Cryptocurrency airdrops are a great alternative to Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs. Airdrops are free giveaways that help distribute tokens, kickstart a community, and avoid the complex regulatory scrutiny around ICOs.

Airdrops accomplish several key goals:

Airdrops build up an initial group of people excited about the product you’re building Airdrops generate brand awareness, which will drive people to use your product later on You can spend less on conventional advertising methods (by generating lower cost conversion rates)

Let’s look at each of these advantages in detail. First, building an initial group of community members who are excited about your product is key. These are the people who will follow your project closely and want to hear updates on your progress. It’s important to keep them regularly updated so they know progress is always being made. What better to get them excited then giving them tokens they’ll later be able to use?

Secondly, if you get the word out about the airdrop, you’ll be able to create serious buzz for your brand. Let people know in cryptocurrency Telegram and Slack channels about your project. Post about it on Facebook, Reddit, and let people know on Twitter. Even adding a few articles on a Medium blogging page for your project couldn’t hurt. Most importantly, let people know what you’re building and why they should be excited. As more and more people launch airdrops, the space is becoming more saturated and you need to give people a good reason to participate in yours.

If done correctly, the buzz generated by an airdrop is organic and largely free. Set aside time to spread the word, and start marketing before the airdrop launches. You should spend a few days minimum letting people know about your upcoming airdrop. Use a Google reCAPTCHA to prevent bot entries, or have people receive airdrop tokens by announcing their involvement in the project with their friends on their social channels. The latter tactic has the added advantage of creating viral loops and spreading the word even more quickly. You won’t need to run expensive Facebook or Google Ads, and instead use the value proposition on your project and free tokens to get people interested.

To release your tokens, you’ll need to have a smart contract created and deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. We’ll save the technical details for another article, so stay tuned for more info from the ELIX blog. Once your airdrop tokens have been deployed, you can get a general sense of the scale of your project by the number of token holders. Here’s what that looks like for Elixir:

Airdrops can also be a much fairer way to distribute tokens to a wider number of people, while at the same time getting people involved in your project. Airdrops don’t favor people who are rich by allowing them buy more tokens, but instead give tokens away to everyone equally. For example, people may be required to follow your project on Twitter or Facebook, or join a Telegram channel. If they’re genuinely interested in your project and what you’re making, they’re stick around and see where everything goes. They’ll also have tokens which they can use on your upcoming platform, giving them an extra reason to stay. Doing an airdrop helps kickstart discussion, social media activity, and plants a seed that will pay off enormously later. There are plenty of sites for creating airdrops, but you can also host your own on a forum like Bitcointalk or do an announcement on social media. You should also have a project logo, whitepaper, and various social channels all set up so people can learn what makes your project special.

We used some of these strategies to build ELIX, our crowdfunding and smart contract platform. You can use ELIX to create a product or campaign in just a few minutes: