Thinking about creating NFTs? Don’t make these mistakes!

I’ve been in the NFT game for 2 months now and it’s gone reasonably well, but there’s a lot I’ve learned on my journey. I’ve previously written a couple of posts on here about my NFT creating journey and the response was good. I want to help as much as possible for anyone coming into this field, so I’ve listed some mistakes I’ve made along the way so that you don’t have to make them too.

All of these assume you have a plan in place or have already created an NFT collection.

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#Choose your blockchain and marketplace carefully

I’ve previously discussed options when choosing a marketplace or blockchain. Having had more experience now I can give some additional feedback on this.

I chose to go with ETH on the Ethereum network due to the fact that I want to go BIG or go home! The whales of the NFT marketplaces seem to be on this chain and all of the big projects that hit the moon are here too, this is why I chose this option… However, having experienced some issues I wanted to point you guys in the direction of the other options that are extremely viable!

Firstly, if you are going to market your NFTs on OpenSea, which isn’t a bad idea, then you’ll need to decide between ETH on Ethereum or ETH on Polygon.

The reason I’d recommend ETH on Polygon is because when starting out for the first time you will want to price your NFTs are a reasonable buy in cost. As a new project you need to build up a community before you get noticed more. The first investors you should aim your NFTs at are fellow artists! This may sound nuts, as other artists are trying to sell, not buy, but you’re actually not right if you think like this. Other artists are also looking to invest in other projects too and they are the easiest investors to pick up early on.

However, other artists generally want to spend less, so GAS FEES are a major road block!

On the Polygon network there are ZERO gas fees. This is highly attractive to any investor looking to buy in early to a project for cheap! A bit like when shopping online, you are probably more attracted to an item that has no shipping costs, even though the shipping costs are added into the cost of the item itself, the fact that it says **Free Shipping** is highly attractive to the buyer! It’s the same with Gas Fees.

If I was to start my project over, I’d seriously consider releasing on Polygon. I’ve seen a few projects do incredibly well on there.

I only have experience with OpenSea, so I can’t comment on others yet, but I know there are some other popular choices that use different cryptocurrencies.

Most notable and mentioned amongst the communities I’m a part of are:

Rarible, BakerySwap, Nifty Gateway, Foundation, CNFT, Solanart.

I’d recommend checking out all of them before making a decision.

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#Plan a release schedule

So, the next thing you should do once you have planned or built your collection and decided on a marketplace and blockchain is to figure out how and when you are going to “drop” your NFTs on the market.

There are a few different ways you can release your nfts. This is one mistake I made, I didn’t research other projects enough first and see how they went about releasing.

1) Release slowly

I know a few projects that simply release one NFT a day or less. This seems to have worked superbly well if you’re not planning to make a 10k collection. You start slowly and at a cheap price, then every time one is purchased you raise the floor price by a small amount.

One project I’ve been watching and every bought into early started at 0.001 ETH on Polygon. Over the course of 2 months they used this release tactic and now they sit at a 1 ETH floor, and it’s still rising!

2) Release everything at once

This method is generally used if you’re releasing a massive collection. As you need to mint the collection on the blockchain at once using a smart contract (otherwise it would take weeks to upload individually), the collection is generally dropped all at once after being hyped up first.

3) Release a set amount per week

This is the tactic I took. It’s not a bad tactic overall, but I made the mistake of doing this straight away with no hype whatsoever about my project first and zero social media following!

Considering that I’ve done ok to build everything up on the go, but I wouldn’t recommend this stressful method of release unless you have the next step in place first!

#Build up your socials and project hype before release

So the most important thing about creating and selling NFTs is the community you build up around your project! I’ve built this up over the course of release as mentioned above, but a better way to do this is to have your project ready to drop in which ever method of release you choose, but build up hype on social media **first!**

You can release the images of the NFTs you’re going to sell, make some marketing materials and get the word out there on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, Reddit (of course) and anywhere you can think of. Make a **Discord** server for your project and set everything up FIRST, before release! You’ll thank yourself for it later and your project should get off to a flying start this way.

Have a roadmap in place and a release date! Important! Investors want to see your project has a future. At the end of the day they’re at least 75% buying into your project so they will make money later on, whether that’s a fast buck or a long HODL to the moon, if you have no roadmap, they won’t know if the project is going to advance.

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#Plan out your rarity traits before you make anything

I had an idea of these values before making my bottle cap nfts, but I didn’t generate a rarity trait list until I’d released the first batch. Luckily, I wasn’t too late, but I learnt the hard way.

Know how many NFT’s you’re releasing overall and generate a list of traits that will be added to them.

You may decide on four properties to add to each NFT, for instance, so you’ll want to have a number of traits per property and some rarer than others. I used an excel spreadsheet to list these out and every time I release an NFT I tick it off the list, so I know how many have been used.

Be organised NOW, not later, otherwise you’ll end up in a world of panic!

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#Don’t get scammed

Once you’re out there marketing your project you are going to be approached by COUNTLESS promotional accounts.

DON’T DO IT!

Unless you’ve had a direct recommendation from another artist you trust who’s tried one, do not fall for these scams.

On Instagram there are so many promo accounts with lots of followers. 99% of these accounts are bullshit. They have bot account following and liking their posts. How can you tell? Look at their posts, how many comments are on them? Usually there are very few comments and most of the comments say something like, “Love it! DM us now!” (basically, other promo accounts spamming the threads), or there’ll be loads of comments, but multiple from one account with only emojis on them. They usually only have a small number of posts too, say 50-100 posts for NFTs. That’s because the account probably used to “promote” a different topic and they deleted all of the posts from the unrelated topic for their new scam!

On Twitter, there are a lot of promo accounts that will “Shill” your project. These are also generally pretty poor but charge a lot more than the Instagram ones. I’ve had a few community friends try these out and get extremely poor results. They also usually charge in ETH, from 0.05-0.1, so this can be expensive for not a lot of pay off.

On Discord you’ll be messaged continuously for promos. This is the worst! On Twitter and Instagram the scammers have an actual account and will genuinely give you the post they promise to, the scam part is the engagement with your post as they are followed by 90% bot accounts.

On discord however (and this is one I fell for) they promise to shill your project and gain you joiners for your server. Now this is something you can do yourself and you’ll also get results, but hiring a team to do this for you will allow you to focus time on the project itself, so it can be money well spent, however ONLY go through recommendations! I went for one “shiller” who made a good offer to shill my work and gain me some following, only for me to pay him and he disappeared into thin air! That was an expensive $250 lesson for me. DO NOT make the same mistake guys!

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Well, these are all the points I wanted to share with you today. I know I wish I’d read some of this stuff before I started out my project, so hopefully it’ll really be beneficial to some of you on here.

Don’t start on ultra-hard mode like me :D

If you want to check out my project and see if I really know what I’m talking about, I’d love for you to visit! https://digi-caps.com It’s a Fallout themed project with bottle caps, so if you were into that game you’ll love it.

You can find a link to my **discord** on there, so please join up and come and have a chat with me if you have any questions! I really love sharing the knowledge I’ve learnt along the way. Like I say, it’s all about community, and I’ve loved being a part of the r/cryptocurrency community as well, so if I can help any of you out, I’m happy to!