I borrowed the title from Mr. Fungible at NFT Times on youtube. He said it wouldn’t work, but I think it might, and I’m willing to risk ten minutes of my time to prove it. You can see his youtube channel here:
He mentions in his video a number of things related to marketing. Now, apart from a class demonstration on marketing which I might put up on opensea, youtube or, you should pardon the expression, “the website formerly known as facebook”, I don’t care whether I sell anything or not.
I’m offering examples of things you might want to learn to make in your studio, and I’m asking you to cover the cost of the item plus the shipping. I have no interest in a single penny of your money, and you couldn’t buy what I’m offering — it costs more than money.
So one of the things he mentions in his video is Discord. He suggests you have on hand a Discord Manager, to host your live events in Discord.
I guess you’d conduct a DROP or an AIRDROP in Discord right then and there in front of God and everybody.
What’s a drop? I’m glad you asked.
I don’t rightly know, but it seems to me that it’s some sort of release of more than a single copy of a NFT to a crowd of noisy buyers.
There are NFT auctions, too, but I’d be wary of them until you have a powerful following, if you ever manage it. I have a small following for my NFTs at the moment, so I’d be foolish to try an auction with very few bidders, if any at all.
The ideal way to mint NFTs is to put them out one at a time, in a very highly promoted “drop”, and then follow that up with further promotion every time the NFT goes up in value.
People love to back a winner, so make sure that your NFT is a winner right from the start — which means promoting the Hell out of it and getting a good buying crowd to the sale event.
Of course, the obvious METHOD by which one sells NFTs is to — before you make a single NFT — join or create a group and meet constantly over a period of about a year, during which you’ll discuss your concept for a NFT.
At some cunning and elaborately convincing point in time, you’ll actually MINT the NFT and set up a special sale event in Discord where you might stage an AIRDROP, using the wallet addresses of the participants.
Of course, you’ve set your artist’s commission to exactly 2.5%.
Why this number? Well, because if your riding commission per sale is more than that, it will create bumps in the rising retail, which will bring further aftermarket sales to a dead screeching halt.
Nothing kills a rising stock faster than a bump. Wow, the action that goes on in a drop can be amazing — from a penny to a million dollars in the fraction of a second.
It’s all very exciting, and some people make millions doing this, but I’m not one of them.
I’m a legitimate artist, selling my artwork in several collections, all priced fairly according to their stature in the art world.
My jazz backdrops have sold for six figures, so why not the NFT? I could even set it up so the NFT and the original artwork go together, which is the original purpose of the NFT, sort of a fancy bill of sale.
I have hundreds of NFTs up for sale and not one of them is a multiple. They’re all one of a kind, and that’s intentional.
Some of them are priced so that a donor can donate to the community, while others are priced so low it’s not worthwhile selling them, except they’re intended as samples and examples of my NFT artworks that you can easily own at a fraction of the regular price.
Look for items priced at .001 and .002 Eth — there are plenty of them!
Live events where you sell your NFTs are the way to go, kind of like an art gallery opening party, and it’s just as good to do this in ZOOM, if you’re more comfortable there — Discord is the home of NFT folks, and ZOOM is an open meeting ground, if there’s any difference at all between them.
I’ll give you one piece of advice that I heard from Sharon Tate when we worked at the studio. She said it a LOT: “Don’t follow fashion, make your own style.” That goes double for NFTs — don’t make them look like anyone else’s NFTs.
Of course, that means you dump an entire market of speculators, but who needs them? If you’re an artist, sell ART. If you had wanted to sell stocks and bonds, you’d be on Wall Street.
I’ll also share a funny with you from my friend Harry Nilsson — “Yeah, my song is number one, with a bullet.”
Why is that funny? In Billboard Music Trade Magazine back in the 1960s, a song with a bullet printed by it — that black dot thingy you see now and then — meant the song was number whatever, but that it was rising up on the charts.
“One with a bullet” is therefore funny. He also used to answer “How old are you” with his age at the time, adding “with a bullet”, but he stopped doing this immediately after John Lennon’s passing.
It was no longer funny.
So Mr. Fungible mentions that you should offer five bullet points explaining briefly what five things it’s gonna do for you, meaning selling points, all directed to why the NFT is going to be a success.
I do none of that marketing with my NFTs because I’ve been a working artist for over 60 years, and I have a market for my art, jewelry, craft items and rare books, coins and treasures, but I don’t need any of that — I have an independent source of income — my Social Security check.
Pardon me while I laugh.
Of course the way to make money is to start out the price at the bottom and wait for the percentages to add up over the next few dozen trading cycles, but remember that NFTs are strictly non-liquid assets, meaning that you can’t automatically sell them at a fair price — there is no cash value to your NFT, just its artistic value, and that’s a fact, and that’s why I’m not selling mine as if they’re some kind of stock that’s going to go up and up and up.
If I do a Drop Party, it will be just for the fun of it, as an art gathering, a Happening, as we used to call them, and the NFTs I offer will be one of a kind, not multiples.
Prices start at .001 Eth, and trading costs are going steadily down after the holiday spike, so I hope you see you in my NFT art gallery on opensea — there’s a link at the end of this dissertation.
I heartily recommend you follow Mr. Fungible on his NFT Times youtube channel — I appreciate his insights and advice, and have found them to be very sound and useful.
Best of luck making and marketing your NFTs. Hopefully they will be 90% art and 10% marketing, and you’ll be happier that way, I assure you.
By the way, if people don’t buy your art, it doesn’t mean they don’t like it. Maybe it’s you. Be an artist who makes NFTs, not a NFT marketer who makes NFTs. It will show in your work.
There are literally millions of artists out there who are ten times better than you. Don’t let that stop you from becoming the best artist you can be.
That goes for music, too, and that’s coming from an artist who has 12 guitars, two basses and two sets of drums and a full professional-grade recording studio.
Oh, that reminds me — I use my music in some of my NFTs, and you can actually release and pre-release music albums and spoken-word productions using NFTs.
So there’s a ritual to NFT sales, and it involves social media, but you probably already guessed that.
I’ll be working on my NFT collections on opensea, and lowering some prices to accommodate the rising value of the ETH you’ll have to spend to get them.
If you’re betting that my NFTs will be worth more in the future, and you turn out to be right, you’ll get far more for the NFT than just the value of the ETH — you’ll get the added value of the artwork being traceably and unarguably mine.
It’s my hope that you will also appreciate the artwork. Think of OpenSea as an art gallery, and you’ll be half-right.
The other half is a crypto-currency dream. Some would call it a nightmare. I call it a windfall.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby