In a previous post, I talked about how to get some free starter crypto. Today, I’m going to take a look at ways to actually earn it. These take a fair bit more work than and some are a long more long term plays, but in the end, I think these could end up being a good way to make a little side money that is already in crypto form.
These are things outside of just straight up buying crypto to hold, or doing shorter term trades to try and turn a profit. These are ways you can actually earn crypto, without first investing it. Something like a side hustle, but in the crypto space.
For the usual disclosure, I am not a financial advisor, I don’t even work in finance at all. My day job is as a telecommunications software engineer. Treat everything you read here as some educational resources and not financial advise.
When I first decided I would do some writing, I started up my website. All my blog posts start there, and it’s ultimately where I hope to push a lot of traffic through. Obviously, trying to boot strap a website up and get the traffic numbers up takes a bit of work, but I think ultimately it could be a good payoff.
I’ve been doing work on it, and of course have longer term plans, especially as both traffic, and my general skills in the crypto space increase, because I am still relatively new to this world. I’ve already started implementing some of them, things like my newsletter.
I will be adding things like having pages where I’ll embed my TradingView charts for the cryptos I am watching, and put up frequent price updates on how I think things are looking and may go. I’ll also be adding things like a forum system and all of that, if that traffic and demand calls for it.
And of course the good ole ads. That part is easy, even without being approved for AdSense yet (they keep saying my site has no content, but I don’t know what they could be looking at). But throw up a few banners using my referral links, and even one for an app I did the coding for a friend on, and well there could be some revenue.
The idea is to get traffic and hopefully engagement up, and be able to drive a little profit back from the site. If any of that interests you, or you have any suggestions, I’m always down for feedback!
I never much fancied myself a wordsmith, by trade I’m a software developer/technical support engineer for a telecommunication vendor. I make sure that voices travel across the wire, not words, but I figured I might give it a shot when I started my website up, and actually found I like it. I won’t make any great claim to be any soft of amazing writer, but I am working on it, and honing my craft.
I’ve found a few sites, and hell even an outright community out there, where I can cross post my stuff, and actually make actual profit on it. And I actually have. Not a lot, I’m not going to quit my day job, move to some cabin by the lake, and start hacking away on a typewriter while slowly drinking myself into a writer’s stupor, but it’s a start, and as I get better at writing, and more people start following me, this could actually be a good source of side hustle money.
The first place I’m going to talk about is hive.blog, and really the whole Hive community in general. First, it’s social media/blogging platform built on it’s own blockchain. Everything that gets posted is on the blockchain, There are many different communities on the platform covering a vast array of topics.
They have a native currency called HIVE, with built in staking functionality which of course, earns you more. They call it powering up, and your HIVE becomes Hive Power (HP), and this HP is the driving force behind what you can do, and how much influence you have on the platform. A lot of the communities also have their own token, like the main one I hang out in, LeoFinance, has the LEO token, and again this can be staked to give you more influence in that community.
The first thing Hive Power does is recharges your Resource Credits. These are what you need to post and write comments. Now, there is another feature of Hive Power, and that is delegation. People can delegate their HP to other people, or to pools for various things like getting rewards. Getting a bit delegated to you is pretty easy, you can get some from the GiftGiver site, which will delegate to you temporarily to help you get started. There is also a faucet on that site in order to generate small amounts, and I’d recommend using that to help get your initial bit going.
The next best way to get some Hive Power to start, is write yourself a good intro post. Don’t be like me and just start throwing a bunch of posts out and burn through your resource credits until after you’ve made this post. And make sure to tag it #introduceyourself.
This will get you a bit of attention, a lot of people tend to upvote these posts, especially if they are well written. You may also find yourself a very kind soul to delegate you some to help you get on your feet. This will help you knock out a few posts, and hopefully earn yourself some upvotes which you can then turn back into Hive Power of your own.
Hive Power and the power you are generating from staking your tokens is also how you influence other people’s posts. Which you should very much do, because you could get a part of the post rewards. The way it works is this, every night the blockchain mints a bunch of new tokens, part of which goes into a rewards pool. That pool is divided out to the posts and comments that get a lot of upvotes and attention.
The rewards that go onto a post are split in half between the author and the people that helped curate it to popularity through their attention and engagement, so it benefits everyone to be out there and engaged. You can earn by posting, and by engaging, what’s not to love. And of course you can stake it all, earn more rewards.
If you enjoy writing, and want to earn a little side income, I’d highly recommend you head over to the onboarding site, get yourself an account, find a few communities, and get to posting and engaging with others.
You can cash out your earnings, they have some on/off ramps using Bitcoin (BTC) and a few alts, but I personally think you’re better off staking into the platform and betting on this one for a longer term, because I think the platform has a lot of potential.
So how much have I made there so far? My first post was on June 5th, and my welcome post on June 6th. It takes 7 days to get paid out for it, and my current value in hive is:
And then if I take a look at my tokens I have a bit more there:
Now, these numbers are a little inflated. As I said, the intro posts tend to do very well, while my other posts are averaging a lot lower than it, but again, I’m new to the platform, I don’t have a lot of followers yet, and my posts are not getting a whole lot of attention. But I plan to keep at it, honing my craft, and that should come with time.
Another couple of sites that I have found to be pretty good as far as cross posting things over to are Publish0x and read.cash. These sites are far less involved than over on Hive, they are your more traditional blogging platforms.
Publish0x is a little unique in that you get a set number of tips you can hand out every day, free of charge. You also get to keep anywhere from 0-80% of the tip, depending on how much you like the article, and how much of it you just want to keep for yourself.
