A Guide on Content Creating

Introduction

Congratulations you finally decided to jump in and start creating content on Telegram, this’s awesome and the start of an extremely adventurous journey! Creating content is not a single skill it’s an entire department of roles mixed into one. From researching to marketing, from organizing your content to brand deals and so much more. I recommend you read this blog to really dive deep into the benefits of content creating. Now that you understand why you should create, here’s a definitive and deep guide on how to navigate and manage your content and engage with people after creating your channel.

I am Dagmawi Babi, I have been running my main channel on Telegram for over 9 years now. It’s been a spectacular journey for me and I’ve been encouraging so many people to start content creating as well and that has given birth to a growing and vibrant community of content creators. The advices and guides in this blog post are from my experiences and from what I’ve observed very closely from other creators. These things are also what I have advised to close friends and family creating content on Telegram. These things aren’t all exclusive to Telegram and will apply to most other platforms so I hope this really helps you in creating quality content, managing it with care, monetizing it well, and also form an amazing community around your brand.

Getting Started

One of the first things you need to decide on while creating a channel is what the channel is going to be called, its profile picture, its bio and whether to make it a public or private channel. When starting off, these decisions shouldn’t entirely consume you as they’re prone to change as you grow in your journey but these things are also what form first impressions when people see your channel so it’s good to give it some good thought.

1. Setting up

Depending on the type of content you plan on making, give your channel a short and catchy name. Oftentimes it could be your name, other times it should be a short phrase — the goal is to make it precise and short enough that people can recall it easily. But that’s not all, your channel name should oftentimes be the same as the channel’s username. This is important because you’re making it even more easier for people to memorize your channel and find it easily. A good channel name will be the channel’s username, and that will be used to sign each of your posts (we'll talk about signing posting later in this blog). It will also be the name of your brand. My channel name is “Dagmawi Babi” and the username “@Dagmawi_Babi” — this hasn’t changed for the past decade of it’s existence and it has become my brand and the name is more known than my actual name (it’s Dagmawi Esayas btw)

Next up is your profile picture. Just like your channel name, your profile picture should be something simple, minimal and memorable. If you’re good at graphic designing go ahead and make yourself a good simple logo if not just use one of your pictures or go to Pinterest and find something you like. Remember to not overthink this — unlike your channel name and username, your profile picture and logo can change more often and with a proper notice people will get used to it unlike the name and username. So keep an open mind and just go with something simple that you like or made. If done correctly this image will be the face of your brand, it’s what will be printed in stickers, shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks and more, it’s what your followers will sketch, it’s the single image that represents your entire vibe and energy (no pressure tho!)

Your channel should be a public channel if you intend on growing a following, building a community, and expanding your brand. Private channels add friction for interested people and often times feels more shady than trustworthy no matter who runs it. So it’s best to opt-in for a public channel. It makes it easily discoverable, it will be suggested to others, and your followers can easily share to their friends and get more subscribers in.

Now the bio. Think of the bio as a simple and quick introduction to the person asking who you are and what you’re doing in this channel. So a simple introduction about you and what kind of content you intend on posting should go here. Apart from that use it as a quick guide place where you can put in links like your site, community link, and more — making it easier for people to navigate your channel.

Telegram also has features like Welcome Messages and Community Associations. The one I recommend is the welcome message feature. Thing of it like the bio of your channel but with more features and is shown only when a new subscriber joins your channel. So in that welcome message you can put in media, links or normal text — make it welcoming and guiding so that when people subscribe they feel great about joining and know what to expect. This is particularly useful cause not a lot of people read the bio of channels and this feature puts it up in their faces to read. The Community Association is a fun gimmick and as of writing this blog it doesn’t contribute much. So you can totally skip this part.

2. Planning Long Term

Congratulations your channel is now live and you can continue making content just with these things setup. But if you intend to build a community and grow your engagements two main things remain. One is the Comment Section and the other is your Channel DMs.

