So you’ve just bought yourself a server, logged in, built your spawn and added some basic plugins. Now you want to start getting some players on.


The common tactic at this point is to post in PMC chat and the forums, and perhaps some other forums as well. You list the plugins, perhaps give a backstory, and then share your IP and a website if you have one.


For a brand new server without a player-base or any votes on the PMC list, this is all you can really do to get started.

When I published my first article on my blog, I got a lot of emails from server owners who wanted to ‘hire’ me to be their community manager or social media manager. In 3 out of the 8 people that contacted me, 1 had just started building the server, and the other 2 had only launched the day before – they assumed that they needed a full marketing team to get initial players on the server, but that’s not true at all. Posting on PMC chat and the forums is exactly what you need to be doing when you first launch – you’ve just got to make sure you do it properly.


Here are the things you shouldn’t do when you launch:


1 Don’t immediately start recruiting Admins or Mods – you don’t need them yet.

Recruiting in PMC chat or in the forums for a server that literally just started is completely unnecessary, unless you somehow managed to get 30 players on your server in the first 10 minutes (which is incredibly unlikely, let’s be honest!). If you go on PMC chat, you’ll see kids offering staff positions to the first people that come on to the server, which is just idiotic. If you want to build a strong player-base, you should be on that server as much as possible in the week after the launch, getting to know players that come onto your server.

Once you start getting around 5 regular players at any one time (probably after a week or two, maybe three), you can pick an Admin from those regular players. By this point, they want to help because they care about the server, not because they’re power-hungry 13 year olds.

Begging people to join the server with promises of power is a bad idea – don’t do it.


2 Don’t post poorly written threads/adverts in the forums – it makes you look immature and unprofessional.

The ideal target market for your server is the mature players. This is because the mature players are the ones that’ll stick around, and quite frankly, are the ones that will be able to donate in the future. Now this may sound like you should only care about the money, but in the long run, how else do you expect to expand and maintain your server?

If your forum adverts are messy and grammatically poor, the mature players probably won’t read past the first few sentences, because they’ll see you as an amateur who may not necessarily know what he/she is doing. You’ve got 5 seconds to capture their attention, and if it reads badly, you’ve lost them. If spelling and grammar isn’t your strong point or English isn’t your first language, get a few people to proof-read it before you post it.

You may know that I’m an online marketer by profession, working with businesses to kick-start their web presence and social media strategies. My company offers web development, and it’s usual for clients to send us the written content that they want on their websites. You’d be surprised how often we get poorly written copy that looks like a chimpanzee had bashed the keyboard a few times. We usually end up re-writing it.


3 Don’t even think about donations

At least, not for a month or so. People will still be settling in to the server, and won’t necessarily want to part with their hard-earned cash for a server that’s only just started. There’s a high failure rate with Minecraft servers (some actual research on this topic will be starting soon, subscribe to the blog to get involved), and everyone knows it, so they don’t want to give $5 for some extra privileges, only to find that the server has been shut down with no explanation the following week. I talk a bit more about donations in my previous article, Server Donations: An Introduction to Donor Relationship Management.


4 Don’t neglect the forums – get out there and get involved in conversations

This may not sound particularly important, but it’s absolutely necessary. If you’re starting your own server, how do you expect people to take you seriously if you’ve never even posted in the forums? If your post count is zero, you should be getting involved in conversations on the forums, in as many board as possible.

Also, make sure you add an actual avatar to your forum and PMC Chat profiles, because you’ll look more invested and interested in Minecraft if you have an avatar. It could be as simple as taking a screenshot of your player in-game and cropping it, so that it looks like my one at the bottom of my post. Then, ensure that you use the same avatar across every community, in all chats and on your own website and forums, when you decide to take the next step (more on that later).


That’s all for now. If you feel that I missed something, let me know in the comments section below and I’ll add them to the list.

You can find similar posts here on my PMC profile, or on my Minecraft Marketing blog.