How to use Discord for business and making money?

What is Discord?

Have you ever felt that while playing games with your friends, it is more fun to actually talk with them?

If you are aware of chatroom culture, then probably you know about Discord. Otherwise, before knowing how you can use Discord to build business, its necessary to know a little bit about the purpose it serves.

In a chatroom, a lot of people join and they have conversation. Chatroom culture has been popular with different types of online games. In online multiplayer games where a team is playing, the members would like to talk among themselves and have a nice time. Discord is a popular platform for this type of activities. Here you can join different servers and join in conversations. When you join a server, there will be different channels for different topics, one channel can be for one game discussion, another channel might be for listening to songs, and so on.

As you can understand, Discord is a platform where you can build communities. It promotes building a culture rather than a business.

But does that mean you can’t use it for business and making money? Simple answer is- yes, you can. It depends on your mindset of doing business. Ideally, a leader focuses significantly on 3 things- people, culture and process to build a business. All 3 go hand in hand. So, from a cultural perspective, it is important to build a community to grow sustainably. Money comes after value. So, if you want to develop your business using Discord, you have to keep the mindset of earning money aside and focus on building an engaging community.

7 Features on Discord that will spellbound you

Before telling you some ways to develop your business on Discord, I would like to mention some facts about why Discord is an opportunity for your business.

• You can keep 250000 members in one server. This is more than one akshauhini army from the Mahabharata.
• In one channel, 25000 people can chat simultaneously. The owner of the server can modify accessibility and permissions to keep the chat clean. We will talk more about security later.
• You can create up to 500 channels in a server. The channels can be categorized based on topics. These can also be made private.
• There can be text channels for normal discussion. And there can also be voice channels where people can speak, listen to music, do video calls and also share screens. With these features, Discord is a really useful platform to collaborate with your project team. The video chat and screen sharing features are very similar to Google Meet but the quality of video is a bit better.

• In Discord, you will get a lot of bots to automate tasks and also for entertainment purposes. As an example, the Hydra Bot is to play music, the Lofi Radio can play radio 24×7, the MEE6 bot can welcome new members or assign roles. You can find a lot of useful and verified bots here- https://top.gg

• You can also link your social media like Youtube and Twitch with Discord. When you go live on Youtube or Twitch, your community members will be notified.
• There is Nitro Boost in Discord to add premium and paid features and extended server capacity.

How to use Discord to earn money

Now, let’s talk about different ways to make money from your Discord server.

In Discord, you cannot earn from ad revenue but some of the ways are these:

1. Share an affiliate link in your community– Suppose you are a gamer and you have developed a Discord server. You live stream on Youtube daily and now you have a growing number of people on your Discord server. You regularly interact with your community and now you have become almost a sensation among them. At this point, you can share some affiliate link in the channels and ask the members to use it to buy the product if they are interested. Affiliate links usually give the buyer some extra discounts and you will also get some amount of commission from the sell.
2. Sell a product in your community– Suppose you already have a business where you sell some products. After you build your community, you can market your products in the Discord channels easily.

Another example can be like this; suppose you talk about a particular topic in real life or in social media. And you have also created a follower base on Discord with your effort and valuable knowledge sharing. Now you can create a premium course on your topic and sell it in your Discord server.

You can also sell products like NFTs in your Discord community. Well, you cannot actually ‘Sell’ the NFTs here because this is not an NFT market place, but you can facilitate conversation, create awareness and promote your NFTs in your channels. There is this Indian gaming company named Totality Corp that is developing a mythological game named ‘The Zion Verse’. For this, they have created NFTs on Indian mythological gods namely Laxmi, Ganesha and Saraswati.

They made 5555 such digital arts, turned them into NFTs and facilitated the sell in their Discord server. As per their plan, the NFTs will give the buyers some guaranteed monetary profit after a year when the game launches. Also, the NFTs can be used in the game to earn more from the game (Zionverse). The project might sound complex, but just be aware that, if you have a solid community, you can do such things and value will flow from you and to you.

Abtaran App Store would use its Discord Server for similar purposes like selling the NFTs we create. Though, we cannot actually ‘sell’ them here, we surely promote, facilitate and guide the NFT enthusiasts in our Server and community.

3. Ask for donations from your community in return of giving something– Suppose, you talk about certain topic in social media and gradually built a community on Discord. You can ask for donations (like Patreon) from your community at some point of time in future. The loyal followers will possibly extend their helping hands.

4. Make a Discord bot– Earlier, I gave you an idea about different types of bots on Discord. These can make your life easier and automate tasks. So, now that you know this, you can build a nice bot and let different Discord server use it. You will need some level of programming knowledge but if your bot provides value to the users, you might ask for small periodical (monthly or yearly) donations from the Server owners who want to use your bots. Or, you can also add some premium functions in your bot so that interested server owners can integrate those in their servers.

