How to sell NFT art

The topic of NFTs is red hot at the moment. Any influencer with a sizable audience has a chance of making a fortune on NFTs: it could be a meme, a catchphrase, a screenshot of a tweet, or a piece of art.

Those who have a little bit of coding skills, have fun generating collections of NFTs like Boring Apes (Tron), Rocks (Ethereum), or Rooms in the virtual residence (Solana).

NFT art has no practical use, still collectors are ready to acquire some digital masterpieces for thousands or millions of dollars. Indubitably, novice creators would be happy to make $40 (0.01 ETH at the time of writing) or even $4 per piece.

Where do you even start?

How to sell NFT art: play to your strengths

The umbrella term of “art” covers a variety of intellectual products, so to speak. We got habitually used to think of NFT art as primarily images or animations but upon closer inspection it turns out that any art can be digitized and linked to blockchain – if not stored directly on it. Sculpture (as 3D-models), poetry, you name it.

That said, if you identify as a poet, stick to it. Do not start making graphic art only because you’ve heard stories of unimaginably expensive NFT pictures. It is better to be among the first in a relatively unoccupied niche than to enter an overcrowded one. Then build a long-lasting brand of your name.

How to sell NFT art: approach it like a business project

It takes a strong gut to run a business… and a good marketing campaign to start one. How many of your friends know that you create art? How many potential customers are there?

Pick up a simple business model: “4 Ps”, for example. See if you took care about your Product, its Price, the Place of distribution, and Promotion. As a one-man band, you’ll need to work in all these directions at the same time. If one of the Ps is neglected, the whole endeavor will suffer.

Work with what you got. Do not overcomplicate. Set achievable goals (possibly according to the SMARTER framework), re-evaluate them, and see what can be improved after each small milestone.

We can give you a hand with a choice of Places where you could sell NFT art pieces.

Where to sell NFT art

All of the marketplaces we are going to list, will require a respective wallet.

By the way, the Trustee Wallet app links to any service that supports WalletConnect. The NFTs you own will show up in the app as well.

Ethereum marketplaces have the highest daily traded volume:

Next goes Binance Smart Chain:

Where to sell NFT art if you are a professional artist?

See the level of creators at SuperRare and ask yourself if you can create similar or better art. It appears that professional visual artists use this platform as a side gig, so don’t go all-in and consider the other blockchains as an alternative, too.

Where to sell NFT art if you are a beginner or just trying it out?

The newcomers are repelled by the Ethereum transaction fees that constitute $4 on average. The total price you’ll have to pay until your NFT is finally ready to be sold may go as high as $20-50, so it makes sense to look into the platforms that offer free minting services.

How does it work?

The asset data will be written on blockchain the moment it is sold or transferred for the first time. Below are some of the platforms that offer free minting (more platforms will probably join in time because it attracts more users).

Search for “gasless minting” or “create NFT for free” to find more alternatives to the named services.

Also, browse for blockchains with low transaction fees. For example, Polygon (MATIC) transaction fee is way lower than Ethereum’s, and you can actually earn enough MATIC for your first transaction via MATIC faucets. To get MATIC, you’ll need a connected wallet, of course. Here is one Polygon NFT art marketplace for you.

Or, see if the other chains work for you. NEAR (Mintbase, Paras.id) and Tezos (hicetnunc, kalamint) offer a passable balance of exposure, minting fees, and possible earnings.

If you don’t intend to sell NFT art but rather to get it out there, set the price to zero so that the buyer only has to pay for the gas. You’ll get your share of royalties anyway if the buyer resells it.

How to make and sell NFT art

As you learn more about the technologies that surround NFT, it starts to feel like a fall down the rabbit hole. You could just click the button “Accept and Continue” instead of studying all the intricate details, but such a lighthearted attitude never did anyone any good. What difficulties can you run into then?

  • Not enough funds on the connected wallet to cover the minting fee;
  • The file format is not supported on a given marketplace or the size exceeds the limit;
  • The storage that the NFT metadata points to is unreliable.

Let us clarify the last one a bit. For example, ERC-721 standard tokens can optionally contain links to images. That link may point to an http web address, which, in turn, may expire. Knowing this, you would prefer IPFS storage whenever possible or writing data directly on a blockchain. However, the latter option does not allow for more diverse content, speed, and operation costs. IPFS, on the other hand, does not guarantee true immutability of data: the files can be abandoned by their owners and effectively removed from the network.

There is another snag to watch out for:

  • Copyright violation that results in the deletion of content.

That is, when you post an NFT that has a Tesla logo on it, for example. It will take time for platform moderators to notice it but when they ultimately do, they will take the content down (cease to display it and disable trading).

Those who want to buy and sell NFT art find themselves in an even more stressful situation: they risk losing a lot more money than the price of minting. What are the dangers the unsuspecting buyers may face buying a new awesome asset?

How to buy and sell NFT without trouble

The dangers of buying an asset that is already problematic (considering the minting mistakes we mentioned) is obvious. How do you sell NFT art pieces that do not display properly on the marketplace, Etherscan, or your wallet?

It gives us another reason to suggest you read the Creator Guideline of NFT marketplaces you use.

When a new token standard comes out, it may not be immediately supported by Etherscan. Therefore, it would appear as if the token is not in your possession. This minor problem is temporary.

As for the storage… if an NFT links to deleted content, its integrity is effectively broken. Pay attention.

Perhaps, you will decide to become a creator yourself and write your own guide on how to make and sell NFTs one day!

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