Discord Growing Tactics For Crypto Founders That Want To Succeed

If you are in crypto, you should have heard about Discord. However, if you are going to be a crypto project founder, you need more knowledge about how to grow your Discord server. 

These days it is almost unheard of not to have a Discord server for your crypto community. It’s free to have one, but growing and keeping it active may be very time-consuming. This may not sound good to you, but the reality is that how loyal is your community affects the chances of your success very much.

This is one of the main differences between web 2.0 and web 3.0 marketing. In the crypto world together with a great product and great offer, you should have a great loyal community too. So, when you are planning your marketing activities, you need a place on your list for Discord-related tactics too. 

Benefits of Having a Discord Community

It needs time and effort to build a solid Discord community, no doubt about that. But why it is so beneficial to do it? Let’s see some of the main reasons, in no particular order:

1. In crypto, there is a lot of FUD and it can spread like wildfire in less than 24 hours. This means that in less than a day your project may be destroyed or at least brought back to level zero. However, if you have a loyal community, it can support you during these storms and help you to overcome them.

2. You can refine pretty fast – improving a product is one of the most important things that a project founder can do. Having people that care about it gives you the opportunity to get feedback pretty fast. You just need to constantly use the suggestions to upgrade your product. This is a proven way to beat your competitors.

3. You can use the best marketing – word of mouth, to get even more investors

4. You can help people to better understand and use your product

These are just a few of the benefits. From a marketing standpoint, the community is a must. It is like having all your shareholders in one place. It’s risky, but if you care about your business you will figure out how to make this your advantage in the best possible way.

I hope that you are convinced that you need to have and grow a Discord server. Let’s take a look at the free ways to achieve that.

Free Methods to Grow Your Discord Community

First off, unless it is actively pushed, a Discord community is unlikely to be found by potential new members. Second, a stagnant Discord community may be perceived as boring or inactive, which may cause members to leave. Last but not least, a dead Discord community is unlikely to be able to sustain itself over time. Luckily, there are things that you can do to overcome this:

Add your Discord link everywhere

When you are building the main assets of your crypto project, you will need to write descriptions, bios, and things like that. Use them to show the world that your Discord server exists. 

Actually, by doing that you are not only going to attract new members to your server but also build trust (especially, if your Discord server is active and members of the team actively participate in the discussions). So, add your Discord link to your:

– Twitter
– Facebook
– Instagram
– TikTok
– YouTube
– Website
– Twitch
– Email Signature
– Forum Signature
– Blog posts
– Guest posts

Whenever you can, just add it.

Post your link to Discord directories

Screenshot from disboard.org

There are websites that have a lot of visitors interested in Discord servers. The great thing is that most of them give you the opportunity to add your Discord link there for absolutely free. However, adding is not enough. 

You should frequently bump your Discord server after that. This will bring your server to the top of the list and more users will be able to find and join it. Otherwise, your server will be near the bottom of the list and no one will ever see it.

Here is a short list of some popular directories where you can list your Discord server:

– Top.gg – top.gg/servers
– Disboard – disboard.org
– Discords – discords.com
– Discord Street – discord.st
– DiscordMe – discord.me/servers
– Discord Servers – discordservers.com

 If you dig more into this tactic, I am sure that you can find more.

Promote your Discord on social media

I am sure that you know how important it is for your project to be active on social media. Try to include in your posting calendar some content related to your Discord server. It’s good that you have the link as part of your bio, but you will get more users by actively reminding people that it exists. 

The best way would be to make content that shows how fun and valuable it is for someone to be part of your server. Most crypto investors are part of dozens of Discords and you need a good reason to make them join yours. Even if you seduce them, you may be quickly forgotten, that’s why it is really important to… 

Keep your Discord server engaged

Having thousands of members is useless and may be dangerous if they don’t care about your project. It may not very obvious, but making your members actively involved in the discussions on your server is a great free promotional tactic. On one side, if you give them enough reasons to be active, there is a good chance they to start talking about your server to their friends. And this is the best possible promotion.

On another side, active servers convert more. What I mean by that is this – when you have a person that is interested in your Discord, he/she will check it, but this doesn’t mean that he/she will join it permanently. In most cases, people decide if they are going to stay or not based on the activity on the server (and the type of activity too). So if you have an active one, more people will convert from “viewers” to “members”.

