Source: Shaurya Malwa
What are airdrops?
An airdrop is a marketing tactic used by crypto startups. Essentially, the startup will announce that they are giving away a certain amount of Tokens for free with a few general stipulations like joining a Telegram channel, registering on their site, etc... Airdrops raise awareness and popularity for a startup and do particularly well in the crypto space. You have nothing to lose even if the Token performs poorly on the markets.
I want free cryptos, what do I need to do?
Well, first you would need to find active airdrops and then follow the simple instructions to become eligible. You could try to find them by performing a google search, but this can be tedious. In addition, many air drops aren't super well known so they're hard to find on traditional search engines like google.
So, to make sure we take advantage of as many air drops as possible with the least amount of work, we are going to be using three things: (1) Zapier(2) Airtable and a (3) Medium RSS Feed
Zapier will allow us to automatically pull relevant articles from Medium, a blog site where many airdrops are announced & publicized, and push them to an Airtable (basically a spreadsheet). All free.
Here is my proven method :)
Step 1: Create an Airtable and Zapier account
Airtable is a free, easy to use spreadsheet platform. It is super aesthetic and I use it for organizing all sorts of stuff. We are going to use Airtable to collect airdrop announcements.
Zapier is one of my favorite free automation tools. Simply, Zapier makes it super easy to connect one app to another. Currently, we have 1,000 apps to choose from. We will be using Zapier to connect an RSS feed to an Airdrop table. And, fortunately it's all user-friendly.
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Step 2: Connect your Airtable account
After setting up both your Airtable and Zapier accounts, we are going to connect your Airtable and Zapier account. Easier than you might think.
(a) Log on to your Zapier account and click "Connected Accounts"
(b) Search for Airtable
(c) Add API key
| You should see this window pop up. Click on "account page", copy your API key & paste. | After clicking "account page," you should see your API key towards the bottom of the page. All you need to do is copy it. |
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Step 3: Make a "zap" (automated workflow)
As you'll see, your Airtable is now connected to Zapier. Now, we are going to make a "zap," which is basically just an automated workflow.
(a) Choose a Trigger App ("RSS")
(b) Choose Trigger ("New Item in Feed")
(c) Enter in Feed URL
Enter in "https://medium.com/feed/tag/airdrop" in the Feed URL section
Note: you can create a RSS feed for any tag by changing the word "airdrop" in the URL to whatever you want
(d) Make sure it works
Click "Fetch & Continue" to make sure everything works alright
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(e) Choose an Action App ("Airtable")
(f) Choose Action ("Create Record")
(g) Choose Account ("Airtable")
(h) Choose your Base and Table
In Airtable, your "Base" is basically a collection of spreadsheets, or "Tables." If Zapier doesn't present any options, you will need to create a Base and Table on your Airtable account. On how to do this, you can read Airtable's instructions.
(i) Edit template
You'll see a couple optional fields pop up. These allow us to customize exactly what information we want and in what Airtable column we want it. RSS feeds contain various pieces of information that might be useful to scrape. For this example, we will just be extracting the name of the article and URL. You might find it helpful to rename your Airtable columns first before doing this step.
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(j) Final test
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(k) Name your Zap
Step 4: Check your Airtable for the latest Airdrop announcements
I hope you also learned a bit about Airtable and Zapier in the process here. Zapier is a SUPER useful tool for so many things. Highly recommend you explore the site.
You can also mess around with it. I just used one RSS feed in this example but it's also possible to pull data from up 10 RSS feeds and push them all to one Airtable spreadsheet. For example, you may want to push Airdrop RSS feed data from Medium, Reddit and Twitter. You can easily do this. Instead of choosing the trigger, "New Item in Feed", click "New Items in Multiple Feeds." This will give you the option to plug in more than one RSS feed (I use this feature a lot).
So, that's it for now but I may post other workflow ideas in the future! I'm relatively new to Steemit, so let me know if you thought this was helpful. I want to make sure I'm producing useful content and your feedback is appreciated! :)
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