Artist Onboarding

Guide for getting new artists set up on NEAR & advice to help them with sales.

Why NEAR for artists?

$NEAR is a carbon neutral L1 blockchain with NFT royalties and splits implemented at the standards level. In bullets...

• Splits of sales and royalties are easy via mintbase.io.

• Royalties are implemented at protocol level so they work across marketplaces.

• Greenest chain around (PoS + carbon offsets).

• Convenient web wallet (mint and trade from your phone/tablet).

• Low latency, reliable transactions (1 second block times makes chain interactions feel like a snappy Amazon click).

• Robust DAO ecosystem (astrodao.com) and ability to launch your own social token (tkn.farm)

The NEAR ecosystem has over 100 monthly active DAOs where you can earn crypto with your skills, full ist on nearguilds.com. At time of writing Sputnik on DappRadar shows over 1M paid out over the last 30 days. Creatives can get involved in more ways than selling NFTs.

The chain is super friendly with other chains, lots of energy going into interoperability. There's a rainbow bridge to ETH, EVM running on Aurora, and OctopusNetwork for substrate chains like Polkadot/Kusama.

More technical but NEAR has solid scaling. The sharding set up is like the blockchain running on a rendering farm vs a single GPU.

New Artist Setup

Wallet setup

Have them sign up at wallet.near.org and fund them for 2 or 3N. You want them to have at least 2N minimum so that they can submit DAO proposals and make some mints.

Keep track of the NEAR names for artists you've onboarded. You can submit a proposal to nft-onboarding DAO to receive 5N for each.

Welcome cards

Create your own high edition (100 is good) card on Paras.id and drop 1-3 of them to new artists when they join.

After you send the artist a card, show them their profile on Paras.id (eg. https://paras.id/starpause.near) where they can see the cards you gifted them. Encourage them to fill out their Paras.id profile, it speeds up the time required for them to be accepted for minting at Paras.id.

First purchase

If you have more time with the artist you can have them bid on your high edition card instead of you sending it to them. This shows them the flow which collectors will go through and helps them understand how NFTs and the platforms work.

On Paras.id or Mintbase.io have the artist place a bid of 0.01N for your art and then accept it. If you're IRL with the artist you can show them what the process looks like on your phone as well.

Advice for selling artwork

How often should an artist release art?

We want new artists to make a habit of minting their work on NEAR so it's important to have some guidelines for publishing set up.

1 artwork a month is the minimum that an artist should be releasing on any platform to stay visible/relevant.

There isn't a maximum number of artworks but a maximum of 1 a day or 1 a week is reasonable. If an artist is making more than 1 mint a day (or an average of 1 mint a day) they're probably flooding low quality work.

Self promotion across platforms

Promotion of NFTs is more similar than different to promoting any other kind of sales. It takes persistence.

Artists need to link to their NEAR storefronts from their social media profiles. Set up https://linktr.ee/ if the link sections is cluttered.

Use a social media management tool like Buffer to maximize reach for the amount of time spent on sharing your artwork.

Authenticity is key. If you hang in a space and engage with people on a human level before shilling your work then you'll get a warmer reception.

Twitter (short form)

Twitter is the best place to connect with other artists and collectors. Even if an artist is starting from scratch, it's advised to get a twitter set up.

If you're going to reply to a shill thread, look at who posted it. Check what they've bought in the past. Share work that resonates with that collector. It's not uncommon to find it's an account that doesn't collect and is just going for likes/engagement.

Generally there is more engagement on weekdays than weekends, but experiment with posting days and times to see what gets picked up.

Jury is out on if hashtags help or hurt the visibility of posts. Moderation is sane, including a few relevant hash tags won't turn people off from your post and signals that your post is part of a larger trend.

Substack / Cent.co / Medium (longform)

Publishing editorials also helps with sales. These don't need to be huge tombs, in fact most people won't make it to the bottom of your article.

Substack is a good option because it puts you in a direct relationship with your readers.

Cent.co is more crypto centric along with other options like hive and mirror.

Medium is the facebook of writing platforms. It's used for a many of the more respectable projects for white papers and announcements.

For pseudononymous publishing you can use pastebin.com or hack.md with guerrillamail.com for a login.

Paras.id has a publication section. It's a better way to surface your art than spamming price updates.

Auction participation

Art Gallery Auction House (telegram)

t.me/theAGAH is a great place to get started with auctions. They happen online and you can sell NFTs using any token.

Join the link and mute the channel because there's a ton of messages.

Introduce yourself and hang out for a few auctions, especially if you like the artist whos up. There are auctions most weekdays. This way you'll get a feeling for how auctions go.

Every Friday a submission link goes out for you to get your artwork in the next week of auction slots. Hop on that as soon as you see it, there tends to be a more demand than supply for those slots.

During your auction it's important to be around and talk with people about your art.

Roaring Auctions (IRL)

https://t.me/roaringauctions has less frequent events than AGAH but worth keeping an eye on.