The Comment Section is not your community, it is solely the comment section. But because of the way comment sections are built within Telegram, people will join the comment section group and that tends to be a place of off-topic discussion for people. But that’s not right nor manageable going forward. The comment section should be used to comment and discuss about the specific post you’ve posted and nothing else. For building a community you should create a separate group and let people join that and have as many off-topic discussions as they like. Since groups can also be converted into forums, using a separate group to host your community is the best possible choice. (Mine is @DagmawiBabiChat, make yourself at home)

Next up is your Channel DM. This is one of the best features Telegram has introduced. As your channel grows in subscribers, and as you become more known thousands of people will want to talk to you privately. They’ll want to ask you questions, just connect with you, flirt with you, companies and brands will also reach out to you and so much more. So using your personal DM for all of this is just lunatic and a mess. It will fill up your chat list, take away your freedom and privacy and let bad actors abuse your personal account. That is why you should setup Channel DMs — a separate inbox for people to talk to you privately. You can spread and share your channel DM link as much as you like unlike your personal account (here's mine) and people and companies can still get in-touch with you. Highly recommend you set this up as early as you can.

Now that is how you get started! You’re all setup and your channel is so ready to take an adventure of a lifetime. It’s looking good and even the very first subscriber has a good experience joining it.

Management and Archiving

Your channel is YOUR channel. It is made for you first and everyone else comes second. You should be in full control and possession of it and have the most power in the content, subscribers and commenters around it. Thousands will join your channel, but thousands will leave too. At the end of the day you’re the only one left with your channel so manage and organize it well. It isn’t an easy task it’s a system you set up and follow through everyday. But a well managed channel is a treasure for years to come. So let me give you some pointers on how to do that.

1. Securing Access to your Channel

One of the first things that you should keep an eye out is Telegram bugs and errors. There are countless examples of people with channels with thousands of subscribers losing it some random second of the day. It could be their personal account getting banned, or some telegram bug not letting them sign in. This has happened to me once, I was experimenting with things and I put on Telegram Support’s number in my bio and that was automatically flagged by the servers and banned my personal account which was the only way I could reach my channel. I was extremely blessed to have my account reinstated back after reaching out to support. I don’t know any other person who got their account back since then — so I’m extremely grateful of God for this!

So the first thing to do is to add another admin with full permissions to your channel. By the nature of Telegram when the channel owner’s account is deleted or banned, Telegram will automatically give ownership to the next admin with the most permissions. If there are no admins then Telegram will choose a random subscriber and give that person full ownership of your channel (crazy I know, but I hope there’s some sensible metrics they use to assign that user as owner of your channel) Anyways you should put in 2 or more other accounts as an admin with full permission to your channel. These accounts could be your alt accounts, family member or someone else that you trust.

Now you have to be extremely careful here. All the accounts you set as an owner should the accounts themselves be secure! That includes having 2FA login and managed sessions. So make sure the admins of your channel have secure accounts and aren’t hacked or marked spam before. If these admins are marked spam then your channel, comment section and wherever else you have set them as an admin will be marked spam in red for everyone to see and that’s just an ugly sight. So put care into securing your accounts and stay away from clicking on unknown links, setting bots as admins, and logging into sites with your Telegram account.

2. Combating Spam and Abuse

A public Telegram channel has a large surface vulnerable to spam and abuse. Let’s combat some of the most popular ones. First up is the comment section. This is where bots from botnets will comment under your posts and also where bad acting humans will abuse. The bots will post crypto links, sexual content, and other times these bots are there to gather information about the members (these bots will join and fetch a list of all the members of that comment section, grab their User IDs, usernames and if their phone number is public then steal that too, then make a huge database of users for the bot owner to sell or abuse. Basically OSINT but run through Telegram bots) So as much as you can setup mods in the community group who will actively delete posts from these bots.Also whenever you notice them in the subscriber list of your comment section or channel remove them. There are also bots like @MissRose_bot that help in managing spam so make good use of these bots just make sure you’ve properly configured them.

