Introduction

Crypto is a movement that brings together individuals using brandable tokens. Thanks to non-fungible tokens or NFTs, creators have the opportunity to create crypto-driven communities and explore blockchain-enabled primitives in ways they never could.

At 🪶 Phoenix, we serve creators and teams with NFT services. In the pursuit to serve others, we have defined best practices for NFT shilling. This blog post is meant to give insights into the promotion or shilling of NFTs.

Shilling Basics

Shilling is the process of engaging in promotional activity that generates attention around NFTs. An NFT shiller is an individual that promotes NFTs to generate revenue.

Shillers play a vital role in the universe of NFTs. Shilling aims to increase demand and capture the attention of people who may not be aware that NFTs exist.

Many social media platforms allow shilling, however, when considering becoming an NFT shiller, one needs to follow guidelines or best practices.

NFT shilling can help generate revenue, but you have to know how to shill projects properly without sounding like a spammer.

In this blog post, the 🪶 Phoenix team explores common practices for NFT shilling and highlights the importance of goal-setting and messaging campaigns.

Identify Your Goals

Determine if you want to make money or have fun. If you want to make money, decide how much time and effort you're willing to put in. Do you want to drive traffic directly to a minting site or use your NFT collection as an organic lead generation machine for your Discord server? By defining specific goals, you increase your chances of shilling success.

Identify Your Ideal Customers

At 🪶 Phoenix, we created a list of steps you can take to identify and reach out to your ideal customers.

Before spending any money on advertising, research who might be interested in your NFT collection. Then find ways to reach them through advertising platforms such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads.

Your goal is to identify the demographic of consumers who would purchase your NFTs at different price points.

You need a plan for how you're going to reach and interact with potential customers.

Who are your prospecting buyers? Are they photography buffs, NFT lovers, or crypto enthusiasts? You need to define your ideal customer profile to better craft marketing campaigns.

Where do your ideal customers hang out? Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, Instagram? Keep your social media accounts updated before reaching out to prospects.

Use Creative Copywriting Best Practices

In our quest to find the perfect marketing strategy, we have identified several creative copywriting formulas to market and promote NFT shilling:

1. AIDA: Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action
2. BAB: Before -> After -> Bridge
3. PAS: Pain -> Agitate -> Solution
4. QUEST: Qualify -> Understand -> Educate -> Stimulate -> Transition

Track Marketing Work

Keep track of your marketing campaigns. You can't improve what you don't measure. Monitor everything about your NFT shilling operation so that you can better reflect upon successes and failures. Create an Airtable or Google Sheets to record all marketing activities. For Discord promotion, keep track of invite links, marketing copy, channels posted on, and posting date. For Twitter promotion, keep track of tweet storms, tweet links, accounts mentioned, and posting dates.

Evaluate your marketing results once a week or once a month. The NFT space moves fast. It's important to reflect upon a time frame to better understand what you can improve upon based on marketing feedback. Look at how many emoji reactions, replies, or comments you receive to better understand the impact of your marketing work.

Write Short To Medium-Form Content

At 🪶 Phoenix, we determined that content creators should aim for 300-500 words for Discord and 40-70 words per tweet on Twitter.

In your marketing campaign, include a link to your website, Discord server, or Twitter account. Sharing hyperlinks that divert the attention of your prospects will increase your branding and improve your marketing reach.

It is important to include an image, an animation, or a video to better capture attention. It could be simple (an animation of artwork) or complex (an animation of a treasure chest filling up with gold coins).

Write Long-Form Content

Blog posts and web stories are underrated by the NFT community. At 🪶 Phoenix, we predict that blog posts and web stories will capture the long-term value of NFT projects.

NFT projects focus their time on social media and neglect their own website. Creating long-form content and video-based stories is hard. It's easy to overlook this when performing daily NFT shilling.

At 🪶 Phoenix, we believe that video-first blog posts and web stories will capture the essence of a project and can be shared on social media platforms like Twitter, Discord, or Reddit.

According to developers.google.com

Video is more engaging than text or images. Use as much video as possible, and supplement with images and text.

By posting SEO-friendly content, projects can reach a wider audience than ever before while building searchable content that can resonate with prospects who are searching for your project.

Use Different Creative Copy With Every Marketing Post

One of the most critical aspects of marketing the creative copy. It can be challenging for a blockchain project to have a distinct voice when every post comes from the same source. The best way to solve this problem is to use different copies for every post that you market to your target audience.

A unique story will create variety in the marketing campaign and make it more interesting for your readers. They will be more receptive and open to your content.

It would be best if you had a strong team of content creators that write unique content regularly. You can accomplish this by hiring in-house or by partnering with marketing teams like 🪶 Phoenix. Since this copy is written for each piece of content, it will show your team's creativity and differentiate your project from others in your industry.

You need to be creative if you’re trying to sell non-fungible tokens. You have to try different marketing messages and see which ones work best. And you should vary the copy you use depending on who you are targeting and what media you’re using.

Successful shilling is a series of steps:

1. Create unique stories with each post. People are sensitive to the same content. If you post something new, your community will appreciate your creative effort with every post. The novelty of a new copy will be enough to get them to open your posts and read at least a few sentences.
2. Post daily or weekly. Community users have learned that if they see frequent posting from social media accounts, they can expect another that the project is active. Regular posting frequency means they can expect something new on a daily or weekly basis.
3. Speak the lingo. Each community speaks a different language, known as lingo. Each marketing post is an opportunity to speak in a language or creative style that resonates best with your audience. Are you launching a derivative of the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC)? Speak to apes lovers. Use 🙈's as emojis.

Don't Sound Like A Spammer

There are a lot of shilling-friendly communities, channels, or groups out there. Many of them are happy to promote NFT projects as long as they follow posting guidelines based on content, links, and attachments (images, animations, videos).

Here are guidelines for shilling NFTs:

• Do not post more than once every six hours. Why six? Many Discord servers turn on "Slow Mode" which allows users to post one message every six hours for individual channels.
• Do share relevant links. If you're posting a link, make sure it's relevant to the topic and isn't an attempt to drive traffic to your site.
• Do share relevant visuals. People love visual assets, including images, animations, or videos. Create visual assets for social media promotion and you will capture attention faster than text alone.
• Do not use CAPS. People are sensitive to online shouting.

Use Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Or Similar Platforms

Shilling is an excellent way to increase the reach of your NFTs.

Many social networking platforms allow creators to share links to NFTs inside posts and comments. Social media platforms allow users to embed images, audio, video, and other metadata describing NFTs.

Multiple social media platforms support embedding links, including Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Medium, and Telegram. Instagram is another way to shill NFT projects without posting links.

There are hundreds of platforms where you can shill NFTs. Some are popular, some are not, but all have their audience.

Discord is the most exciting platform for shilling NFTs, in my opinion. It's trendy among gamers and game developers.

The main benefit of Discord over other platforms is that people tend to stay longer in Discord channels than on Telegram or Reddit. It's also more personal: you can get to know people better and take more time to explain things to them.

It is important to remember that you can't just throw your link into a large public channel and expect people to read it. You need to engage with people, preferably one-to-one, and answer questions until they understand what you're doing and why it's interesting.

Be friendly and helpful, and if someone asks you a question, guess what: they want an answer!

Look At Post Engagement And Post Views

It would help if you looked at the statistics after each campaign you ran and measured it against your goals going into the project. The reason for doing this is to see if what you did was effective.

A/B testing is a valuable tool, as are other marketing strategies such as landing page optimization, call-to-action experiments, etc. But we need to identify our successes and failures to learn from them.

It's essential to monitor the performance of your campaign. Monitor your post engagements, post views, and impressions.

Monitoring your performance will help you improve your campaign and get a better idea of how to create engaging content that people want to see.

After you post your campaign and share it with your audience, you need to look at your campaign's results.

You should monitor the following stats:

• New followers: number of people who did not follow you before but do now
• Engagement: percentage of people who engaged with your post in some way, for example: liked it, commented on it, or shared it
• Views: number of times people viewed your post in their news feeds without actually engaging with it
• Comments: people left a comment on your post
• Shares: how often your content was shared using the share button next to every story on the page
• Offers (available if you use offers): how many offers were clicked by people who saw your ad