It’s a big question in the world of non-fungible tokens or NFTs. People are wondering how to mint and create these items and how to make them valuable in a marketplace that is quickly changing.
There is no denying that we live in a digitally connected world that is expanding rapidly. Technology has blossomed just in the last few years as cryptocurrency and then NFTs came on the scene.
So it’s reasonable to expect questions about NFT creation and how that works. Newcomers want to understand what they should do as they work toward minting their first NFTs – what sorts of strategies make the most sense for beginners and how to scale and grow as they proceed.
Here are some key ways to get more value from your NFT creation strategy.
Transfer Intellectual Property
Here’s a strange wrinkle of the NFT phenomenon.
When you look at a lot of minting platforms, they essentially give the NFT creator a choice – whether to give copyright to the NFT owner or not.
But as many people have pointed out, what are you actually selling if you are not turning over ownership of intellectual property like digital art? If someone can pocket an NFT and still not have ownership of the artwork itself, what are they getting?
These are fundamental and relevant questions; you can put at least some of those questions to rest by selecting the option to transfer intellectual property with the NFT.
Then the NFT makes sense as a sort of ‘digital key’ for the artwork. But it’s reasonable for buyers to ask about what they’re paying for if they are only getting an NFT without corresponding intellectual property rights.
People Power
Another way to add value to an NFT is to tie it to a particular person – a celebrity, an athlete, or a musician, for example, and their efforts.
As a prime example, you have existing sets of NFTs for quarterbacks and running backs, and others who have been on winning Super Bowl teams in the NFL. In fact, you have every single NFT representing a particular achievement for that individual person.
This type of NFT creation goes back to the age-old concept of digital twinning – where engineers use digital systems to imitate what’s happening in the real world.
This can it be instrumental in the business world, in an analytical context, but with NFTs, it helps add value to something that is pretty intangible and can be created on the fly.
Here’s another way to talk about this strategy. If you get a famous person to sign on to a particular NFT, its value may increase. It may not be as explicit as somebody signing a digital autograph that you put in the NFT file. It may be that they allow you to use their name and attach it to an NFT.
But there is no denying that some of the hottest NFTs are sold by (or on behalf of) artists like Snoop Dogg and others who have figured out how to leverage their celebrity power on NFT marketplaces.
Community
Community is one of the foundations of successful NFT projects. If you can set up a social media presence or Discord community around your art or project, you can add value. This value is more about creating.
Realistic Values
Here’s another cornerstone of ensuring that your NFTs have value for a buying audience – always think about price and how it corresponds to value.
One part of that is ensuring the digital art attached to the NFT is good. It has to symbolize an honest effort and be designed with some deliberate craft and strategy in mind. Something very random that anyone could do is unlikely to draw value in the NFT marketplace, and remember, an NFT creator is competing with many others to attract buyers.
Then the price has to be set realistically, as well. Pricing is different in the art world than it is in the world of commodities. Artists with name recognition can charge hundreds of dollars for a piece of artwork. Others usually can’t.
The same thing holds true in the NFT community. There’s a certain amount of value that you can create and pricing that you can get away with, and then you hit a ceiling beyond which buyers are not attracted to what you have to sell.
With that in mind, making affordable NFTs is a winning strategy for getting more of your digital products to sell on an NFT marketplace. It’s also helpful to know how people are buying, what the trends are, and what blockchains are most popular for these kinds of markets.
Create Avatars
Here’s another crucial part of marketing your NFTs effectively – think about what people will be using them for.
If somebody’s not using a piece of digital art, they’re less likely to buy an NFT that represents it. But there’s one crowning use case that is directly tied to the NFT production world.
It’s an aspect of the meta-verse, the place where we will probably soon be mingling in digital form. I mean, Decentraland has already really taken off!
An avatar is a simple visual digital artwork representing you on a virtual platform. NFTs are perfect for this use because they can be directly tied to the avatar images that people will want, and people can buy them for affordable prices if the NFT creator is selling them that way.
Use the Right Blockchain
It’s also helpful to research which blockchains are getting the most action.
In the early days, Ethereum was the main smart contract facilitator and a major way for NFTs to be minted and sold.
But then Ethereum sellers started to suffer from high gas fees – take a look at some of the average costs just to mint an NFT on Ethereum – the idea that there is a lot of value attached to a transaction due to the cost of making that transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.
People began to find alternatives. For example, a newer blockchain called Solana allows for minting NFTs with much lower gas fees, and on some platforms like OpenSea, it’s essentially free.
Then people also discovered that Bitcoin SV or ‘Satoshi’s vision’ also offers this possibility, typically with lower gas fees than Ethereum.
That has led to a sort of “renaissance” in NFTs and crypto, as new blockchains help to facilitate more types of digital deals.
Notwithstanding the current market pressures as the Fed raises rates, crypto should eventually register some of this expansion in coin values.
Embrace Tokenization
The first point that we made above talks about the value of tokenization of tying something intangible to something more tangible.
Real estate is an excellent example. People are likely to buy real estate tokens because they’re directly tied to a real estate asset of value.
The same is true in the NFT world. Make your NFTs worth something, and they will be valuable in the market. The study of asset tokenization shows you how NFTs can work best.
They are digital representatives of something else. That’s a general idea. But NFTs that aren’t backed up with some kind of understandable value are contributing to that myth in the general market, that NFTs are something you have to shy away from.
When people talk about NFTs as “MLM marketing” or “snake oil,” it’s partly because of a lack of understanding that is exacerbated by the offering of poor quality (or poorly conceived) NFTs.
There is money to be made with NFTs, and it is worth owning some of them. Sorting out which ones are worth owning – well, that’s up to the individual.
But the above guidelines can help you to understand how best to approach the NFT market as a creator. When selling, you can create anything and call it an NFT. It’s no different from any other market in that way.
Your NFT is your product. Why don’t people sell useless products on other markets? Once in a while, they do. But by and large, the market is self-correcting – it rewards people who create things of value.
It’s the same way in the blockchain world, whether people want to admit it or not. In other words, the value of your NFT has much more to do with what it is and what it represents than whether it’s an NFT in the first place.
As you go into the market, you’ll learn more about the trends and see more of what’s happening in the marketplace. You’ll become wiser about using NFTs in ways that you can’t match just reading about it or listening to motivational speakers talk about finTech. So get out there and make this corner of the technology world your own!