As easy as assembling IKEA furniture: how to create a Telegram channel

Telegram is becoming more and more popular worldwide. Its audience reaches more than 200 million users from all over the world. The best thing about this messenger is that it does not have usual annoying advertisements (thanks to the official policy of the messenger) so people use it with more pleasure. One more advantage is that when you own a channel in Telegram only your target audience will read you and they will be interested in what you say and will trust your opinion. But first, you need to create the channel.

First steps of creating a channel in Telegram

So first and the most important thing before creating a channel/blog/ profile/community on any platform whether it is a content website, YouTube, Telegram or any else — is to define the topic and content of your channel. Of course, nowadays there are channels almost of any topic, but you still have a chance to create something unique and interesting.

Just in case check existing channels (it is an unofficial source). Maybe somebody else has already created the channel on the topic you want, so you can think about some other interesting and exciting subject that will attract people so that you will not need to compete with developed and popular channels.

Having made up your mind on the topic, it is time to create the channel. Unfortunately, as for now you cannot do it in the desktop version, so take your beloved smartphone and let’s get it started. Firstly you should choose to create “New channel”, after that Telegram will suggest you to choose Channel name, to set Channel Photo and to provide an optional description. Let’s take a channel with gadget sales as an example

Then you need to choose if you want your channel to be public or private. The difference between them is that public channels are displayed in search and any user can join them but private ones can be joined only through the special link. Here you should also indicate the channel address, in our case it is @bestgadgetprices

Congratulations! Now you have your own channel. So let’s create your first post.

Bots and channel management

Alright, now we need to use a bot which will manage our channel. Seems kinda complicated, doesn’t it? But as a matter of fact we need a bot because currently it is impossible to create a post in Telegram channel which includes an image, text, URL button and reaction – all at once.

In order to make a new friend – the bot, you need to find this guy in the search  — @ControllerBot. It will be your loyal assistant in managing your channel. Send him the command /start. It will introduce itself a little and will let you know what it can, after that it will offer you to add your channel. Send a command /add.

Now ControllerBot will offer you to choose your personal bot which will help you to manage your channel. If you don’t have a bot yet, don’t worry, let’s use one more free bot to create it. Let us introduce you to — @BotFather.

Send it the command /start and read through all the opportunities that BotFather can provide. Now we want to create a new bot so send the command /newbot.

BotFather will help you to create the new bot. Choose the name for your new bot and choose its username. We decided to give it a name — Best_bot.

Now you have your own bot which will complete your tasks. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

In the end BotFather will give you the token to access HTTP API of your bot, it will look like a long set of letters and figures.

Copy it, go back to ControllerBot and send the token to him as a reply.

After that make your bot the Admin of your channel (no worries, the bot will not steal your channel as it obeys three laws of robotics). That’s how you can do it: click channel info —> click “Admins” —> click “Add Admin”. Type your bot’s name into the search and assign it an Admin.

Congratulations, from now on you have your loyal assistant and two followers of your channel (you and your bot). Alright final preparations to start posting: come back to ControllerBot and forward it any message from your channel or send it the username of your channel and your time zone.

Good job! Now we are ready.

Time to make a post

In order to make the post, open the chat with you bot, choose the necessary channel (if you have several) and send the text of the post.

We have decided to make a channel dedicated to gadget sales. So let’s make a post about some sports watch with a discount. Let it be Garmin Fenix 5:

Having received your text, the bot will offer you to add an image, reactions and URL button to the post. As soon as you have added all necessary information to your post, click “Send” and make a post.

You can postpone your post for any period you want by pressing “Enqueue” after choosing to send it. Such posts will be sent automatically at the indicated time.

After sending the post, it will appear in our channel with all elements which we have added.

Channel promotion, attracting subscribers

There are several ways to attract new subscribers:

There are two possible ways:

The first way is pretty clear and well-known but not many people and channel owners know how to use the second one. Let’s look in details at how to earn through this model.

CPA (Cost Per Action) — is the model of online advertising payment when an advertiser pays a publisher for some required action performed by a user attracted by the publisher. There are many types of actions: service payment, purchase of some product, application installation or registration in some online game and many others.

In simple terms, you will get share or a fixed sum if a user purchased some goods through your affiliate link. To find out more about how this model works, please check our article “Affiliate network for beginners: what it is and how to make money through it”.

To start earning you need to sign up for the affiliate network Admitad. In the network you can find many affiliate programs of different segments (travel, finance, e-commerce, games, mobile apps and so on) you can find the whole list in the section “All programs”.

Choose the programs which are relevant to your channel topic. For example, in our case with gadgets we can choose GearBest.com program. If you have a channel dedicated to travel topic, you can post affiliate links for hotel booking or flight tickets. You can make thousands of creative posts which will help you to earn.

Conclusion

Of course, Telegram is not so well developed as Facebook now. There are no possibilities to search easily channels, recommendations or other tools which other popular social networks include. But we should remember that Telegram is a messenger with advanced functionality, not the demo version of a social network. Telegram keeps developing extremely fast and it will soon become a very attractive platform for advertisers. Many publishers are already earning through Telegram channels using CPA model. So maybe it is your turn to start earning too.