How to lead and promote the channel in Telegram - the complete guide

Hey. One of the trends in social marketing of the last year is the channels in Telegram. It is believed that this messenger is now the best audience, high involvement and the most expensive advertising. I run one of the fastest growing and most successful channels in Telegram and will be happy to share my promotion experience.

Promotion in social networks is not my specialty, and I certainly do not consider myself an expert. However, the growth case of the t.me/za_bugrom channel from zero to 7000 subscribers per month (if someone is not in the subject: this is a large channel by the standards of Telegram) interested a lot of people.
Since there is so much interest, in this article I will once describe my vision of the process, which is just my opinion and may have no connection with reality. I will share all my experiences, from beginning to end, without understatement. For this reason, the article is large. TL; DR.

About my channel.
I have a channel about life in the United States, in which I talk about the culture and life of Americans, the intricacies of life in immigration, and also share tips on the actual use of English. The first post was released on March 1, 2017, but I began to invite people to the channel only on March 15 - from that day I consider progress.

Monthly growth channel

So, on March 15, I had about zero readers, and on April 20 - about 7,000. This is not a stunning, but very good growth, the components of which I will describe in detail below.

Do not read this article.
I will save your time. You should not start your channel and read this article if you:

Can not write well;
Do not know what to write about and are not an expert in anything;
Do not have a budget for the development of the channel;
Do not have a specific goal of creating a channel.

I will teach you.
If these points do not apply to you, then starting a channel in Telegram is a great idea, because there is still very low competition and there is an opportunity to quickly gain a high-quality audience. All channels in the Telegram can be divided into excellent and sucks, and the latter - the vast majority. There is nothing in the middle, so remember: your channel is either great or sucks. The goal is to make a great one. It's simple.

To make such a channel, you need to solve exactly four problems: goal, product, content and promotion. Below I will describe in detail and in order about each of these problems. They are all equally important.

Content:

I. Purpose

Earnings on advertising
Channel for your projects
Graphomancy and ego

Ii. Product

What is a product?
Name and avatar
Community

Iii. Content

Author's style
Post content
Uniqueness of content
Utility
Virality
Reactions

Iv. Promotion

Budget and Opportunities
Primary content filling
Spread among friends
Outdoor advertising
Advertise on other channels
Mutual PR

I. Purpose

The first thing you need to decide - why are you doing the channel.

1. Earnings on advertising.
If your main goal is to “earn” advertising on other channels, your channel is likely to suck. Everything is simple here: only a schoolchild can consider such a real income, and an average schoolchild is unlikely to be able to make a cool channel (forgive me, students).

For this reason, on @za_bugrom , despite the dozens of offers that come in constantly, there is no advertising of other channels: I’m not interested in pennies, and the channel’s reputation is crucial.

A typical author plans to monetize his channel.

The mathematics is as follows: the channels now sell ads at a price of 50 kopecks. for the subscriber and below. For example, if you have 10 thousand subscribers (and this is a very large channel), advertising will cost you about 5 thousand rubles for one post. Even if you literally feed your readers with advertising and release 10 orders per month, this generates income of less than a thousand dollars. Business, frankly, controversial, if only you do not have a grid of 10-20 such channels. But it is unlikely.

By the way, advertising in Telegraf is now overheated: large channels sometimes put up completely inadequate taxes, and over time, under the influence of economic forces, the market will move to a more efficient state, and advertising prices will decline.

The audience in Telegram will be diluted less interesting, the quality of the content will also fall. In general, come while it is still hot.

2. Creating a channel for your own projects.
This is a more noble goal to run. For example, you are the owner of a business and will be able to competently conduct marketing of your own projects on the channel that you are leading. Why not? Telegraph audience is very active, people follow links, commit actions, subscriptions, purchases.

It seemed to you that they run their channels just like that, but in fact monetization has been planned for a long time.

Now the Russian-speaking Telegram is populated with respect to a solvent audience, and you can easily find your customers here. Unless, of course, you lead a really interesting channel and you have something to offer your readers. A channel for such a purpose can take off.

3. Creating a channel to satisfy graphomania / ego.
This is the most non-commercial option, but it will most likely lead to better results on the growth and involvement of the audience. It is suitable for those who have a lot of time, free money and even more desire and opportunity to write well about something. Not suitable for those whose favorite query in Google is “making money on the Internet”.

Determine the purpose? We turn to the other three problems.

Ii. Product

What is a product.
Your channel has at least some chance of success only if you approach its creation as a product with a full range of marketing. Good channels are not made on the principle “x% # to x #% to and in production” - only mediocre channels are born this way.

