Are you an artist or musician looking to turn your music or art into an NFT? As you’ll see in the following article, turning your work into NFTS is an involved process. Below we break it down into four steps. These steps may not make sense to everyone. If you feel like you need help doing any of these, read on till the end of the article, we’ve got you!

1. Tie your Art to Characteristics

The unique characteristics each of your pieces have will define each NFT(Non-Fungible Token) in your collection; Non-Fungible literally means unique or can’t be replaced. In this first step, You will have to assign characteristics to your artwork that will ultimately be encoded into the blockchain. Projects that make digital artwork specifically for NFTs do this by programmatically randomly selecting different variations for each layer that makes up their digital art. This medium article provides a good overview of the process. If you want to turn your existing work into NFTs, you will need to use a slightly different method. Deconstruct your art into its core layers and use them as characteristics. It may not be super intuitive at first, but it can be done for any art form. For example, a rapper may encode their adlibs, collaborators, album, sample, and even song title as characteristics in their NFT, thereby making a unique token representing each one of their songs.

2. Plan A Strategy For Your NFT

Planning a strategy is not a required but a highly recommended step since it makes your NFT more appealing to buy. This strategy should leverage the decentralized ownership that is logged on the blockchain in some way. Some specific examples are:
1. DAO A distributed organization that you can join through owning a share of your NFT. As an artist, you can allow this DAO to vote on your future creative and even have input on the direction of these funds.
2. Community wallet A wallet, usually funded through a portion of the proceeds of the sale of the NFT minting that owners of the NFT control. Typically through a DAO structure, each holder will get one vote, and these wallets are often used to fund infrastructure for the DAO or sponsor more art. The NFT space is still very new, and in the next few years, we expect to see tons of new ways to use funds from community wallets.
3. Royalty Share You can distribute a portion of the commercial proceeds of your NFTS. For example, NAS made an NFT where he distributes tokens that allow you to receive a small percentage of the songs’ streaming royalties.
4. Air-dropping future NFTs You can distribute future content such as other NFTs and digital items. The Bored Ape Yacht club airdropped its holders Mutante Ape Yacht Club NFts which currently has a floor price of 19.69 ETH.
5. Custom Discord servers This is the most lightweight step and can be set up in about 30 minutes without coding. This video walks by NFT times through the entire process. Doing this enables holding exclusive discussions among holders. Through this channel, you can plan events and broadcast announcements!
6. Integration with other websites There is a growing list of websites which you can connect your NFT too and build additional functionality on top of. A recent example is Twitter which has started supporting NFT Profile Pictures.

3. Write and deploy a smart contract

The most common way to do this requires connecting to the Ethereum network using Solidity, Javascript, and various other technologies to write and deploy your smart contract to the Ethereum network. As you’ll see in this tutorial, all your NFT is, is a smart contract with unique attributes.Additionally, Some of the strategies above require encoding logic on the blockchain.

4. Listing it for sale on Opensea

In order to List your collection for sale, you must Integrate your smart contract with Opensea’s standard. Once it’s integrated, you can customize your collection and configure secondary sales. You can also Embed the collection in your website.

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We got you if you would like help with any or all of these steps! Our unique position as an NFT curation site allows us to stay up to speed with all of the advancements, tech, and possibilities in the NFT space. Fill out this TypeForm if you would like to partner with us, and let us help you build your First NFT!