Making bank on Cent

[Originally published on Cent]

Some users may have noticed, but I'm currently no. 2 on the Cent leaderboard. If you're curious how someone can earn over $300 a month on Cent, this post is for you.

Engage. Engage. Engage.
Rule number one is simple: Stay engaged.

Engage with other posts by leaving a reply or comment. Engage with users who reply to your posts. Shout out users you think are doing great things. Check in multiple times a day to see what posts are new. Sort replies to posts, and do it thoughtfully. Our thoughtfully engaged user base is a key reason why new users are joining, staying and spending on Cent.

High engagement will get you paid too. If you give a tight reply to a bounty post you'll (probably) get rewarded. Sorting replies to bounty posts will yield small change on a per-post basis, but over time it becomes non-trivial. By engaging with the community you'll become a familiar voice - imho this is super helpful for when you really want to start earning money on a more regular basis by posting.

Posting
Pushing out daily posts has been one of the two major ways I've been able to earn and climb the leaderboard. Every post I make isn't a home run - and home runs for me aren't common to begin with - but a steady group of users have been seeding my posts everyday for over two months now.

While only 25% of seed money goes to me, 25% of all seed money over 30 posts really add ups. Although I don't engage in this practice (yet), seeding one's own posts is a way to earn more than that base 25% rate, especially when you seed your own post *first*. [Note: The reason why I haven't seeded my own posts is because I don't want to artificially inflate my earnings - as a member of the Cent team that just wouldn't be a good look. When seeding history is revealed y'all can check.]

Seeding
The second major way I've earned a lot (perhaps even more than I've earned from my daily posts, I'm not 100% sure - I'll do a deep dive on my earnings at some point) is through seeding. I'm pretty obsessed with Cent, so I'm checking the site to see if any new posts have been made all the time. Since earnings from seeding are maximized if you seed early, diligently checking Cent is crucial. Like I said above: Engagement, engagement, engagement. It helps that there are a ton of interesting posts popping up all the time though.

My tipping philosophy is two-fold. I'll seed posts that genuinely interest me regardless of whether or not I think many other people will seed after me. That's my seeding-as-tipping approach. My other approach is to seed posts as early as I can that are made by bigger names or that provide a whole bunch of value and/or are extremely high quality (e.g. NFTY News, Week in Ethereum, @Kelechief videos) that I think a significant number of users are likely to give follow up seed money to. The ROS (Return on Seed) of being the first seeder on those kinds of posts can be in the range of 300~500%.

Tipping
A low key powerful way to earn on Cent in a way that'll boost your leaderboard ranking is to accept payments over Cent's state channels from other users utilizing the tipping feature built into the top right of every reply card. The breadth and depth of talent and skill sets contained within the Cent community is growing by the day, and paying someone for doing something for you or getting paid for providing a service to another user over Cent is lightning quick. For example, I paid @charlesx on Cent to make a series of unique digital drawings for my daily posts.

Get Money👊
Well that's pretty much it, at least for now. In the future as more varied content gets posted across various mediums, I hope to provide analysis on what content earns users the most. As always, let me know it you have any questions, ideas or suggestions.

And finally, just to avoid any potential mis-understanding I want to make the following clear: In my particular case, my leaderboard earnings don't necessarily reflect pure profit. I put a lot into Cent in the form of bounties and seeding posts that may not yield me any additional earnings, so on the whole I may be putting more into Cent than I earn back, but *if* I wanted to focus on profit maximization, that is totally attainable.