They pay out randomly in either Ethereum (ETH), Ampleforth (AMPL), or iFARM (IFARM), and it’s not a whole lot you make on every post, but hey, it takes me just a few minutes to republish my work over onto that site, and the payout thresholds are not crazy excessive, so it’s worth the extra bit of work in order to do it. Plus I get to read some interesting articles and tip other writers, without actually having to shell out anything from my own pocket, and spreading the wealth around is always a fun thing to do.
I made my first post over on Publish0x on June 2nd, and here is my earning for the month so far over there.
read.cash is another one that is just a straight blogging site. The tips there are not free, but there is a random tipper bot that hands out a little bit when the posts are good, and it pays out in Bitcoin Cash (BCH), with zero minimum withdraw level, so again, it’s worth the extra little bit of effort to throw my posts up here, even just for a little bit of extra exposure.
They don’t have a fancy payout page like the other sites, but I’ve made about $2.50 CAD from that site in Bitcoin Cash (BCH), so it’s not nothing.
There are some other sites I cross post my stuff to, but that is just for the exposure with the aim to drive traffic back to my actual website, and I’m not earning on those, and don’t plan to change that, so they don’t make the cut to be mentioned here.
Another way I’m hoping to monetize myself a little bit is on the ole social media platforms. I created fresh accounts for all my crypto stuff, not that I’m trying to hide my identity, I literally changed the word that usually sits in front of my handle from Ninja to Crypto (damn all the people who have stolen the name Wingnut and make me throw extra words in front just so I can use my damn nick name).
I post up price charts over on Instagram, and hopefully draw in a bunch of followers. I have a new Twitter where I just post up random stuff, and news articles. And then I have Facebook and Telegram, where I have no idea what I really want to do on those, and mostly just use them to aggregate posts from everywhere else into one feed. Maybe that’s the best usage for them.
The goal with the social media stuff, generate enough followers to be able to land some sweet, sweet, sponsorship gigs. I’ll of course, be extra choosy, and I’ll only accept sponsorships from things I believe in. Like hardware wallets. Which I would do sponsorships for just to get a free one, so hey Trezor, if you want some advertising for the grand ole price of a free hardware wallet, hit me up.
I’ve also started up a YouTube channel, where I’m currently posting Saturday morning videos where I go over some of the price action and how I think the market looks and where I believe it’s heading in the coming weeks. It’s still new, my charts were still a little bare in the first ones, but I’ve actually spend some time drawing a bunch of lines on them this weekend, so next week’s video should actually be much better.
And if it gets a bunch of attention and views, maybe I’ll do some other videos on it too, because it’s really not all that hard to make that content, I’m already doing most of the needed research for my blogs, and just for my own market analysis anyways, so it might just be worth the effort. And it’s pretty obvious the monetization path for a YouTube channel.
I’ve made nothing from any social media or YouTube as of yet, so no earnings to share with you here, but hey, if any of it every starts making me any money, I’ll post up another article and share some of the details of it there too. Maybe I’ll make it a reoccurring thing, go over my earning from my crypto side hustles. If that’s something that might interest you, well, you’re just going to have to follow me and watch all my posts. See what I did there? Marketing.
There are a lot of sites out there that offer you small ways to get small amounts of crypto for doing various things. This could be as simple as click a button once an hour, like the GiftGiver faucet for over on Hive. There are also sites that let you do surveys, or complete offers, and earn crypto that way. I’ve tried a couple of those sites, and a lot of them just don’t seem worth the effort. Except one.
That site is Cointiply. It has a faucet, which lets you basically spin a wheel a win a small amount of coins every hour, but it also has a lot of offers for things like, play this mobile game and get to level whatever in within 7 days, and you can earn sometimes up to $10-$20 worth of crypto on each of these. Now, the more you earn, the more work that goes into it, I’ve been playing one game for about 5 days periodically, but I’m about to get a $10 payout from it, so it will be worth it in the end. They pay out in Bitcoin (BTC) or a few alts with a $5 minimum withdraw for Bitcoin (BTC) and $3 for the alts.
And yes, I’ve actually been paid out by them. It actually does work, I cashed out once so far for $6.87 USD worth of Bitcoin (BTC), mainly to test the platform and make sure the payouts worked before I put more effort into it. It said it would take 24-72 hours to get my payment, but really it was like 3 hours. So if you’re one to play mobile games while you’re watching TV, or you want to do a bunch of surveys, watch ads, or whatever, you might as well get paid some crypto to do it. Again, you aren’t going to get rich doing this, but it’s something worth considering if you have some idle time to fill.
I know there are other ways to make some crypto I didn’t cover, and that’s because I don’t have any experience with them. Specially, there are blockchain games that involve NFT’s and you can actually make money playing those, and it is something I plan to explore in the future, so you might want to watch out for posts about those later on, after I’ve gotten my toes wet with them.
Overall, the few ways I’ve been earning a little side crypto aren’t sending me to an early retirement, but it’s all stuff that is just monetizing what I was doing anyways, so why not get paid for it? Plus, everything I’m earning has the potential to be worth more when the markets go up, so really, small amounts now, could be worth slightly more later on. It’s marginally more work than I was doing before, but that’s why they call it a side hustle and not side free money.
Find me on social media on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram and noise.cash.
If you enjoyed this content, you can check me out every weekday. My posts start at my website, but you can also find them cross posted at Publish0x, LeoFinancial, Hive, and read.cash.
I also post a weekly price update video every Saturday over on my YouTube channel, where I will be discussing the weekly price action for some of the major cryptos. You can also sign up for my newsletter which I send out every Friday with news and whatnot from the crypto space, delivered right to your inbox!
You can also find links to resources such as research and news sites over at this link.
Want some more content right now? Check out some of my previous posts:
Merged Mining
Stablecoins: What and Why
Proof of Stake (PoS)
Originally Posted On My Website: https://ninjawingnut.xyz/2021/06/14/earning-crypto/
