Post by Dancing Puffball on Dec 27, 2019 5:04:31 GMT
A one stop guide on how to grow your advertising server
Advertising servers are a growing phenomenon on Discord. 2 years ago, there were few. Now, there are quite literally hundreds. However, most advertising servers are lead by people who only use the bare minimum of tools are their disposal to grow fast. To grow an advertising server, you will for the most part want to advertise the same way you would a regular server. However, certain platforms and services work better for advertising servers than social servers, yet at the same time, some platforms work better for social servers. For example, Reddit and Discord.me may favor social servers, especially Reddit - while other advertising servers and bump bots seem to do well for advertising servers due to the greater amount of advertisers as recipients. In this article, I will go through several different platforms and give certain brief instructions on how to grow your advertising server. Do keep in mind that much of this applies for any type of server. Please make sure to set a reasonable goal for yourself, because the larger your server gets, the more difficult it becomes to grow bigger. My server (Discord Growth Portal) grew to 7000 members in slightly over 5 months, and I am sharing most of what I've done to grow at that speed.
1) Server Listing Websites
Server listing websites are paramount to growth, however some are much more effective than others. DISBOARD takes the lead for DGP, currently earning us a total of 7654 joins. DISBOARD earns over 3 million hits per month and has increased in traffic by over a million since June of 2019. In order to make the most out of DISBOARD you must use good tags and you must bump every 2 hours. Good tags are tags that are likely to be searched in DISBOARD's search bar, especially tags which would lead to high click rates for your server. The tags that have helped me the most are 'Advertise', 'Advertising', 'Emotes', 'Social Media', and 'Self Promotion', but please don't just copy all 5 of my tags. Play around with your own and find what works best for you.
Other websites you can use alongside DISBOARD are top.gg/servers, Discordsl.com, Discordservers.me, Discord.me, Discordbee.com, Discordservers.com, and more. For top.gg, make sure your server's short description includes many keywords, such as "advertising", "advertise", and more, because words typed in short descriptions will act as secret search tags so it is important to be cunning here. With Discord.me and Discordservers.me both require payment to be effective. Discord.me is more expensive, and also requires manual bumping, but will typically result in at least twice as many members joining from it. However, Discordservers.me is much cheaper and doesn't require any bumping, making it a viable alternative to the more costly and strenuous Discord.me. DiscordSL can be manually bumped every 3 hours, but autobump can be purchased for $10 per month.
2) Server Listing Servers
Server listing servers work very well to promote advertising servers. Some good examples of advertising servers you can use to advertise your own advertising server are AYS, SPC, EMPIRE, DGP, Open Advertisements, Hydronix Advertising, and many more. If you are really serious about getting your server out to as many people as possible, you will join as many decent servers as you can find and advertise as often as you can. Advertising servers are DGP's second largest source of growth, behind DISBOARD. Click here for a list of my most used servers for advertising.
3) Server Alliances
One thing unique to advertising servers are the abundance of alliances that exist within the advertising server community. Alliances are like super partnerships. They work similar to a network, in that all parties involved must add all other servers involved in to their own alliance channels. The most of them all is the Advertisers Alliance formed by Sc0rpi0n of SPC. As of today, DGP has gained 351 members from this alliance, and that is not counting any servers involved that may have used a different invite link to promote us within it. This is a huge number of people coming from just one source alone, and without having to do any work or even pay a dime. There's also the United Servers alliance formed by Looat of Open Advertisements, the EMPIRE alliance formed by EMPIRE's Blitz, the affiliate alliance and promo circuits formed by Purin of DGP, and more.
4) Partnerships
When I first started my server, I underestimated partnerships. I always felt it was an overrated way to grow, because of how quickly and easily ads get buried within partner channels. However, when you are running an advertising server, there is a pretty decent chance that the partner manager of the server you're partnering with will join your server to advertise. Due to the fact that partner managers will often join your server after partnering with you, partnerships become much more effective. As a result, hiring Partner Managers to compete among each other with a points based rep system could help you grow your server much faster. You can also consider rewarding your PMs for their hard work, if you are able to do so in any way, this way a Partner Manager will be more likely to work harder for you. You can also try requesting rep4rep or ping4ping partnerships as additional options.