There were two very popular bots named Groovy and Rhythm, that used Youtube’s API (application programming interface) to play music in the voice channels. But Youtube put some restrictions on them and they had to discontinue after running for 5+ years. But The developers of Groovy have created a new music bot named Hydra, which is like a second version of Groovy but more improved and outside the reach of Youtube’s objections (Hydra Bot).

This Hydra bot has gained 96% satisfaction rate within a few months of publishing. Rhythm developers are also working on a new project and they are requesting for donations from its existing community. Another fact is that, for such projects, you as a developer, may seek and receive funds from investors as well.

How to build a community on Discord?

Being said all these, one thing must be clear to you by now. Everything on Discord depends on how strong your community is. Now you might be thinking, how you can build a community. Let me give you some pointers.

1. You need to have a purpose other than earning money. Create value to others in some manner. Also, create awareness. Use other social media as necessary.
2. Focus on developing the culture in your community. Culture will orient the engagement that is happening in the channels, people’s interest regarding your projects and products, your decisions and plans.
3. You need to focus on your channel members. Communicate with them, solve their queries, facilitate their activities. If one member is supporting you genuinely, empower that member. Humane values are important in this scenario. You have to earn trust of your members. (Another relevant article)
4. Create emotions, create hypes, surprise everyone.
5. Promise things…… then fulfil that promise. Or else you will ruin everything.
6. Give your community members some identity. It can be given through some roles. As an example, if the football team Liverpool opens a Discord server, the members will be probably called ‘Red Devil Fans’ because the team has the nick name of ‘Red Devils’. You have to make sure that your community members take pride in their identity and is not ashamed of it in anyway.
7. To be honest, you might mot be able to build a community if you focus too much on building the community rather than focusing on providing the values. Elon Musk has millions of followers, do you think he asked people to follow him? NO…. it happened in a passive way. He focused on his own work, he made people amazed with his work and people automatically knew him. This is the charisma of word-of-mouth, but behind this, there is hard work and sustainable development. So, focus on doing what you actually do. If you provide value to the people, you will automatically build a community in a sustainable manner. But after you build a community, communicate with them and guide them if you want to earn value from them. Not to mention, keep providing value to them regularly.
8. Feel free to use other social media to bring members in your Discord server. But don’t force anyone. Also, don’t tell false things to gain members. Because people will detect soon and you will lose reputation. Also, remember that in Discord, you are building a community, that is loyal and trusts you. Act accordingly. With a clickbait, you might get more members temporarily, but you won’t earn respect. Also, the followers will not be loyal.

Securing your Discord community- Some tech hacks

When you develop a server, you become responsible for what is happening inside it. Government and legal administrators can perform surveillance inside your server if they become aware of something fishy happening. And if you have a large community, it might be hard for you to track all the engagements happening inside the channels. But you can maintain security in a few ways.

1. Don’t share your user token– Every server will have a user token. This is like a key to your servers. Scammers can lure you by saying that they will give you free Nitro if you share your user token with them. The chance of something bad happening to you after you share your user token with them is almost 150%. In this article, we won’t declare the way to find your user token, because sometimes ignorance is bliss. Just don’t give the user token.
2. Don’t use malicious bots– You should only add verified bots into your server. The bots that have a lot of user count and those are listed in popular websites, are more likely to be secure. Or else, one fine morning you will wake up and see that your discord server is vanished. You will rub your eyes to see if you are hallucinating, but it will be for real. So be aware.
3. IP grabbers– In the channels, people can randomly post links in between texts. These might be scams and clicking on these, might hack your IP. IP is basically your computer/mobile location. If someone knows your address, the person might stalk you or harass you. So don’t click on shady links and also tell your members to stay aware.
4. Safety from predators– In your channel, there will people of all ages. There can be adults as well as children. And there might be people who have ill mentalities. They can harass young members and this is unacceptable in all ways. You cannot know if one person in your community is personally contacting another member. But feel free to create awareness. One way to stay secured is to modify your privacy. Go to ‘Settings’, then ‘Privacy and Safety’ and turn on the ‘Keep me safe’ or ‘My friends are nice’ option. This way, you won’t get random texts from unknown people and you can decide whom to add in your friends list.

5. Keeping your server clean– In your channel, someone might post NSFW contents. This might not be good for your culture and public reputation. So, feel free to restrict permissions for different roles in the channel settings. Also, go to ‘Server Settings’ and ‘Moderation’. Turn on scanning for explicit media like this. This way, Discord will scan the contents and flag all inappropriate contents in your server. Feel free to ban people who commits such acts, because this will be good for your community, reputation and culture.

To end with, Discord is a tool to help you improve your identity. Focus on providing value, stay genuine and things will turn out fine for you.

Abtaran App Store Discord link