So you decided to make some money with an NFT collection? But you are not sure where to start and what to do.
What are NFTs used for?
Broadly speaking, there are two major types of NFTs. Security and utility. Security NFTs are the NFTs that you can invest in with the hopes of it increasing in value. Those are mainly art NFTs and procedurally generated NFTs that usually have rarity stats. Examples of those are Soey Milk’s art and CryptoPunks.
Utility NFTs are NFTs that provide some kind of service associated with them. For example, event tickets or a domain name. The value of those NFTs isn’t expected to change and is less subjective across users.
Launching an art NFT
First of all, before launching an art NFT you need to think of a marketing strategy. You’ll have a better chance of selling your NFT if you already have a sizable following on Instagram or Twitter.
Otherwise, become very active on Twitter and Reddit in the crypto community. There are new promo opportunities popping up every now and then.
Another thing to consider is your reputation. NFTs are highly disliked outside of the crypto community, just browse #NFTCommunity hashtag on Twitter. Or watch that South Park episode on NFTs that everyone talks about.
Existing Instagram following doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. Creating NFTs can result in losing subscribers. Main reasons for that: ecological implications of proof-of-work blockchains, rampant art theft in the NFT community, scams and money laundering accusations. So think twice before you announce your first NFT drop.
Creating an NFT on OpenSea
Once you create a picture, gif, video or a song, you’ll need to upload it to a marketplace. In this article I’m going to be talking about OpenSea.
OpenSea has a 2.5% fee on every transaction. It supports Polygon that has low or no gas fees. You can set a royalty fee of up to 10%. That means you get paid up to 10% from each subsequent sale of your NFTs. You can also set stats and traits manually on each of your NFTs if you so desire.
Minting an NFT
First you need to connect your wallet to OpenSea. I’d recommend using MetaMask just because it’s popular and easy to use. Please, be safe and never share your wallet’s password and recovery phrase!
Then you can create a Collection to upload your NFTs to. Hover over your profile icon > click My Collections > Create a collection. Here you can customize your collection’s logo, banner, URL, description. You should also include your social media and website links. Creating a website about your collection makes it look more professional. You can also set the royalty fee here.
Don’t forget to choose the Polygon blockchain in this step. Ethereum has high gas prices, Polygon doesn’t.
After you create a collection you can start adding and minting NFTs. Minting is an action that puts an item on the blockchain, and costs gas to do so. On OpenSea you pay the gas fees only when you transfer or sell an NFT. So initially it is free to upload an NFT onto a blockchain.
You start adding NFTs to your collection by clicking on your collection > Add item. Or by clicking “Create” next to your profile image and choosing a collection from there.
That’s it! Now you just promote, promote, and promote. Try giveaways on Reddit and Twitter and joining NFT communities like Skurpy, for example. The world is your oyster.
Now, if you find that creating a small art collection is not your thing and you want to tackle something bigger, like an NFT game or a >10,000 NFT collection, you need to look into smart contracts and token standards (like ERC721). And if you’d like to be able to monitor your big NFT project before, during, and after deployment – Moonstream can help you with that. We’ll be posting a tutorial later on, don’t miss it.
Meanwhile, join our Discord to get all the latest updates.