Do partnerships with other Discord servers

Another free way to increase your member count is by partnering with other Discord servers. When you are just starting out it may be difficult to do collaborations with big guys, but you don’t have to. 

In most cases, the big servers have plenty of fake users and not a lot of interested people. That’s why your goal should be to find smaller but active servers that you can work with. Make sure that you have a nice and engaged Discord server when you start doing that. You don’t want rumors saying that it has been a waste of time and effort servers to partner with you. 

Use Quora

Quora is a great free promotional tool. As you probably know this is the biggest question-and-answer platform in the world. People go there to ask questions about everything. And in most cases, if you ask a question on Google, Quora will probably appear among the top results. That’s why you shouldn’t underestimate its power to promote your Discord. 

The easiest way to do that is by searching for questions that are somehow related to your crypto project and answering them. 

The second way is to brainstorm many questions whose answers somehow lead to joining your Discord server, mentioning it, talking about the benefits of your server and etc. After that, post the question with one account and answer it with another.

Finally, you need to ask your community (Discord and Telegram) to go and Uptove your answers, so they can appear on the top.  

Participate in Twitter spaces

Lately, Twitter spaces have become very popular. They can be a great opportunity to promote your Discord. Just make sure that you don’t go with this as the main goal. Try to figure out a way to provide a lot of value during your appearance and if you get a good option to mention your server then do it. 

Even if you don’t have this chance, which I doubt, especially if you have provided a lot of value, don’t worry at all. Most probably those that have benefited from your speech will research you and your project and there is a good chance to want to join your community. 

Be active on other Discord servers

This is very much related to the last tactic. Joining different servers and providing pure value, without promoting yourself, gives you a lot of benefits. One of the main among them is that a good amount of people will be interested in you and will check your bio. Having a link to your Discord community and a reason to check it out (this is optional, but it will increase the chance of people clicking) will lead to some fresh and curious members.

Just try to be consistent with your activity on other servers. Writing there once per week or twice, won’t make people remember or even notice you. That’s why you should plan your activities for the week in a way that you have some time to join different discussions. 

Start networking before even having a Discord server

This is probably the method that can help you the most. Putting it, in the end, is not a coincidence, but I will keep the reason for myself. Anyway, I want you to remember one thing. 

If you want your project to have an active Discord server with a loyal community, you should plant the seeds before it even exists.

The best and almost guaranteed to succeed way is to build relationships in the space before you even start working on your crypto project idea. Try to be everywhere possible in the crypto space and provide as much value as possible. Make people remember you, talk about you, search for you, to want to be your friends. 

You can achieve that by joining discussions on Discord, Twitter, Twitter Spaces, Podcasts, YouTube interviews, LinkedIn, and everywhere you can. Do that by having the one and only goal of providing a ton of value without asking for anything in exchange. Show the world how great you are (please, don’t try to fake this) and how much you can give. 

This will lead to dozens of friend requests and personal communications. And the secret of the success of your Discord and your crypto project is hidden exactly there.

Paid Methods To Grow Your Community

Having a budget to grow your server is great and you should plan to spend some funds on its promotion. Otherwise, it may take you a lot more time to grow it. You can still achieve a lot by using the free methods (especially, by following the last two), but some funds can help too.

Organize different events for your Discord server members

The crypto community loves events, especially if they have some sort of a prize included. Use this to your advantage. Organize different activities with the goal of people inviting their friends, sharing your server on their social media, making a video about your server, and everything that can stimulate your audience to grow your server.

However, try not to give big prizes, because you will attract a lot of bots. Actually, events that include financial rewards in most cases make people use bots or invite bots. That’s why you should be very careful when you are working on the rules. Try to structure them in a way that people are not tempted to cheat or to be clear that cheaters will be punished really badly. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time, money, and effort. 

Hire shillers

One of the very common ways of promoting servers is by hiring people that spend a lot of time going to other servers and talking about your Discord. This is a great way to increase your members, but only if you have a team of shillers that are trained and know how to do the job in a professional way. You don’t need a team of people that spam other servers, because this can lead to a FUD with some bad consequences. 

