Validation Journey for a Discord Bot

I made a discord game bot (Minute Mystery) which is an interactive multiplayer puzzle game.

With a month of validation/marketing, my bot has been invited to 100+ servers and got verified recently. With the current status, I don't think such bot can be profitable. But I would like to share my marketing moves tried in this journey. Hope it can help others if they also work on a discord bot project in the future.

I would like to get more comments and suggestions on how you will run marketing for/validate discord bot or bot from other platforms.

1. Launch:

Discord bot has many launch websites, you can find a list here.

In my opinion, the current most famous discord bot board is top.gg.
I have launched my bot in all the available boards, I didn't get much users from these though. Most likely because it just disappeared after the lunch. Most of boards support vote system. You can get more organic traffic if you get more votes.

Top.gg also offers advertisement auctions. Once you register your bot on top.gg, you can bid on an advertisement for your bot on different page slot. To validate your bot, I will recommend to just run advertisement on specific slot. For me, I mainly run ads on Social slot and Fun slot. I normally win the bid at a price $1.5-$2.5 per 1000 impressions. For my bot, I spent 30 dollars and got 17k impressions and 550 clicks from its ad. Around 70-80 servers came from these ads.

Since votes can improve ranking on the boards and increase organic traffic, it is recommended to add vote link into your bot command. (Like footer of the response embedding) or use vote to give user premium feature of your bot. Both will make the user more likely to vote the bot.

2. Build a support server and advertise the support server:

There are many types of advertisement services available for discord servers(free/paid). Thus we can use that to market.

Use xenon to find a template to create an initial support server and adjust it based on your need.
You can find lots of public advertisement server, put your server ad at their promotion channel. (You can start with [55k] Self Promotion Central & Nitro Giveaways!. You can find more within its server.)
You can also find many advertisement bot (like shareme, bumpit), invite the bot and set your server description to the bots.
If you don't have to time to manage the server. You can also find volunteer or paid staff to manage your server. You can also hire server chatter from Fiverr and teach them to guide people to use your bot.

3. Discord Marketing

Search for topic related servers, either from discord community explore or on 3rd-party server board (like top. gg).
Search for growing servers. When you run ad for your support servers, you will also see many other servers who are using the same ad method. These servers are growing and more willing to try new stuff based on suggestions.
Join the servers found in 1 and 2. Follow their rules. You can either promote your bot in some specific promotion channel or directly DM to the admin team.

4. Reddit Marketing

Not much to say, just normal marketing for topic related subreddit.

5. Email Marketing

In my opinion, many discord users are also the followers of some YouTuber or some twitch streamer. Thus, you can find your topic related influencer on this two platform and contact them for possible cooperation or simply ask them to try your bot and make videos if they like it. In my experience, I got one YouTuber to create a video of playing the bot for on the first week.