How to make and sell an NFT

How to make and sell an NFT is something a lot of artists and businesses are exploring as a potential new source of income.

Unfortunately for the less tech-savvy among us, even creating an NFT supporting wallet, not to mention buying, selling and creating NFTs, can seem like a daunting task. Creating and keeping tabs on a collection of 10,000 items might seem impossible, or at the very least require a large amount of resources. Up until recently this was indeed the case. Most artists and other creators looking to create and sell NFT collections would need a team, and at least one experienced programmer, to set up their collection and create a secure page for people to mint their NFTs.

Some online services and tools are making this process a little easier and cheaper, but still do not cover the entire process in a fast, secure and affordable manner. This is why Certhis.io is launching a new platform with easy-to-use tools enabling anybody to create an NFT collection with no prior knowledge. Let’s break down how to create and sell NFTs step by step using the Certhis platform.

Step 1: Create an NFT supporting digital wallet

Your NFT wallet is essentially a cryptocurrency wallet that can also store NFTs. These wallets are installed as an extension on your browser and allow you to connect to websites and conduct transactions. We won’t cover all the types of wallets or how to install them here, but you can use some of the links below to learn how to set up a wallet in a secure manner. 

Step 2: Connect your wallet

Now that you have set up your wallet, you will want to connect it to Certhis.io, using the link in the upper right corner of the page. This will be how you will pay for the gas fees (more on this below) to upload your collection and also where you will receive your cryptocurrency when items in your collection are sold. It’s worth noting that you should only connect your wallet to websites you trust.

Step 3: Create, upload, and mint your NFT

Before we create our first collection, here is an explainer of how to create a single NFT. Press on create, then upload your image, audio file, video file, or any other digital file you own, to Certhis.io, by dragging and dropping to the selected spot. Write a name and description for your NFT, and that’s it, your NFT is ready! Now you have the option of minting your NFT. This means storing your digital item on the blockchain and providing proof of ownership for this digital item. This is how you make a non-fungible token. You can upload your item first and enable a potential purchaser to mint your NFT (set a mint price to do so), or mint the NFT yourself and then sell it at a price of your choice. Anyone who mints or buys an NFT will have to pay a gas fee.

What is a gas fee? A gas fee is essentially a transaction fee. It’s the fee paid to blockchain miners using their computing power to verify transactions. Note that gas fees fluctuate based on the amount of activity on the blockchain of the selected cryptocurrency. When many transactions are happening simultaneously gas fees are higher. 

When you mint your own NFT you are doing so for free! You are only paying the gas fee for the transaction on the blockchain, which is not controlled by Certhis.io. 

Step 4: Create a collection

Now that we learned how to create an NFT, you are probably wondering how to create a collection of say…10,000 items? Do I have to repeat this process 10,000 times, and pay 10,000 gas fees? Absolutely not! 

The process is very similar, only this time, you will first create a collection. Go to the create page and select create collection. Now fill out the details of your collection. Give it a name, a profile photo for the collection, a description of what this collection is, and connect any social media pages your collection has (Most collections have an Instagram, Twitter and Discord at the very least). Your collection has now come to life!

Stage 5: Set royalties.

Now for the more practical part. How do I get paid? First of all you must choose the percentage of royalties for your collection. This will determine how much you will earn on secondary sales of all NFTs in your collection, for life! For instance, if you choose a royalty fee of 5%, everytime someone sells one of your NFTs for 100$, you will receive 5 dollars in royalties. This money will go directly into your account. Write your account address where it says “collection payout sell address”. Use copy-paste to avoid making a mistake. If the collection has several creators, you can list multiple wallets to divide the profits the way you choose. You are now ready to upload your collection to your chosen platform.

Stage 6. Upload collection

You now have a collection, but without any items. In order to add 10,000 items to your collection, Certhis provides a bulk upload functionality. Instead of uploading items one by one by dragging them to the drag and drop location, simply place all the items you wish to upload in one folder. So if you have a collection of 10,000 images (jpeg file), drop them all into a folder. Now drag your folder and drop it into the ‘drag and drop’ location, and voila! You have uploaded all items in the folder in one easy action! In this case 10,000 images. This should not take more than a few minutes. 

Stage 7: Choose your platform. 