Be careful with this strategy. It’s proven to deliver results but comes with risks.

Bounty campaign

A bounty campaign is a tactic where people perform promotional activities on behalf of a crypto project in return for a reward (in tokens). So, it involves creating simple tasks for participants that they need to perform in order to get financial benefits in return.

In most cases, such campaigns are run in forums like Bitcointalk (the most popular place for that) and then promoted to different Telegram channels by the bounty manager (the person who prepares the thread, its design, gives tokens if people cover the requirements and some other activities).

This is also a great option to grow your server. However, if you decided to make as a task for people to join your Discord server, you will get fast growth but with worthless members. It’s better to use the bounty to make the participants promote your Discord server, but not to join it.  

Paid AMAs

Some servers can organize you an AMA there if you pay for that. I think that this is a well-paid promotion only if you can find out the approximate amount of real users and if it is an engaged one. This is not a very easy task, but if you or someone from your team spend a few days analyzing the activity and the members, I am pretty sure that you will have some answers in the end. 

Finding engaged servers with real members can be a real gold mine for your project. It’s rear to find them, but if you have reasons to believe that it is a good one, it’s not a bad idea at all to try to make a deal with them for an AMA or more. 

Paid ads to grow your Discord server

Another way to grow your Discord server is by paying for some ads. Among the most popular ones for the promotion of crypto projects are:

– Twitter
– TikTok
– Instagram
– Facebook
– Google & YouTube Ads
– Quora

All of them have their own specifics, but it has been proven many times that they can help you to grow your Discord server. It may be hard if you are using them for the first time, so if you have the resources you should hire an agency to help you with that. 

Things You Shouldn’t Do When You Are Trying To Grow Your Discord

There are sneaky ways to achieve the growth that you want. However, they will most probably lead to bad long-term results. I will just mention the most common among them which I don’t advise you to even consider.

a. Buying members

Why spend time and effort when you can buy as many members as you want? Actually, the reality is that you don’t need a very big server with thousands of members. You need a much smaller one, but with a loyal audience. However, if you decide to buy some bots to make your Discord look big, you will do more harm than good to it. 

There is no way to make the bots to be active. They can just increase your numbers and that’s all. But this is not what you need and if your real members find out about that, you will be in trouble. 

At the beginning of the crypto and NFT world, this was a working tactic. Now it is dead and all people know about it. 

b. Paying to active chatters

In order to increase the activity in their Discords, some projects hire professional chatters. These are people (2 or more) that spend a specific amount of time in the server discussing all types of topics with the only goal to make it look active. In most cases, they talk about things that don’t relate to the project at all.

From a first look, this sounds like a great plan to delude joiners. However, it will not take them a lot of time to figure out that these are paid members. Guess what, when they find it out, you will have to explain (more problems for you).

The main issue is that the chatters are from poor countries and they don’t have much knowledge about crypto and your project (most have bad English too). This can be easily discovered by your real, loyal members. You don’t want to lose real potential or current investors only to simulate an active community.

You should know two things about these chatters:

– They need some managing, it is not a plug-and-play solution that you start and then forget about. Actually, depending on the team, it may take you a lot of time till you see some sort of normal discussions going on in your server.
– As soon as you stop paying the chatters or if they don’t come, your server will look dead. This will start questions and sooner or later, members will figure out the answer.

My advice to you is to stay away from that and to spend more time brainstorming ideas on how to give value to your members and keep them engaged, instead of hiring chatters.

c. Buying a server with members

It’s tempting to not start from ground zero, but as I said, it is no longer a numbers game. The bear market has proven that. Shortcuts can cost you a lot. Buying a server and rebranding it is a risky game with no clear result. 

Stay away from this tactic. You should start your own Discord server and grow it.

Conclusion

Having a Discord server can be a time-consuming task, but it has a lot of benefits. In the beginning, it may be attractive to cheat here and there. Don’t fall into this trap and follow proven tactics. This article gives you enough options to grow your Discord server. When you are working on it, keep always in mind that you are here for the long game. This will protect you from being attracted by shortcuts that can cost you your business.

If you need some guidance or feedback on your Discord growing strategies, make sure to schedule a free consultation with us.