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Types of opportunities to make money promoting crypto projects

Opt-in Bribes
Some companies will raffle off crypto prizes to populate their mailing lists. These list-building activities can be pretty lucrative for the end user. Because they opt-in to to newsletters that give them highly valuable alpha on that specific crypto project, as well as standing a chance to be rewarded for them doing so. Often companies want to get your opinion or a piece of user-generated content in return. But that’s a small trade-off for something that takes less than 20 seconds to do. Imagine being eligible to win 0.25 ETH for signing on to a newsletter and sharing a 20-second video of yourself saying something about a product you are already hyped about anyway. Simplplest thing ever.

Promo Centers
By far the most popular way, and the most honest/transparent way for all parties involved, are so-called Promo Centers.
A list of promo tasks are generated that benefit the company’s marketing objectives.
And users that feel hyped about a project and want to see it succeed can log in to find a shit tonne of easy tasks to perform.
They earn points for each task,  Like tweeting an X, or Casting a post on Warpcast, uploading some user-generated content, etc.
All users’ points are tallied and reflected on a leaderboard. And depending on how many points you’ve gathered you will be able to unlock perks and payments.

This is a very meritocratic system that ensures that those who’ve put in the most/smartest work get the biggest slice of the pie. That’s why these promo centers are the most popular amongst end users. They feel appropriately rewarded for their effort, and they do not require a tremendous amount of marketing experience to enter and be succesful. And companies love it too, because the fact that you don’t rake in the big bucks if you half ass it, keeps the quality of the promotion at their best possible quality level.

Rewards from promo centers range from anything, like an airdropped free course to your email, to an entire ETH landing in your crypto wallet. Most often you are rewarded with NFTs or Microcap coins you can Hodl or trade-off to cash in on their value. You never know how well a project will do, so the monetary value for compensation can range anywhere from a couple of tenners, if you half-ass it, to hundreds of thousands, if you attack it like a pro.

Airdrops
Some companies, who provide networks, or protocols instead of products and/or subscriptions, benefit from their networks being adopted early on. Before they hard-launch their services, they often elect to soft-launch with an Airdrop campaign.
An airdrop can be any digital incentive that is delivered straight to a user’s crypto wallet.

Some Airdrops are carefully crafted by marketeers, designers, and programmers working together in unison. But most of them, sadly, are designed by programmers who have 0 experience in the design of game mechanics or marketing communication skills. These types of airdrops are the fintech equivalent of “programmers’ art”.  The basic gist of any airdrop is that by using the protocol or network, and actively trading, staking, yield farming, or providing liquidity, you earn points. All too often nothing about the requirements or progress is communicated. And sometimes even the actual date of the airdrop remains a mystery until it happens.

This system is also very meritocratic, and people often get rewarded (WILDLY)  based on the economic volume of their participation.  But for the end-user, how ever lucrative airdrop hunting may be, it is almost always frustrating enough, for a large part of the hunters to drop off mid-quest, and forget about it in full. This both hurts the end user, and the company organizing the airdrop.

Luckily Tools like aDrop.ai Curate and Automate Aidrop Quests, so you don’t have to keep track of all of your activities in a spreadsheet covering god knows how many quests you are trying to pursue.  aDrop.ai makes it fun for end-users to quest, because it saves them 99% of the time and effort. And its great for Protocol owners, because it demystifies their Quests, and generates a lot of quality mutations on their protocol due to the increased ease of use aDrop.ai provides.

In 2023, active airdrop hunters manually earned between $3,000.- and $18,000.-  on average. And that’s without revolutionary tools like aDrop.ai. Imagine what you could earn if you didn’t have to waste countless hours on tracking points and trying to piece your admin together like a detective on the verge of a burnout!

Starting a Niche Specific Marketing Agency
If you are adept at marketing, you can niche down and leverage your existing skills and experience with operating complex marketing tools and strategies to benefit startups and scale-ups in the crypto space.
You could start a marketing or sales agency and run it from your own site.
Or you could sign up to e-Turk platforms such as Fiverr, Zirtual, or SEO clerks and sell your services as a virtual assistant.
This does require a proven track record of your competence, and this is by far the hardest way to make money promoting crypto projects.  But after airdrop hunting it’s also one of the most profitable ways to make money.
If you lack experience in automating the activities that go into the propositions you offer, you are basically trading time for money.
And that doesn’t scale well. But, if you land a big client, and you are skilled at retention optimization and upselling, you might’ve just unlocked a gateway to acquiring “Fuck You Money”.  As a CMO I have repeatedly seen companies throw MILLIONS at campaigns run by external marketing agencies, once they’ve gained their trust. It’s hard to get your foot in the door, but once you’re in. You’re in.
(until the next CMO makes some cuts at least!)
You don’t have to overcomplicate your agency. Just start as a consultant on a specific topic you know a lot about.
Or maybe even start by offering to blog for the projects you like. (I heard [email protected], is currently looking for bloggers. ssshh). Go to where the execs of the companies you like shoot the shit, and be visible there. Showcase your irresistible offers and propositions where they are most likely to notice you. 

Become a (Power) Affiliate
Literaly anyone who spreads a referral link is acting as an affiliate when they do.
But there is more to it than just spreading links. Real affiliates have structured plans to earn from referral income.
You need more than just a Twitter account and a TikTok account if you want to make it worth your while.

Most affiliates have a couple of well-read blogs and several social accounts with decent engagement rates. And they “survive” off patching together all kinds of offers and driving a portion of their traffic to their merchant partners.
But power affiliates, always earn the most. And that’s because they work the smartest, and they see affiliate marketing as their core business. Affiliates work on commission and are confident enough in their skills to only ask for compensation when they actually bring you trackable attributable sales.

There is nothing more that companies love than a so-called POWER AFFILIATE.
Power Affiliates are the whales of Affiliate Marketing. They operate with such high levels of intelligence that they can garner hundreds of thousands in sales for their merchants and tens of thousands in commissions for themselves. Month after Month after Month. 

Power Affiliates leverage their assets in such a way that they siphon off laser-targeted leads toward their merchants’ sales funnels. They constantly hunt for high-converting offers with decent commissions, and once they find one that proves to make them money, they just open up all of their floodgates and ram as much qualified traffic at the funnels as they possibly can.
Some power affiliates are traffic buyers, and opt to front-run the traffic costs because they know at what percent conversion they make a positive return on investment.
Others leverage their tools, networks, websites, and social accounts, towards off-site funnel entries and drive traffic through the organic flow of users on their ecosystems. Others create a bouquet of Coupon sites (most often paired with blogs or browser plugins) and run promotions on their sites so people looking for a discount find it there and make the sale through their funnel entry.

Yet others leverage their rich content marketing skills to create unicorn content, that their audience actually receives value from.  Affiliate Marketing is easy once you understand how it works. But it’s incredibly complex to master it, and requires large amounts of entrepreneurship to work well.