How I made $630 and got 167,000 views in a month as a writer in Web3
TL;DR: I minted my poetry as text NFTs on In Writing, used their affiliate link program, and shamelessly promoted myself on Discord Web3 and writing communities. I’m really happy with my results — 160k page views is nothing to scoff at, and over $600 in a month as ‘side hustle’ money isn’t insignificant — but it involved advocating for myself shamelessly, sometimes for hours a day, and was by no means ‘easy.’
Many of you may know me from my articles last month about getting over a hundred thousand views through a text NFT marketplace or selling my first poem for $50. These achievements drove me to continue exploring Web3 for all of October, and I’m going to share what I learned below and some tips I have for optimal growth.
Minting and selling text NFTs
I had searched a long time for a platform to mint my writing with (because I was jealous of what artists were doing and making with NFTs), and tried out platforms like mirror.xyz and Creatokia before ultimately settling on In Writing. They had a ‘gas free’ mint feature, which basically meant that I didn’t have to pay anything (not even blockchain-related ‘gas fees’) to mint an NFT, and after trying it out I was surprised at how easy it was to mint NFTs on In Writing even compared to industry leaders like OpenSea, where I had to commit over $100 to ‘sign my wallet’ into their ecosystem.
The first mint on In Writing is completely free, but subsequent ones are similarly inexpensive — the price to mint is 1 MATIC, which at the time of writing is only 82 cents. They have a ‘pay with credit/debit’ option that lets you pay with credit/debit (obviously), but it also gives you a little extra MATIC and that’s how I was able to secure cryptocurrency pretty quickly as a beginner. Furthermore, I had made $50 off one of the first poems I minted, so I figured worst case I had $50 to lose (but fortunately, I didn’t!)
I had no experience with digital marketplaces (be it NFTs or other established sites like eBay), but I was also surprised at how quickly poems would be bought (if at all). I spend a lot of time trolling their site nowadays to see what has been minted, and I see NFTs getting bought within a few hours sometimes. From my own experience, I’ve had NFTs been bought within a couple hours but also ones been bought days or weeks after they were minted. Another positive is definitely that In Writing isn’t taking a cut of the purchases and the entire payment is going to me, and also that they have 20% royalty fees for the original NFT minter.
The only downside is that you do need to have a little bit of MATIC (cryptocurrency) to start off with listing your NFTs for sale, but it’s easy to obtain on their website or on sites like Crypto.com.
Affiliate Links
The other strategy I used to take advantage of In Writing and ‘web3’ was signing up my address for an In Writing affiliate code. It’s similar to an Epic Games creator code, where whenever someone uses my code (MASON, for those curious or want to support me!), they get 20% off and I get 20% of the total payment. I had some friends who were more involved in the crypto space mint their names, and some took it further and I ultimately profited off of 40 or 50 mints in the span of the month.
Tips for Growth in Web3 as a Writer
Finally, I have a few other tips that didn’t fit into the first two categories that I found helped me save a lot of time and grow quickly in the Web3 space.
- You can reach out to a lot of Web3 Discord members for help!
When I had a small technical issue with listing my first NFT, I reached out to the owners of In Writing on their Discord and they actually helped me solve my issue instantly (I didn’t know you needed MATIC to interact with the blockchain, and they sent me some :)) - There’s a huge Web3 community even though it’s a crypto winter
I had heard from my friends and on the Internet that since it’s a ‘crypto winter’, there’s not a lot of activity in Web3 communities (be it Discord, Reddit, or Twitter). I found that this wasn’t true, and that it wasn’t only platform owners that were helpful and supportive — it was (most) of the community as a whole! - A lot of people are interested in Web3, but don’t know a lot about it. After I told some friends that I was making money selling my poems as NFTs, they didn’t understand and some even reacted negatively. However, after I explained more about Web3 and what it really is (besides all the DogeCoin and Elon Musk trolling), they cooled down — some of the biggest hitting points were: Decentralization, so that algorithms are transparent and big companies can’t sell all your data without your consent or do stock-market-insider-trading; and environmental friendliness — the blockchain In Writing is hosted on is called Polygon, and their total annual power output is equivalent to the annual power output of 67 American homes.
I’m definitely going to continue exploring Web3 and the possibilities it offers for writers such as myself, and I’m also going to make more of an effort in becoming a part of Web3 communities and ‘DAOs.’ It definitely seems like the community is a huge part of Web3 (which makes sense, since it’s literally ‘decentralized’), but mostly I’m glad to see the innovative steps platforms such as In Writing are taking to build a better ecosystem for writers and creatives, and how they’re taking advantage of Web3 technology for a greater purpose than to shill obscure cryptos. Thanks for reading!
Read more (or even mint your first NFT, completely for free) about In Writing here, and thanks for reading!