The other comment abuser is another human being. This is easier to manage. If you see people breaking the rules of your community, mass promoting, abusing other commenters, being hateful, negative or disrespectful to you — do not hold back on instantly banning them from your comment section, or even your channel if you want. You shouldn’t worry about losing commenters or anything, you rather have 10 people properly engaging in your comment section than 100 that do it negatively. One thing to consider before banning is giving out warnings and making sure everyone is aware of your rules for the comment section. After than feel free to ban, ban and ban! Remember these bots and people aren’t only after you, they’re also targeting to spam and scam your community, so protect and care for your community by moderating them properly.

Another surface area of abuse are Channel Reactions. There are bad actors out there that are very engaged with your channel but with negative intent. These are the people that will react with laughing emojis to your sad posts, puke emojis to your beautiful pictures, and other times just random reactions to just make you and your other subscribers distracted and steal their attention. All of these are bad and I’ve seen them get abused constantly almost on every channel. So go to your Channel Settings, Reaction Option and then handpick what reactions are allowed in your channel. You honestly don’t need many reactions, at the end of the day these reactions are a way of you getting feedback from your subscribers so you just need a few for positive (support, celebration, laughs, love) and negative (dislike, anger) reactions. I’d recommend disabling all the other random ones too. The Reaction list should be something you fine-tune throughout time cause there’s not a complete solution to it. People can even abuse positive reactions if they wanted to (Thumbs Up/Trophy Reaction to your RIP dog post) so constantly monitor it and don’t be afraid to turn some positive/negative reactions off till the person is bored of it then you can reenable it.

3. Preserving your Channel

The second thing that you should care about is preserving YOUR content. Consider your content as old photographs. No matter what topic they are about or what time they’re posted at, they’re memorable and should be preserved and backed up just like photographs. These posts are what you will see a decade after and reminisce on. They’ll be nostalgic and if you’re someone like me that considers their channel as a public journal then you should care infinitely more since you’ve been capturing and sharing your life and thoughts. That is why you should have the habit of exporting your channel content fully every few months. I recommend scheduling every 6 months to fully backup your content. Set up a reminder in your calendar and when the time arrives, export everything in HTML and JSON format including all the media attached. Then back that up in your hard drives or backup system.

Archiving your content is a no-brainer, imagine a YouTuber not having backup of the videos they makes, or a TikToker not cross posting to other social medias for backup. They’d be naive not to do that since once their channel is somehow banned or deleted, the companies aren’t giving them access back. Though sometimes these companies offer an option for you to export your data but even that is limited so treat your Telegram content the same way. You’d be naive to not have a backup of it. You owning your data gives you so much freedom — like you can take your content and host it else where, you can even populate a new channel with your content if you’d like, the possibilities are endless honestly. So own your data. You will thank me for this advice someday!

Content

Your content is at the heart of your channel, brand and community. Apart from you, it is by far one of the most important things there. Your content is what will form the image of your brand, it is what will grow or lose a following, it is what attracts brand deals or cause chaos. Your content is not you, but it is a great reflection of your thoughts, perspective and effort of research and care. So your focus entirely should be on creating quality content. Making each and every post valuable and worth sharing no matter the topic. So let’s get to some pointers…

1. Attention Spam (not a typo)

Your goal, as a quality content-creator, isn’t to post 10 mediocre posts throughout the day. It is to post a few extremely packed and useful posts that are each worthy of being shared around. The ultimate goal is to pack as much useful material into a single post in a short and well organized way. This is a difficult goal, but the pursuit of it will make you standout among 99% of other channels.

