Discord is the hottest not so new way to communicate. It’s a cross between old-school messaging boards and social media. It’s the perfect platform for building a community of like-minded people and interacting with them on a more personal level. If you were wondering how to make a Discord server (and how to make it look good!), you’ve come to the right place!
How to Make a Discord Server
Creating a Discord server is actually fairly straightforward. All you have to do is navigate to Discord, open the app, and click the (+) round server icon on the left-hand side. When you hover over it, it will say, “add a server.”
When you click to add a server, a pop-up will appear that gives you the option to create your own server or choose from various templates. The templates already have some channels and categories created for you, while if you opt to create your own, you will have to do all of those from scratch.
Next, you will have to decide whether the server will be public or private.
What is a Public Discord Server?
A public Discord server allows pretty much anyone to join. They still need an invite, but it isn’t exclusive. A public server is known as a community server, and if you turn on the community functions, you will open up a few additional options that will help you with moderation.
A Public discord helps you ensure that the people who are joining are safe and won’t publish inappropriate material. Any user must have a verified email address to join a public server, and you must turn on Discord’s filter, which scans and deletes explicit material.
Making your server public will also automatically create two channels – an announcement channel and a rules channel. When making your server public, you can choose an existing channel for these or have Discord create a new channel.
How Do I Make A Community Discord Server?
If you didn’t choose the community discord option when you first set up your server, you can change it in the settings menu. Navigate to server settings, and then click on “enable community.” This will turn your private discord into a community discord.
How to Make a Discord Server
Now that you’ve decided on a public versus’ private server, you are ready to move onto the last step, which is naming your server and uploading a profile picture.
Finally, you will be prompted to name your server and upload a profile picture for the server.
That’s it! You’ve created your first Discord Server!
How Do I Make a Good Discord Server?
That quick tutorial on how to make a Discord Server will leave you with the bare bones of a server. The hard part is building your server into the awesome community that you want it to be. This includes creating your categories, channels, and roles, integrating your channels, and integrating your bots.
You can start with the basics on these things. As your Discord server grows and develops, you can always adjust your settings, add or subtract channels and roles, and change things to meet any growing needs.
Creating Discord Categories and Channel
First, you should brainstorm your categories. These are groups of channels that serve similar purposes. These will differ depending on what type of server you are building.
For example, I run two discord servers. The first is a streaming community, and the categories in that server are related to streaming and building a stream community. We have a social category with the general chat in it and some channels to help support folks through real-life problems. The server also has a category specifically for streamers – with channels showing when people are live on Twitch and channels for getting help setting up your stream.
My other discord is a blogging community for gaming bloggers. The categories here include things like blog help, which has channels on WordPress, monetization, and SEO help, Collaboration requests which has channels on interview requests, quote requests, and other types of collaborations; and a making friends’ zone for general chats and getting to know each other.
The great thing about Discord is that you customize your channels and categories in any way you see fit. You can have an entire category for memes and channels for animal memes, funny memes, tv memes, or any other type of meme if you want. The possibilities are endless!
Developing User Roles and Permissions
The next thing you will want to think about is your user roles. These are highly customizable as well. Some roles might be just for fun, others might be for paying members, and still others might be for members who are helping out or have a specific area of expertise.
I have tech support roles, social media roles, and creative design roles in my streamer support community. The people with these roles are experts in those fields and always willing to help other users. There are also roles for affiliates vs. non-affiliates and a variety of roles for the people who help moderate and run the discord.
Each of these roles has different permissions. General users can only chat in certain channels and categories. But you can also create private channels that only people with certain roles can chat in. You can let certain roles delete messages and prevent other roles from doing so.
Assigning roles and permissions is a very important task. You need to only give people that you trust permission to manage channels and integrations. It’s best to only give most people the ability to chat, read old messages, and use fun things like emojis and gifs. Only moderators should be able to manage and change things.
Integrating Discord Bots
The best part about Discord is the integrations! There are so many cool Discord bots available that do so many amazing things, from automatically assigning new folks’ roles to integrating your blog’s RSS feed.
There’s a bot for pretty much all of your Discord needs. If you need help determining which bots you should use for your server, check out our beginner’s guide to Discord bots to get started. This guide shows you how to get the bots that automate your moderation, add music, integrate with other platforms, and allow you to play fun games in your Discord.
How Much Does A Discord Server Cost?
One great thing about Discord is that it’s free. You can create and manage a huge Discord server for absolutely no charge. However, they do offer a premium service, called Discord Nitro, that allows you to use emotes from any server anywhere in Discord and allows you to upload larger photos and videos. Additionally, you can pay to boost a server, which will give the server more emoji slots and allow anyone in the server to upload larger files. Neither of these payments is necessary to make a successful server; they are just extra perks.
Boosting a server costs $4.99 per month, and Discord Nitro costs $9.99 a month.
Do Discord Servers Make Money?
Discord is a messaging app. The point of it is to make new friends, collaborate with folks, have video chats, and get to know people on a more personal level. It was not intended as a money-making app.
However, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to make money with Discord. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Some communities charge their members for access, while others offer exclusive access to channels for certain paid roles. Other communities are entirely free.
It’s up to you whether you want to charge for access to your Discord community. However, before doing so, be sure to ask yourself if the value you are providing is worth the cost.
Getting People Into Your Server
In my opinion, the question isn’t how to make a discord server. That part is fairly straightforward. The harder thing to do is to get people into your server. That truly is a challenge.
There are things you can do to get folks in. If you are a content creator, use your platform to invite your fans or your target audience. I’ve grown the Partners in Fire streaming community Discord into a huge success because I invite streamers through my blog.
Word of mouth is also incredibly important. Once it started growing, our members started inviting their friends, and it snowballed into one of the best communities for small streamers available. Tons of people promote it on their streams and on social media because we’ve built an awesome community.
However, if your community is more niche, it will be harder to find people to join. You will have to go to where your audience is, invite them, and give them a good reason to join. That reason is something you will have to figure out, but it should align with your brand.
How to Make a Discord Server
Hopefully, this brief tutorial on how to make a Discord server will help you get started with building your own. Remember, though, that tweaking and growing your server is a never-ending process. As it grows, you may need new channels and new integrations, and that’s okay. It’s fun to learn the new capabilities as you grow!