You must clearly understand what your basic idea of a channel is, why it is interesting and useful, who its reader is. The channel is not only the posts that you write there. This is aesthetics, rhythm, design, community, your style and much more. All this should be properly packaged and presented as a finished product.

2. Name and avatar.
I will give a simple example - without self-admiration, but the easiest way is to show on yourself than to look for examples somewhere else. Telegrame has a huge number of travel channels, and all of them are called approximately the same: “World of Travels”, “Our Planet”, “Wonderful World”, “Countries of the World”. Sorry if I mentioned someone's channel now: I just invented these names in 3 seconds, and therefore they are so banal and bad.

In addition, all such channels will have a similar avatar - either a palm tree and a sun, or a flag of a certain country, or a photograph of an airplane. In general, a stamp, a stamp, a stamp-memory. No one will remember you, everyone will pass by. Beggars will sign up to aesthetics, but are you looking for such an audience? No, not like that. You are looking for people with good taste, because you have a cool channel.

I stand in this long list of travel channels along with everyone, but the name “Beyond the Hill” is easily remembered, and the avatar of the channel immediately corresponds to this name and can even cause a smile:

Name and avatar work as one

Yes, it seems that this is not important at all, but I selected the avatar of the channel for several days and from 15 different options. I even did some testing on my acquaintances before launching and found out that this picture is immediately remembered and is always visible in the list of dialogs.

Make the product.

3. Community.
Keep your own ego away: the channel is not only you, but all of its readers. They constitute the value of the channel. The community must be active, involved and targeted.
How to create it? First, it is necessary to unite people around a common problem or interest. Your content should be directed to one specific audience, and not at all a bit at a time: do not try to write about cars, art and give business advice along the way.

Secondly, add interactive. For example, reactions to posts (using the Controller Bot), reposts, links to a public chat channel, where readers can communicate with each other on common topics.

There are large, but completely dead channels in the Telegram, and there are small (1-5 thousand), but very active ones: they are full of life. More information about assessing the quality of the channel and its community will be written in the "Promotion" section.

Iii. Content

1. Author's style.
You can write as illiterate as you like, but if you have your own recognizable style, you have chances. The narrative in the Telegraph should easily and pleasantly enter the ears and eyes of readers, otherwise who will read you? Only your friends, and this is not the largest audience on the Internet.

For a good start, read five famous books on how to write lyrics. It only takes a month, but it definitely won't be a useless reading. In your letter you must get rid of cliches, clichés, clericalism, empty statements and water.

Read this book before writing the first three words to your channel.

Start with William Zinser’s How to Write Good, and select the other four at your discretion. I have been interested in writing texts all my life and I still think that I am incompetent and can’t do anything, because in this area one can develop endlessly. Well, because I'm really incompetent. Evolve.

2. The content of posts.
Content is usually called the word “content”, but in reality content is a broader concept that includes all the sub-items in this chapter. The content of posts is only an integral part of the content, albeit a very important one. This is what you are going to tell your subscribers, and it is here that most authors have problems, because it turns out that they have nothing to tell about, although I really want to.

I held a contest on @za_bugrom , during which readers sent me a personal feed to me. In total, I received links to 83 channels. Do you know what a common problem is 90% of them? Total lack of content. That is, there may be many posts, they can be very long, but essentially nothing is said in them. There is no story. I don’t want to read previous posts and don’t want to wait for new ones - I don’t care, because the product has no content.

Before you start a channel, make sure you have something to say. Check it is very simple, there is a special test. Write a typical post that you would publish in your channel, and think about it - would you tell this story when meeting your friend? Would you be interested in discussing it? If the answer is no (for most it will be), close the Telegram, the browser, the lid of the laptop and set aside the idea with the channel until better times. You still have nothing to say.

3. The uniqueness of the content.
You do not have the right to rely even on tiny success, if you are not ready to create unique content yourself. All these channels with selections of links to other people's materials can reach arbitrarily large sizes (20-30 thousand readers), but in essence they remain a lean crap, uninteresting even to their creators.

The reader wants the author and the narrative, not the link aggregator.

By the way, in the 21st century, the algorithms of newsmen, tweeters and other media monsters cope better with the aggregation of content. Doing it by hand is the same as building a fireplace in the middle of a room to keep warm. Woo-oo-oo, we are scratching our hairy chest and collecting another selection of "interesting materials for the week."

Once people lived in caves and manually selected interesting materials on the web.

No, I'm not saying at all that there can be no external content on your channel. Can. But if your contribution is always limited to the design of posts and their release on a schedule, it's time you get out of the cave. Outside the sun shines and boils life.

By the way, I share an important experience: God forbid you to buy ads in these channels, link aggregators (do not confuse them with channels-catalogs of other channels, such as @rugram - in which advertising comes just fine)

People subscribe to them for a tick, view posts only so that the unread badge disappears in Telegram, and the links in the posts themselves have not paid any attention for a long time. The return on advertising in these channels is the lowest, but they charge prices from the entire height of their caves. And they themselves, they know, are usually caves in the mountains.

Atenshan: there are exceptions to this rule. I know several excellent link aggregator channels, but the authors put their whole heart into the process.

If you want to buy ads, look for good author channels with an involved audience.

4. Utility.
Even if you really have something to say and you have a recognizable author's style, it is quite possible that your content will still not be useful. Utility is the ability to solve a problem.

Why is the @za_bugrom channel useful? Because many people are interested to know how people live in the United States. Because people are planning their own immigration. Because many people want to get an education abroad. Because people can improve their English and find like-minded people. Because ... I can continue for a very long time, but you get the idea.

Look at your channel and ask a simple question: “why is it useful?”. Not useful to you and your friends, but to the general public. What problem should he solve? What need to satisfy? Can you help at least one person? Yes? Not? How?

5. Virality.
The ability of the channel to maintain organic growth is one of the main success factors. If you have a cool channel, at some point it will start growing on its own, without any investment in advertising. And this is not a myth, @za_bugrom is growing by 40–100 people a day, even if I don’t buy ads at all, but only write posts.

They start talking about your channel, friends discuss it and advise, readers of forward posts to their Telegraph contacts, and other major channels mention you for free. By the way, several times I just “woke up famous” when my channel for free and without any approval advertised two of the coolest projects - @dailyeng and @penthaus . Hey guys, if you're reading, and thank you.

If your post was really interesting and useful, it can catch the avalanche effect of repost, which will lead to a lot of free traffic and subscriptions. Here is a post from my channel that collected almost 60 thousand views with 6 thousand subscribers at the time of its publication:

The coverage of the post was 10 times higher than the number of my subscribers

Such a successful post can bring hundreds of new subscribers for free. It can repost not only readers to their friends, but also other channels, which will cause an even greater cascade effect.

Experiment with formats and choose those that have the greatest viral effect. Thanks to this post alone, I received about 400 new readers who found it outside the channel.

6. Reactions.
To understand how cool the channel is - look at the reaction under the posts. Now many channels add likes, smiles and votes for each post. They can be used to evaluate how involved the audience is in the channel, whether people read posts and whether they take part in the life of the channel.

Good result

Many posts on @za_bugrom collect about a thousand likes, the most successful have already gained 2 thousand reactions. With all my strength I try not to brag, but I have not seen a single channel with such an involved audience. On comparable sized channels, the number of reactions under the posts below is 4–10 times.

I recommend that everyone use reactions to assess the involvement of their audience and test new formats. If the new rubric is typing too many dizlays, do not continue it. She only likes you. And you are not ordering music - but your readers.
Council If the channel has a low ratio of reactions to the number of subscribers, do not buy ads there. This is a bad channel, whose subscribers are not at all interested in what is happening on it, which means that your advertisement will also go badly.

The guideline is as follows: on my channel with 7 thousand subscribers, every post collects from 500 to 1000 likes in 2 days (I do not take into account the most successful posts). Even if on the channel this ratio is twice lower, you still have a steep channel. But if, with 7000 readers, only 50–150 reactions are collected in posts, you probably shouldn’t cooperate with it.

Advertising on channels with a low number of reactions and views is like advertising in a cemetery. A lot of people, but they all died long ago

So, we defined the goal of the channel (chapter I), made it a product (chapter II), created good content (chapter III) and ... what next? Where are my subscribers? Teacher, I did everything right, but no shit happened!

It remains to richly grease all the money. About this in the next chapter.

Iv. Promotion

1. Budget and opportunities.
I do not advise working in the Telegraph, if you do not have at least a minimum budget. I estimate the minimum budget at $ 2,000 - with this amount you can quickly enter and start a good growth. Of course, if your channel is weak in purpose, product or content, it will not work, you will merge the budget and get another dead giant channel that nobody needs except its creator. However, if you smear the initially good product with money, you will reach the goal quickly and relatively inexpensively.

Ready to launch your channel

The more interesting your channel, the cheaper each subscriber will be. The average market standard is about 20 rubles per subscriber, but at that price boring channels get their audience. Mathematics is as follows: at 20 rubles per subscriber, the development of the channel up to 10 thousand readers will cost 200 thousand rubles. Once again: if you have an interesting channel, this figure will be much lower.

Count the money before you start investing. If your budget is 5 thousand rubles, you will spend them nowhere.

2. Primary content filling.
A common mistake is to advertise empty channels. The author has written three and a half posts, but has already bought advertising on all major sites. Potential subscribers go on advertising, fall on an empty channel and close the tab.

Remember: as investors do not give money to teams without a product, so readers do not subscribe to channels that will be interesting in the future, but now it's desert.

The person moving on advertising should see the finished product.

I promise, soon there will be a thriving metropolis, so buy land from me now!

The initial filling of content with @za_bugrom took me almost a month of posts every day. Yes, all this time the channel had one reader - me. But the first ad was supposed to lead not to an empty place, otherwise I’ll salt the budget.

3. Spread among friends.
In an ideal world, money earns itself, Tinder does not match you with bots, and the channel in the Telegram can be spun through friends. In the real world, everything is different.

If you are an ordinary person without a multi-million audience of followers in all social networks, direct marketing of your new channel among friends will not give you absolutely nothing. At best, 20 people will subscribe to it, who will advise the channel to five more, and those in turn to two more people. As a result, you get 27 subscribers and a ton of shame.

Let your friends find out about your successes from the news. Do not beg them to subscribe to the empty channel.

4. Advertising on external sites.
Before writing this post, I tested all available types of advertising. Initially, it was obvious that to advertise the Telegram channel anywhere outside the Telegram itself is idiocy, but I had to try to tell you. My budgets are your free experience.

Immediately to the conclusions: advertising Vkontakte, Facebook, LJ, YouTube and other sites has almost no sense. I released advertisements in suitable on the subject of public Vkontakte for 3-5 million subscribers, and the effect was several times lower than that of advertising in the most rotten channel with funny pictures in the Telegram itself. Stay within the platform.

5. Advertising in other channels.
The only working way to promote a channel is advertising in other channels. You can not even test other ways, because I already did it for you. Save money spent on something pleasant or transfer to my account.

Easier said than done. It turns out that choosing a channel for advertising is a difficult and demanding task, because most channels, as has been said more than once before, are slop-and-do, and placing ads on them is unprofitable.

Call it advertising, if you want, but I still advise the best, in my opinion, launch pad - this is my friend’s feed @rugram . I got a wonderful effect from posting on it, and most importantly - the admin selects only interesting channels for publication and rarely posts them, which means that the value of each posting is very high. I advise.

My advertising in @rugram collected 33k views per month - and brought a lot of subscribers

The indicator that should not be looked at when buying an advertisement is the number of subscribers. This is a non-informative indicator that says nothing about the channel . Yes, a lot of some people, perhaps, they once read this channel. You really need to look at how quickly new posts get typed (for two days the post should recruit about 100% of the audience of the channel or more - then you are in the right place), as well as the number and dynamics of reactions under the posts.

Another important aspect is the density of publications and the degree of readers' confidence in the author. If the author otzharivaet 5-10 posts per day, or every second post on the channel advertising, the value of advertising will be zero.

Let's say you found a good channel for advertising. How to communicate with the admin? Remember: the price that the admin calls is invented by himself and in principle is intended for the sucker. No one really understands how much an advertisement in a Telegram should cost, so everyone molds what he wants. You can call such numbers that you lose the potency for the week ahead.

Medicine: communicate normally with admins and arrange for adequate conditions. I have a large budget and I can buy expensive advertising, but I do not want to be a sucker , so I have never bought an advertisement at a nominal price. If the seller is not ready to discuss the conditions, I have ten other sellers who are ready. The market, damn it, and I'm an economist by education.

Buying advertising in a large channel - a course for beginners

There are many channels in the Telegram, but not all are suitable for advertising. Choose interesting channels with unique content and audience involved. Bypassing aggregators of links, muddy newsmen, all language channels and those in which the author writes too much or too boring. The less links readers see on the channel, the better yours will go down.

Look for a virgin audience, do not go on advertising brothels.

6. Reciprocal.
There is such a phenomenon - mutual PR, or abbreviated VP. It works as follows: you negotiate with a channel of comparable size and make advertising for each other for free. Many consider this method a perpetual motion machine: you don’t have to pay, but there’s a return. But such people do not see the deeper effects of VP - reputational. But nothing is more important.

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