[Hinch]

Just enjoy a free guide (Was a guide i gave away to hosting customers but why not just give it away completly)



Minecraft Explosion:
How to start and run a more than successful server + how to monetize it.


First of all we need to answer the age old question. Do you have what it takes? If you bought this book on how to just make a server and not make money that’s good but it will get you No Where. If you bought this for how to make money I promise you’re in luck.

The first thing you should remember is you’re not making the server for you to have fun but for others. You may be interested in gay but sex but unless all players on minecraft like that it’s not going to benefit you. There are multiple tasks to do, bring in players then making them donators.

First of all lets analysis the competition. We see that hundreds of thousands of servers are created a day but it seems that 99% of them don’t succeed. The reason behind this is they are targeted towards the owner’s entertainment. They have nothing that identifies them from the others. They constantly change and don’t stick to one thing.

We now need to first decide on what to do on our server. There are many things that go wrong at this stage. We have analyzed others servers and we can use that to decide what’s best for us.
Who are you trying to target?
Is your concept unique?
Is what you’re trying to do saturated?
Is what you are doing too complicated for your skill level?
Are you able to fund your concept?
Do you enjoy your own concept?
Will your players enjoy it and will they be able to fund it or get their parents to fund it?


Now we need to get started. So what’s the first thing we need? Hosting of course.

Ok so choose your package. If you play on running let’s say a prison server I would personally use the coal package. For our niche we are going to use the example of a prison server.

Now we need to choose plugins that are suitable to us not just fancy features.
So before you install any plugins you need to make sure that you need the plugin, if you don’t need it would the plugin benefit your concept? Are your players going to enjoy using the plugin? Is the plugin simplistic? Does your server have a demand for this?

Now we will need to organize our staff. You may ask why not do this whilst we get players but that is a bad choice as you cannot just simply trust what people say. If you are not experienced with coding it is always a good idea to hire someone that is. At the end of the day it is not 100% a must it will benefit but it’s not important.


The next thing you do is create a website. The first thing we will have to do is try to get a domain closest to our server name. Eg my server name might be CerealPrison if that’s your name I would recommend you get the domain www.CerealPrison.com or www.CerealPrison.net The more Catchy the name the better for you. Having a domain like CerealOpPrisonIsReallyGood.com is not a good name. A good place to get your domain is https://www.namecheap.com/ just from the name you can tell its cheap. If your not experienced within web development I suggest for your website use a enjin forum this will benefit you in the future when it comes to donations. www.enjin.com/
There are many things that we need to put on the site here is a list
About (Explain what makes your server unique and what your content is)
Server Rules
Forum (Make sure you actually use the forum)
Social (Make sure to create social media for all your servers)
Gallery (Include Screenshots of your server buildings etc)
If you use TeamSpeak add the TeamSpeak module
Voting (Add a voting page)
Staff List

We will develop on our staff now. There is just one tip I will give you. Don’t just recruit the first member who joins your server. The best place to find staff is from loyal players. I used to run a server and I would recruit staff from the most active players both on site and on the TeamSpeak server. Make sure with your staff you choose staff who are grammatically correct and have an attitude of no conflict. If you are just starting off feel free to use friends as staff.
If you feel that you do not have the skills to do any of the things I mention there are others who will be able to help for free or even for $1
Now the next thing we have to do is make graphics I can’t really help you with that but you will need a minecraft server Icon and banner.

We now need to focus on our community. We need to get as many people to come on the server and eventually you will see a spike of players. We have to aim to make our players invite their friends, advertise out server and donate.
There are many ways to build a large community
Create a forum: (You can use enjin)
Social Media (Constantly be active you can even use memes to make more people aware of your server)
Community events (Do some sort of challenge where players compete in a chance to win $50 worth of donator items.
We now need to promote our server. An easy way to do this is using a voting system. You should install votifier and a listener to automatically reward players for voting.
You will need to make accounts on may voting sites I will list a few below.

http://www.gametracker.com/search/minecraft/US/
http://www.planetminecraft.com/
http://www.serverlistminecraft.com/
http://servers.minecraftforum.net/servers
http://minecraftservers.net/
http://minecraftservers.org/
http://mc-server-list.org/
http://serverlist.us/
http://www.minecraftserverland.com/
http://mcservertracker.com/
http://minecraft-mp.com/
http://mineservers.com/
http://www.minepick.com/
http://www.planetminecraft.com/

There are more you can do the more you have the better. Just posting your server on these sites will get you players I managed to get 50 players on day one just from posting on all those sites, not only that some of these sites have forums so you might as well make use of it.

Another place to advertise is YOUTUBE. You can even make money of this. Make a new YouTube channel and partner up with www.UpriseNetwork.net and a great way to get views is using tags. Ok so what you are going to do is start a let’s play series on the server, if not that record your community competitions.
We have already covered social media so I will not repeat myself.
(A note for Facebook is to make a page not a group, post something funny to get popularity. You can also use tags in post such as #Server #Minecraft)
You can use things like instagram to gain popularity. What you can do is take photos of server builds and use tags that relate to your server.
We need to get our website on google so head over to https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&...8883,d.d24 and add your site it will be manually checked then added to google. To increase ranking include your site in all your social media.

We can use backlinks to get our server ranked but this is risky as google may remove your site of the biggest search engines. A great way to get legit bank links is through social media, gaming forums, server lists.

Now we got that all setup we need to make sure when people join they stay. The best way to do this is create an amazing first impression. The best way to do this is have an amazing spawn. Have nice builds near spawn and don’t have destroyed landscape. Make spawning easier. Make sure you have respectful staff.

[Kenzo Paris]

Great Tutorial! Should help some people who are starting a new server !

[BananaTime]

excellent tutorial for one of my fav game :)

[miserego]

Great tutorial, brother. Thank you :)

[Silent Storm™]

Very detailed tutorial Hinch, read some of it and it's definitely helpful.

[MysticParadox]

Cute tutorial.
Pretty good.
I like it.

[joyboru]

Thanks for sharing the advice very helpful :)

[Vaxorr]

Great tutorial brotha.
Keep up the good work.

[SuppeKonge]

Thank you for making this thread!

[Solid Cloud]

Not bad, I'd love to see you expand on some of the key points.

[Hinch]

ing this so more can see its just that people are still asking questions