Varras

Posted on Mar 03, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

Why I'm Giving Away 300 NFTs FOR FREE

When I started minting NFTs on the Tezos Blockchain I thought about potentially giving away some NFTs for free as thank yous to collectors. I even minted a few specifically for a How To Airdrop NFTs on Tezos blog I wrote. But then I did like anyone else would do, I listed those newly minted photography NFTs for 5 $XTZ each.

So how did I go from attempting to sell my photography NFTs to just giving them away for free? It started with two questions: Why? & How?

Two Questions: Why? & How?

  1. Why would anyone want to buy my NFT?
  2. How can I grow a community that will want to buy my NFT?

As a new NFT artist I face a major dilemma: there is no demand for my NFT; driven mostly by no one knowing I, or my art exists. I also face another problem, I have no money to spend on advertising to market for me. This is where the beauty of low-cost Tezos gas fees really shine. Low-cost gas, coupled with a strong art collector and creator community, makes Tezos a great blockchain for new artists.

While writing my How To Airdrop blog, I found that it was super quick and cheap to mint and manually airdrop NFTs to people. It only cost me 0.144 $XTZ to send one of my NFTs to a collector. This same action would be very costly on Ethereum.

Once I learned the cost of a giveaway was so low, it then hit me to delist everything I had minted and give it away for free. Giving my NFTs away for free accomplishes two things: gives back to the community and markets your NFT.

Giving Back and Marketing

Tezos has a wonderful community of collectors. A lot of them, including myself, can’t afford to pay $100 USD in gas to purchase an art piece on Ethereum. So they come to Tezos looking for high quality art, without the high fees.

As a new photography artist, I am working to produce high quality photographs but I still think I have a lot to learn. By giving away my photography NFTs I’m betting that I can bring value to the collectors in the years to come while I work to perfect my craft. I truly believe in my potential and I’m hoping in time these free pieces will reflect that value for collectors. The giveaways also feed back into the Tezos community with each gas fee I pay going back to the Tezos Bakers (Stakers) that support running the nodes.

Giving these NFTs away for free also helps to market my art and grow my audience. So far I have over 70 different collectors holding at least one of my NFTs. That’s 70 more than when I was trying to sell my NFTs for 5 $XTZ each. This was all done by interacting with people on Twitter; which is a free service. As well as, the amount of people that will see my work on Twitter that would have never seen it if I had never done these giveaways.

When this 300 NFT giveaway experiment is all said and done, it will have cost me around 43 $XTZ, or about $152.50 USD (at the time of this writing 1 $XTZ = $3.53). That total cost is not that much for free marketing and supporting the Tezos collector community with free photography NFTs.

Summary

In summary, if you’re a new artist with a small or no following, giving away pieces of your work for free is a great way to gain collectors and market yourself. If you’re an established artist, giving free NFTs to collectors also serves to show them appreciation for buying your work. Either way, giving away NFTs, coupled with interacting with the Tezos community on Twitter, will bring more awareness to your art and help drive that demand for your art. And if you must have a more self-serving reason, each secondary sale will bring a royalty back to you (assuming you set one). So more demand = more royalties to your wallet.

Follow my twitter account @varrasNFT for a chance to collect one of the free NFTs I’m dropping every day in March 2022. I will release at least one new NFT everyday; each one will only have 5 editions minted. First 5 people to comment their Tezos address gets one. It’s that simple!

Thanks for taking the time to read.

-Varras