How To Sell Your NFTs

Word of mouth is nice but is not enough to drive a community to your project. Because let's be honest, the most successful projects rely on a strong and active community. How do you form one, though? How do you get people as excited as you about a particular NFT collection?

The answer is simple: a project should start building community well before it’s ready. The pre-mint period is crucial, because it is when NFT collections prepare a list of whitelisted addresses, and you should get the community engaged enough to care about getting on those before others do.

Your NFT collection should be present everywhere and strong at least on one social channel.

Which one depends on your project’s characteristics. Just don’t try to have a strong presence on every social media platform just yet. They’re not as important as Discord. The whole NFT community revolves around that service. Every collection you’ve heard about has an active Discord server behind it. Hence, our next advice.

If you still haven't gotten familiar with Discord, it is about time. Join public servers about NFTs and get into the conversation. Don’t go in too strong - become a part of the community and participate before trying to sell your art.

By being part of a few communities, you’ll learn the tricks of the trade. Also, keep in mind that the people who frequent those servers are already primed to invest in NFT projects. This is your audience. Observe them.

Another way is to get into a collection-specific Discord server. You’ll need to buy an NFT to get in. Since access to a server is one of the most common utilities provided by collections, these Discord servers are NFT-gated. Inside one of these, you’ll learn another set of lessons, and you’ll be surprised by the amount of valuable information you get in these places. You can even get an invite to the private groups that the large NFT investors hang in, but those are usually a level above our pay-grade. Examples of such private groups include the Proof Collective, founded by Kevin Rose, and "Crypto Packaged Goods."

A popular, public server is the NFT Discord; a smaller server in which your voice can cut through is NFT Hideout; and even the most popular marketplaces, Rarible and OpenSea, host Discords.

Sure, you can use Twitter to get your community members to tag their friends to get a whitelist but although these tactics work to an extent, they are annoying. Investing time and effort into strengthening your community, though, it's the real growth engine.

Once you have a clear roadmap to sell your art, start engaging with other users by showing your art and the process behind it. Soon your NFT collection will start attracting a specific kind of individual. Identify them and work hard to giving them what they are looking for.

The development team has to be in constant communication with everyone involved since these reports are conversation-starters. Also, for the same reason, answer all questions directed to the team and open the conversation to anyone. In fact, someone in-house should be assigned to encourage community members to engage with one another.

Another tip would be to encourage discussions about the NFT community as a whole. It’s a topic in which everyone on the Discord server is interested.

As you probably know, the CryptoPunks are the biggest success the NFT space has seen so far. By every metric, they’re number one. However, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has been catching up, while at the same time becoming a cultural phenomenon. How did the BAYC do it? By providing for its community. Their initial investors received every kind of reward possible. Each victory for the Bored Apes became a victory for them, the holders.

What happened then? Well, CryptoPunks creators Larva Labs sold their collection’s rights to Bored Ape Yacht Club’s creators Yuga Labs. The reason for this? Because Yuga Labs was better at building communities, Larva Labs felt that the CryptoPunks deserved more.

Building NFT communities is not as easy as it sounds. If you manage to do it right, though, it can be the greatest investment of your project’s life.