5) Bump Bots
Bump Bots can help boost your join rate, especially premium (paid) bump bots. While they are not as effective as websites like DISBOARD, premium bump bots with autobump enabled can work behind the scenes to help bring members to your server at a gradual rate. Bump Central, Open Advertisements, and DSC are all bump bots you could invest in if you have some money to throw around. However, bump bots are not perfect and some may temporarily stop posting your ads or even go offline. Because of this, it is a good idea to check on your bump bots every couple of days to make sure they're all working properly. You can check this by heading to servers running the bot, and searching for your server with the from:user being the bot. If for any reason the bot is in fact not functioning properly, notify the bot dev immediately.
6) Paid Promotions
Many servers offer paid promotions, either through the form of 'here' or 'everyone' pings, or through the form of nitro drops. I personally believe that paid 'everyone' and 'here' pings are almost never worth the expensive fees most servers charge. However, nitro drops are a lot more effective. Paid nitro drops are a relatively kept under the rug strategy that many of the largest advertising servers may occasionally use to help boost their member count. These usually range from $15 up to even $150 or more, depending on the server, and the package. In general, you will want to see around 100 joins for $15 from a good seller. However, with nitro drops, you have to be careful who you buy from, because there are many shady sellers on Discord who are very hungry for your money. It is important that if you consider buying a nitro drop, you do your research and buy from a trusty seller to avoid getting scammed out of large sums of money. Also, the main drawback in doing nitro drops is that some members are guaranteed to leave once the nitro event is finished.
7) External Outreach
Finally, another unique method of getting your server out there is through external outreach, such as blogs. Writing a professionally written blog about Discord server advertising and posting it on a popular website that drives good traffic can help get your server out there. You can also try asking the writer of a blog to add your server to his or her blog post. You can also promote your server on most forms of social media. Be careful with certain websites however, as some have flag detection systems that can prevent you from sharing your link.
8) Join4Join
By far the quickest free way to gain members is via Join4Join. Join4Join is similar to partnering, except instead of sending ads that have to be posted in channels, you just join each other's server and call it a day. There are many servers dedicated to this form of advertisement, many of which can be found here.
By joining and posting in large quantities of these servers and DMing people looking to j4j, you can gain substantial amounts of members, easily over a hundred if you're dedicated enough, in under a day. These servers are so effective that tons of them are active. However due to the shady nature of j4j, it is a practice that's certainly not for everybody. Very few of the people you engage in these practices with have any intent on ever using your server, certainly fewer than those who join as reps.
Many if not most are involved in this practice for invite rewards. These servers are also plagued with bot accounts that spam you in DM, and some users sneakily leave your server afterward. Think about what your reason is for wanting to gain these quick members. Is it to gain perks of listing websites or advertising servers? Is it for invite rewards? Because while these servers are tremendously effective, the members who join are rarely going to be of high quality for your server.
Non-Advertising Related Tips
Here are some tips that will make your server appeal more to your audience. Be active, and make sure your staff is active. Active staff is extremely important to your server for many reasons. For one, active staff help keep the server safe from raids and can punish poorly behaved members. Active staff members also help to circulate activity and handle member's questions. Active staff can also help you bump your server, and provide server assistance for members. Another great thing to have in your server is a level 1 or 2 nitro boost, because these allow you to add more emoji slots to your server. Many people fail to realize how important emojis can be to a server, and especially to Nitro users. Add as many unique and likable emojis as you can to make your server more interesting. Finally, another way to make your server stand out is to have an aesthetic theme. Choose a nice layout to make your server look fun and interesting. Some server layouts can be cute or pretty, casual and cool, or professional and business-like. It's all up to you how you'd like your server to look.