By making each and every post extremely useful, entertaining and direct to the point you are showing the most respect for the attention and time of people. Look at it this way: if your post requires just 20 seconds to read, and if it is seen by a thousand people, that is ~333 minutes or 3 hours and 33 minutes of collective time. So if you’re going to take all that time away from a crowd of people, you should make it worth it by making it as dense in value as possible. This is one of the ways you can show your love for your followers. I have written in depth about caring about the attention and time of your audience in my Thoughts and Advices on Being a Telegram Content Creator blog so read that well.

2. Spammming

Spamming isn’t inherently bad but isn’t encouraged and you also should not associate spamming with consistency. Sometimes you will post lots of content everyday throughout the week, but when you look back at it only a few are up to your quality standards but throughout the week you thought you were keeping up your consistency. So don’t fall into that trap. I’ve had phases where I substituted quality of content with spam consistency. It wasn’t a good experience for me or my community. But if you somehow can manage to produce great content consistently then feel free to spam, you’ve earned it.

Spamming has two effects depending on the maturity of your community. Earlier on even when your followers don’t know you much spamming them could be the fastest way to lose them but on the other hand if done correctly it is also what can keep them noticing your channel (but this requires for your posts to meet a higher quality standard) Channels with a matured community can get away with spamming because their followers don’t mind it because you’re someone they want to hear from even if that thing is silly and isn’t worth sharing. So balance it out well.

3. Originality and Your Tone

Your job isn’t to cross-post from YouTube and Twitter on to Telegram or vice-versa (you’re not the content portal), it isn’t to just copy paste breaking news, it isn’t to just show us pictures of some restaurant or mountain side you went to… we don’t care and unless you’re at the top of your game there are others that can do all of these things better and faster than you. So what do you offer?

When a person subscribes to your channel they understand the cost of it. They are sacrificing their attention, time, mental energy and even their internet bills to view your posts. They aren’t putting all of that effort just to see a new Telegram channel sharing what they just saw on Twitter, or to hear the news from someone that’s not even remotely close to the source. They are here to hear your thoughts in your tone and to see things from your perspective. That is the only thing you are offering them and that is what they are willing to spend all that resource on.

Consider it like a football match. If the match was only being streamed from one camera angle it would be so boring and so many incredible moments would not have been captured well. But even a typical match has 10 - 20 camera angles streaming the game, that number is even higher (30-42) for World Cup games. We get wide angle shots, close ups, goal area cams, pole cams, Spidercams, slow-motion cams, low angle cams, manager cams, fan cams and so much more — all trying to give us a different perspective and tone of the one match being streamed. That is how you should see content creating. You are one of those camera streams. If you just streamed what the other camera is pointed at, you’re not doing it right. You should stream your perspective and it is this perspective that people will subscribe to.

If I am a techie and you an artist when a new AI model dropped today our coverage should be very different. If you just reiterate my perspective you’re doing yourself a disservice, you should tell us from an artist’s POV how you view that new AI model and that take of yours is worth subscribing to. This is the root of your originality. Everything life taught you so far, and where God placed you at are the ingredients of your unique tone and perspective. So use that to your advantage and always create content with the intention of sharing what you think, felt and learnt about it. This is what will make your channel, content and brand stand out quickly and grow your community.

4. Content Organization

Like we covered earlier, your content is worth preserving and organizing. Just like how you create albums in your gallery, organize your book shelf, group your clothes in your closet, arrange your class notes and more — so should you with your content. The more content you create, the more you will realize that finding a specific post gets harder and harder, and as time goes on you won’t even remember a single word you used in that post hence you can’t even search for it. So you need to have a system to organize and group your content to make it easier to find or reference. The systems I use to organize my content are Hashtags, Keywords and Replies.

Hashtags are amazing and straightforward and almost all mature social medias have advanced support for them. Say you’re travel channel and you want to make finding cafes, restaurants and resorts easier. So the easiest thing to do is put #Cafe to every post that is about a Cafe, #Restaurant to all the posts about Restaurants and #Resort to all the posts about Resorts. Then whenever you or your subscribers want a Cafe suggestion, both of you can quickly and easily view all the Cafes shared just by using the Hashtag. You can even use multiple hashtags under one post if you want it discoverable under different topics. As amazing as hashtags are, they can look disturbing if you overuse them so limit yourself to a max of 4/5 tags if the post requires to be grouped in multiple topics, if not just go with one or two distinct tags.

Keywords are another method I use to group/organize posts. These keywords are unique enough that they’re hard to forget and are frequent enough that you can quickly reference them. One keyword I use is “Good Night” and within it I post some of my most favorite verses. So often times when I need to check for a verse I love I just go through posts with this keyword and find it. Keywords aren’t as efficient as hashtags and are mostly useful for you and not your subscribers but if you can come up with a unique and good enough keyword then you can search and group things much more easily.

Lastly I use replies to chain related themes/topics together. One of the longest chains in my channel is the “What did God teach you?” (”እግዚአብሄር ምን አስተማረክ/አስተማረሽ?”) series where I ask my subscribers at the end of each month. So every time I post this question I post it while replying to the previous month’s question. So that a person who really loved today’s responses can quickly jump to last month’s responses, and then the month before than, and the so on. Replies are really nice to chain frequent posts. Other times I would talk about a topic, say a fantasy game emulator called PICO-8, and after the initial post (even though I tried a lot to pack it with as much valuable post as possible) I will find something new, an update or something I created using it. So I will reply to the previous post about it and then craft another packed post. That way the person reading the current post can quickly go back and get the full context.

5. Copyright and Crediting

Oftentimes you want to share something someone else made that you found interesting or really loved. Could be a movie, a song, a book or something else. There are a few things you should keep in mind before you just straight up post it. Copyright rules and Crediting the creator.

Unless specifically stated, you are not allowed to share any movie, song, book or intellectual property onto your channel without the license or permission from the Copyright owner to do so. Unfortunately though (or fortunately - depends on how you view piracy) no one cares much about Digital Copyright laws. So you will probably want to share that content. Here is my advice: if it’s a song only post a YouTube/Spotify link to it specially if it’s just released. If it’s a movie, book, game or anything paid there’s really no need for you to post it but if you must then create a private channel to post and share these pirated or copyrighted files there, then you can share the link of the post in the private channel to people. That way if the channel is hit with a copyright strike it’s only the files channel that gets affected. But generally I would recommend to stay away from these things as much as you can. Because if not today, maybe tomorrow it will get affected.

The other topic is Crediting others. Say you’re a digital artist and you shared one of your artworks. Imagine if I just took those and posted it on my channel and used it to get engagement, comments and more. This is extremely selfish of me to do so. The right thing to do is to properly point my audience to the original content creator. That way I can freely share content from across the internet, while the original creators also benefit from the backlinks. So always, no matter how big or small the original creator is, always, credit them back with a username or direct link in your post.

Lastly, don’t forget to credit yourself in your posts. I call them signing each post actually. The same way you could just rip off someone else’s content by just forwarding and removing the source, others can do the same to you. So might as well “watermark” your posts by including your channel’s username. That way it takes a bit more effort for others to constantly rip you off. But it’s not only that, signing your posts is also great for helping people discover your channel. On Telegram lots of people don’t know that clicking on the “Forwarded from …” label of a message can take them to the original channel — but most of them know that an @ link will definitely do. So you’re catering to those people as well to find your channel easily. But that’s also not all, by signing your posts you’re also reminding people of your channel/brand name and soon enough it’s very easy for them to remember and find it. So I def recommend signing your posts.

6. Limits of Sharing Personal Content

At the end of the day, no matter what community you belong to, you are just a random individual on the internet and the internet is where you are exposed to billions of people where most of them aren’t good. So you shouldn’t forget that no matter how safe and supported you feel within your community, it’s still part of the wild-wild-west internet. Bad actors are actively engaged to gather information about you, to steal your data, to hack you, and worst of all harm you, your family or the people you love. So it’s very important that you are cautious when dealing with personal information and live status updates. Here are some things I do …

Part of the content I create is covering beautiful and nice hotels, restaurants and places. So until I am done capturing that area and then I actually left the place and am far away, I will not post about it. Unbeknownst to me I used to post pictures and videos while I’m still there and people used to show up at that place and get me. Thankfully they’ve been good but the potential to be harmed was obvious. So unless I’m at some public event that needs to be covered, I don’t share live location information.

Another thing is personal information like phone number, home location, relationship details, finance information, who I have beef with or not, health details, and even current mental and spiritual state. On the surface these look like basic information but these are extremely sensitive topics that can be chained together to abuse you. When posting home pictures it’s almost always interior, when sharing relationship information it’s always just my status and nothing about the person I am with, when sharing contact it’s just my public number and not my personal. So there is a very healthy way you can share your personal journey while staying safe. When it comes to people online, assume the default state is to hurt you and you can go from there.

Engagement

Across different socials there are different metrics used to track the performance of your content; views, likes, comments, subscriptions, downloads and more. But the most reliable metric has been shares. A well produced content isn’t only viewed lots but it is viewed lots because of the shares. So when you are tracking and measuring engagement on your channel the number one thing you should keep an eye on is the number of shares. It is very straightforward — a great content is something your subscribers want to share with other people. That’s it.

1. Metrics that Matter

Views aren’t reliable because just because the view counter has increased doesn’t mean someone actually read the content of your post. Likes aren’t also reliable because people just like and instantly pass things just to support. Subscription count isn’t even close since a channel with 10,000 subscribers but little engagement or influence from the creator is worth less than a channel of 1,000 but active engagement and big influence from the creator. You will see lots of big channels suffer to influence, monetize and move their subscribers when they needed them the most. I always say “what good is it to be an influencer if you can’t influence people” So don’t even look at the subscription count as much unless you’re an absolutely gigantic channel. It’s a very cheap metric that you can buy by promoting your channel.

So the most reliable one is Share Count and aside from that, in a well moderated community, are Comments. These two are very organic and you can clearly and measurably see which of your posts are valuable enough to share, and also moving enough to get people talking. So measure these constantly and learn from the feedback and orient your posts in that direction whenever you want to grow in followers or engagement and give value to your subscribers.

2. Reacting First

You should always react first to your posts, not because you are egoistic but because people are lazy to pick from a list of reactions and react. So by reacting first a) you have made it easier for them to react and b) you are setting the tone of reaction first. It’s surprising to me but people actually don’t know how to react to things. You really have to push them into a certain direction. In fact that’s why they’re subscribed to your perspective because they want to learn how to react and feel about things. So by reacting first you are guiding people on what to react and you will see that you can sway reactions in the way you want them to go. For real, post something and react with a heart, fire or cry emoji. Then see the count of your choice of reaction increase consistently. It’s also a great way to kickstart engagement on your posts — because a post with so many reactions will make more people curious enough to read the content and engage with.

Reactions are valuable to creators, it triggers an emotional response. Say you shared an achievement of yours and seeing hundreds of celebration and trophy reactions will definitely make you happy. Bad actors know the emotional appeal of these reactions and that’s why they abuse it so by you reacting first you can set the tone of the reactions sooner and combat bad actors.

There are times I don’t react first. These are times even I don’t know how to react other times it is to see what kind of actor is active and engaging in my channel. So I will post an obviously good or bad post and see what the reactions are. Often times the bad actors will react negatively or distractingly to a good post, and positively on a very obvious bad post.

3. Community and Comments

There is an excellent blog titled "How to DM Properly" written on how to interact with people online so I definitely recommend you read that. It’s well written and covers everything I want to address on how to talk and engage with people online.

What you should keep in mind while interacting with people in your comment section or community is to be very polite, respectful and assertive to the standards of your community. You are going to encounter hundreds if not thousands of hate comments, people are going to create channels just to insult you, you are going to be insulted and threatened and so much more — but doesn’t mean you have to have that same intention and effort responding back. Whenever you encounter these negatively intent people just step back and think through your options: in this case just think about Responding, Leaving them on Seen or Banning them. If you think responding is going to result in an online argument just leave them on seen, if you think letting that user comment more will do harm then ban them.

Remember there are extremely amazing people out there too. They’re also subscribed, commenting, and engaging with your content. So the point is to be great at filtering the right people that you eventually have so many great and good individuals in your community than the bad ones. In my case, some of my closest friends now were just random people actively engaging in my comment section. Some of them became mods, with others we played Minecraft, while others supported by business, and so much more. So remember there are incredible people in your subscriber list too. So by quickly removing the bad ones, you’ll get to the good ones quicker.

4. Support and Peace

It goes without saying that Support and Peace within your fellow creators and community is non-negotiable. You should constantly share and support their projects and the content they produce. But this doesn’t apply to all. Some creators will never support you back so don’t feel pressured to do anything for them despite what everyone else does. Unless it’s someone you really care about, or you’re doing it out of the kindness of your heart — support between creators, everywhere, is transactional, both parties benefit. You’re not an exception.

When someone shares your content, your project, your video and more and compliments you; you should go in their channel and react to their post, comment on it and even highlight what they said on your channel. One of the things I do is go through my channel statistics and see the channels that share my content, then I just react or say thank you and that forms a great connection between creators and also a nice image on your brand.

Your Peace of mind is worth it all. In fact if you really look closer all the banning, blocking, reaction management, comment management is an attempt at creating a peaceful state of mind. Because a peaceful mind can do incredible and wildly creative things, it should be a priority to you. So whenever someone or some creator (no matter how big) affects your peace, do yourself a great favor and block or leave them. I assure you, you won’t be lacking anything cause no one else’s content is worth your peace of mind.

Another thing is to not date other creators or people in the community. It is just messy because if you break up then you’re going to have a bad experience at events where both of you are invited or asked to organize or co-host together and if you somehow reveal who you’re dating it’s even worse. I can assure you that the moment you’ve announced you’re in a relationship a lot of people are instantly rooting for you to break up and they will actively participate in accelerating that. So if you do decide to date, keep it extremely confidential. Don’t even tell other “trusted” creators — no one creator is trusted when it comes to your relationship. So avoid dating anyone in the community or keep it extremely private.

Beef is unavoidable. You will have some conflict, argument, personal drama or some serious disagreement with someone. But the way you deal with it is how you can stay apart. From a technical standpoint beef is bad for your brand. People don't perceive two people in a beef differently even though one could be the bad one and the other just responding. People will associate and perceive both equally negative. You’re not about to mark this amazing brand of yours for some random beef that started. So the absolute best thing is to step back, avoid responding badly. Remember your options of Leaving on Seen and Blocking, and use one of the options. I have seen it over and over again that people who have incited some beef with me have suffered the negative image of their own words, while my act of ignorance has separated my channel extremely. So definitely recommend you to just step out of it no matter how much they try to get a reaction out of you. Remember you’ve got greater things to do than waste time and emotions there.

5. Commentless Posts

This one is a quick hack since most people don’t know about it. Sometimes you want to post something but don’t want either reactions or comments on it. For reactions you can turn all reactions off before you post it and people will just view it. But for comments there isn’t an obvious solution to turn off the comments under a specific post. Removing the entire comment section isn’t realistic since that removes every comment every made. So the hack is this: After you made your post, go to the comment section (the group) and then delete the post from the comment section. That’s it, the “Leave a comment” button of that post from the channel is now gone and you now have a Commentless Post.

Monetization

There are a lot of ways to monetize your channel / brand. In Telegram the options are expanding even more with each passing year. So let’s cover some of the ways you can make money creating content on Telegram.

1. Stars & Gifts

In your channel settings, along with your reaction option there is the option to turn on Paid Reactions. It’s just what the name says, people will spend actual money to react to your posts. Enabling this option will bring the star reaction and anyone that has purchased stars can react using that and then after a certain threshold (currently 1,000 stars) you can withdraw that money.

Another crypto way of making money are gifts. People can send you digital gifts/tokens/NFTs to your channel or account, then you can sell them for stars and then withdraw that out. But one thing to note is that these aren’t dependable and and aren’t widely accessible for everyone. It requires certain crypto/digital asset people to exist within your community for you to get paid reactions and gifts. So don’t consider this as your primary goal.

2. Ads and Brand Deals

On Telegram, there are two types of ads. The ones Telegram will show across each and every channel and the ads you choose to post. Telegram has a 50/50 creator revenue share program but unless your channel is massive the amount of money you’re making from those ads are so small. So shift your focus on the ads you can control and post.

With a stable and growing channel you can make people pay to promote on your channel. Lots of other channel owners and shops will gladly pay you so you can promote their channels and products. The pay increases the higher the number of subscribers you have but smart people will also check your engagement rates so you can make more money selling ads as the owner of a highly engaged community than the owner of a high subscriber count.

If your channel is niche or caters to a specific audience more (say students, developers, movie enthusiasts…) then you’ve got a great shot at running targeted ads for people/companies at a great price. This is also where you can land brand deals and sponsorships. For me in particular, a large portion of my subscribers are developers and founders, so I’ve had deals with companies that want to target these audiences at a very high rate. Even have a site setup for it. So I definitely recommend you to explore ads.

3. Crowdfunding

A healthy community cares about you and is there to support your projects, businesses and the content you’re creating — that support is sometimes financial. I have seen lots of people setup “Buy Me Coffee” type of links and make a lot of money from it. For me in particular, I started a charity called Ruthful Hearts and it’s entirely community funded. For the past three years my community has supported the charity by over 200k ETB which is just mind-blowing to think about. So don’t be afraid to utilize this, cause some of your subscribers want to support you financially too, it’s understandable. I personally support others financially too cause I understand how much effort it takes to create content. My only wish is to do more.

4. Expansion

No matter how great and creator friendly a platform is, don’t limit yourself to that one platform. Diversify and expand to other media formats and platforms. You’ll be surprised how these content creating skills are transferrable across different platforms. So if you’re posting text content on Telegram, start making videos on YouTube, then also start posting on Twitter, then LinkedIn, then TikTok, then maybe your own blog, then may be stream… don’t limit yourself and keep expanding to different media formats and different audiences. The idea is for your brand to be independent of any platform. So wherever you decide to go you have an amazing and loyal community to back you up.

I started with my Telegram channel, then grew a large following on LinkedIn and TikTok, then I started a podcast show on YouTube and I will keep expanding to more areas. I recommend you do the same, it’s the natural maturity path of any creator and brand.

Final Notes

Boiling down nearly a decade worth of experience and knowledge into one blog is very hard but I have tried my best to address every major area and if you get these things right, everything else is minor and something you don’t need to be taught.

These are advices and guidelines, they’re not rules, I’m not the rule setter, I am just a random dude online. So be wise and observe, experiment, break the norm and see what works and what doesn’t. It’s with constant iteration and experimentation that you discover new and effective things. So don’t hold back. The only thing you should be concerned about is for your voice to be absorbed in a sea of channels, brands and content. You should find your advantage, your unique camera angle, your unfair advantage over everyone else so that your channel is distinct enough to stand up tall and independently.

Remember to care for people’s attention and time, to care for their mental and emotional well being. But do not hold back speaking the truth no matter how offended people will be. Speak the truth in love, and be open to learn and that’s what matters. Can’t wait to see all the incredible and amazing content you’re going to be producing.

(p.s Subscriber to my Channel)