Chapter 2 — How to choose the bounty programs for a high income

choosing the juicy projects to increase your income

This step is as important as the actual work that you will do to promote a project. It is crucial that you choose ICOs that are legit and with optimum chances for success. Otherwise, you may work in vain or for peanuts.

For this, I will refer you to this article: 10 Experts Share the Do’s and Don’ts of Investing in Crypto ICOs. It talks about the essentials of how to choose an ICO when you want to invest. We are not investing, we are bounty hunters, but most of those rules apply to us as well.

Here are the highlights of that article on how to chose ICOs with a good chance to succeed:

Check their team.

Check to see these are real people. Check out multiple sources, google them and the companies they declare they have worked for.

Another thing that I do is that I will interact with their team. No matter if it’s on twitter, telegram or email. This gives me a sense of how they are. I am looking for transparency and people oriented towards solutions.

Check their whitepaper, everything on their website and all about their market.

If you don’t know much about their market, check multiple reviews on the project. There are a lot of projects that want to take on big competitors even though they don’t come with anything new to the table other than the so-called blockchain implementation to that business model. Don’t get me wrong. Blockchain technology is awesome, but far too many projects market their main advantage being the blockchain. And for most projects, this is not enough to make that project a success. So check project, market, and competition.

Check their promises.

I avoid unrealistic, to good to be true promises. I avoid projects that rely on hype and big promises.

Personally, I avoid projects with bonuses of over 30%.

Even if the project gets the minimum funding their coin will go down even in most cases, especially if their bonuses were higher than 30%. Since bounty hunters are paid usually after a few weeks or months after the ICO end, you don’t get the chance to dump the coin on a decent price once they get listed on exchanges and you will end up with pennies.

Check the number of followers on social media and the engagement.

Even when the project is newly announced they should have a minimum of 500–1000 followers on facebook, twitter or telegram. This is my own choice. As you gain experience you might choose different numbers, add or subtract from the criteria presented here. And I encourage you to do that.

Engagement is crucial. The more followers they have you should see at least some engagement even before the bounty program start (when bounty hunters will increase engagement).

If a project has no engagement (shares, re-shares, comments, likes) it is a sign that the followers are either artificial or not interested in the project. Either way, this is not good.

Now to another juicy part of selecting the bounty programs.

How to calculate which bounties will have a high payment.

Depending on the rules of the program you get either a share of the bounty or an exact amount. In chapter 4 I will talk about 2 platforms (Bitcointalk and Bounty0x) where bounties are posted. One has bounties where you get a fixed number of tokens per task and one has bounties where you get shares of the total bounty pool.

On Bounty0x they show you already an estimation of the amount that you can make on each specific task. All I do is take that value and divided to 3 for a worst-case scenario, in case the project gets minimum funding and/or the coin will drop rapidly after launch.

On Bitcointalk, for most bounties, you get a share. Here is how I calculate my possible share if I decide that the project is attractive.

I calculate the minimum bounty in case of ICO reaches the soft cap. Then I estimate the number of bounty hunters. This comes with experience or checking closed bounty programs where you can see the spreadsheets with the participants. If you do your research you will start to see a pattern.

I will take as an example a bounty that is already closed. The bounty was for CardStack ICO.

Here are the bounty rules. They promised a bounty pool of 1% of the total tokens sold. This project announced a hard-cap of $30–35 million, but no soft cap. So I ‘assumed’ a $10 million soft cap.

So the minimum bounty pool that I estimated was:

1% x $10,000,000 = $100,000

If the bounty would be a success the bounty is $300,000-$350,000.

But we are interested in the worst case scenario. So we will continue the calculation with the minimum bounty pool of $100,000.

I was interested in the article campaign. That campaign had a 30% share of the bounty pool. So, we have:

30% x $100,000 = $30,000

For article bounty campaign I estimated 1000 eligible bounty hunters. Now we have:

$30,000 / 1,000 bounty hunters = $30

Now some will get more, some less, depending on the article quality and reach. Each campaign has specific rules.

After this calculation, take in consideration that depending on the market conditions the coin might go up or down after launch.

For example in the past year, from what I’ve scanned, I think over 70% of the coins launched dropped in price. Some dropped even with 90% just in a few weeks or even days after launch.

So. After the calculation of the possible share, I like to divide that by 2 or even 3 to estimate the actual money that I will get.

At this point, I would have a minimum possible payout of $10-$15 for a 500 words article.

At the end of ICO, they reached over $35 million. They got over 3,000 submissions for article campaign. Out of those, a little over 400 got validated and paid.

Most decent articles got around 10,000 Cardstack coins. Once the coin got available on exchanges it hit $0,006. So that means that for a decent article you could’ve got $60. $60 that you can convert to fiat, other coins or hold those coin if you want to invest/gamble.

Another thing that I do when I see a project that I think it can be a success, but it is freshly announced and they don’t have much following to check engagement and people reactions, I either jump on the bounty if the payout seems really attractive or I check back in a few weeks. It depends on my mood and how much risk I am willing to take.

When I check for juicy bounties I am looking at bounties that most people are not doing. This way my chances are higher to get a bigger share.

So I chose even projects that have strict rules to participate in their bounties as long as they have great teams, great idea, and/or recommendations from authority figures.

Thinking about this now, I think that the most restrictive bounties I have seen were from a serious project. Scammers and projects interested only in money will not restrict their bounty program as they see this as their only chance to generate as much hype as they can with phony promises.

A few months ago some ICOs started to implement a verification, for bounty hunters, named KYC. This is something that was in place already for buyers on most ICOs. But it started to get implemented for bounty hunters as well. So I took the opportunity, prepared my documents needed for the verification and joined the bounties.

Still banking on that decision. :)

So take a look at programs that are strict. If you get in and deliver, most of the times it is worthed.

At 2018 start, for example, most avoided article bounties. So I got down to business. Each review took around 3 hours for me. On some bounties, I got up to a few hundred dollars in crypto for one article. If you do not know the price for a decent article with 500 words, it is around $10-$20. You might get some good articles with 500 words for as low as $5 on Fiverr, but you need to do some research before you find a decent article writer for that price.

I say that writing or even buying an article for a well-chosen bounty is a good investment.