When you upload your collection, you must choose a platform you wish to display them on. Many businesses and artists have high-quality websites where they sell items online. If you have such a website, you can now sell or allow customers to mint NFTs from your collection, directly from your website! This feature is ahead of the curve, as most websites still only sell their NFTs via a link to a third party marketplace, such as OpenSea. This feature prevents that process. Certhis.io add-ons also enable you to publish your collection on popular sales sites like Shopify and other platforms. An in-depth continuation article about this amazing feature will be published shortly. For now, suffice to say that Certhis provides the opportunity to publish your collection on your chosen platform. If someone does not have a website, this is not a problem either. Certhis provides users with their own collection page, custom-designed, using the Certhis platform! So every creator can give their collection the home it deserves.

Stage 8: Open Mint

You have uploaded your collection to your chosen platform. Now you want to enable customers to mint NFTs from your collection. You can choose to make the mint public, in which case anyone visiting the site can mint, on a first come first serve basis. Or you can pre-approve certain wallets or token holders. Certhis helps perform this function. In this way you are ‘saving’ your mint for specific people. Usually these are people involved in your community or who helped promote the collection in some way. In the NFT world this is called a whitelist. This function is valuable if you expect there to be more demand than supply for your collection. You also will set the mint price, this is how much a customer must pay you for the right to mint their NFT. The minter also pays the gas fee. So you receive the minting price directly to your wallet, minus a 5% minting fee collected by Certhis. Once an NFT in your collection is minted, from now on for any future sales you will receive the royalty fee you designated when creating the collection. For life!

It should be noted that this option involved uploading and displaying a collection, and allowing buyers to mint the items. You also have the option of minting the items yourself, and then selling the NFTs. In this case you will have to pay the gas fee for minting. It’s up to you how to sell NFT items.

Stage 9: Share your collection!

You have created your collection (all items minted, none minted, or some minted). You now want to share this collection with the world. Once again Certhis will get this done for you, by supporting three different options.
The first is to use Certhis integration tools, enabling you to publish your collection on your own website. This is a great option for creators and businesses that already have an active website, and wish to add NFTs alongside other products they are selling.
A second option is to use modules provided by Certhis, enabling you to publish your NFTs on another sales platform, such as Shopify. These modules also work with web creation tools such as wix and wordpress.
A third option is to build your own custom page on Certhis. This is a great option for creators who don’t have an active website on any other platform and want to get started quickly, without compromising on quality. 

Bonus: Create another collection, under the same brand!

If you are a serious business or artist, you probably won’t be satisfied with one collection. You probably want multiple collections. Certhis offers creators the chance to create a label. This is your business platform on Certhis, and all subsequent collections will be published under your label, with a different royalty structure for each collection. This will enable businesses to create as many collections as they wish, all under their brand name. Collaborating with different artists and creators, and setting different royalty fees for each collection. If your brand name is strong enough, you can even have other artists do all the leg work and publish a collection under your label, profiting from the exposure you provide, while you profit by taking a cut from their collection, based on your label tax. More details on building a successful label with Certhis and why it is the best platform for businesses looking to enter the world of NFTs will be presented in future articles. This is yet another way Certhis is pioneering NFT technology to suit ambitious businesses and artists, by making the process fast and simple, with no prior knowledge required. With advanced features other platforms simply don’t have.

Most NFT websites out there are either marketplaces for buying and selling NFTs, or websites offering you a service to create a collection, but without providing a platform for sales. The collection then has to be displayed on a third-party marketplace. Certhis solves this debacle by providing both of these services, an all in one solution for creating, minting, publishing and selling your collection, or multiple collections for that matter, on your own website. Certhis makes sure to be ahead of the curve when it comes to NFTs and so should you. 

Q&A

How to make NFTs?

The main element in creating an NFT is the process of storing your digital item on the blockchain of a certain cryptocurrency (Ethereum is currently the most popular), providing a certificate of authenticity and proof of ownership. This stage is called minting. Before minting you must actually create your digital item, whether it be an image, audio or video file, while most NFTs also have a description of what the item is. But at this point the item is still a fungible token, meaning you can duplicate it and the copied version will be exactly the same. The minting process is how to make non-fungible tokens, transforming a digital file into a unique digital asset with a verified owner.

How to sell non-fungible tokens from a collection?

The best way to sell your collection is to publish it on a platform, from which users can either mint items from your collection, or buy them after they are minted. Most large collections use a smart contract to verify ownership for their entire collection, rather than doing so one by one. This enables you to publish your collection uminted, and then charge customers with a minting fee. Certhis enables you to publish your collection on your own website and allows customers to mint directly from there. 

Should I mint my own collection?

This is possible. Most collection creators prefer to publish their collection somewhere and enable customers to mint the items, rather than minting themselves and then selling. But it’s up to you how to sell NFTs.