How to Sell Memberships to Your Telegram Group
Learn how to turn your Telegram group into a sustainable recurring revenue business in a matter of minutes.
Introduction
If you run a private Telegram chat, the thought of selling access to your group may have crossed your mind once or twice. If not, starting one can be a great way to earn money, whether you’d like to sell access to an exclusive investment community, job posting channel, or crypto trading group. FanPlusOne Bot provides you with an all-in-one dashboard that allows you to manage access to online communities of any kind, including Telegram chats, channels, and more. With FanPlusOne, setting up a paid community takes less than 5 minutes from start to finish — let’s get started!
If you want to skip the tutorial and check out the result, here you go: @FanMemberBot
Create Project
To begin, open @FanPlusOneBot in Telegram. Click START.
Launch @FanPlusOneBot
The bot will send you a welcome message, and then you’ll see the Add project button. Click it.
Send your project name to the bot. That’s what your clients will see when they open your bot.
Well done! Now that you’ve given your project a name, you’ll be asked to add your first resources.
Add Resources (Telegram Channels & Groups)
Create your members-only area
What will your members-only area look like?
In Telegram, it can be a combination of private channels and groups. The first time you do a project you’ll be able to create a channel or group:
You can check out our articles about how to create them:
How To Create a Telegram Channel
How To Create a Telegram Group
Channels are great for content delivery (newsletters, signals, videos, podcasts, etc.) while groups are great for communities (mastermind groups, QA, support groups, etc.).
You can have multiple channels and groups managed by one membership bot!
Add your channels and groups in InviteMember
After you’ve named your project you’ll be asked what would you like to create first — a Paid Telegram Channel or a Paid Telegram Group. Whichever option you choose you’ll see a short video showing the next steps:
To add a Telegram Channel, you’ll need to add @InviteMemberBot to channel admins and forward a message from the channel to the bot.
Here is a detailed tutorial:
How To Add a Telegram Channel
To add a Telegram Group to InviteMember, you’ll need to add @InviteMemberBot to group admins and post a message to the group with a mention of @InviteMemberBot.
Here is a detailed tutorial:
How To Add a Telegram Group
Please contact @InviteMemberSupportBot if you need any assistance.
Add a Subscription Plan
After adding your first Telegram Channel or Group you’ll need to create a Subscription Plan. A subscription plan defines what your customer will get, how much and how often will he pay.
The first thing you’ll be asked to do is to select a currency to charge your customers in, and how often and how much will they have to pay.
In this tutorial we’ll create a “Monthly” subscription plan for this project:
How To Add a Subscription Plan
Great! Now that your project has its first resource and that you’ve started creating your first subscription plan, it’s time to create your membership bot.
Create a Telegram Bot with BotFather
Why do you need this
Your membership bot will be a small application that lives inside the Telegram ecosystem. It will have a name, a username, a profile picture and will appear just like a real person in the user’s contact list.
After setting your first subscription plan price you’ll see a video explaining how to create your membership bot and get its API token:
Register a new bot
Open @BotFather in Telegram and send /newbot command. Pick your bot name and username:
@BotFather will send you a unique string called API token:
Keep this token in secret!
Customize your bot
If you wish to customize your bot (set profile picture, about, and description), please follow this tutorial:
How To Create a Telegram Bot
My new bot doesn’t reply
Your membership bot application is now registered in Telegram. But if you launch it — it will do nothing until you send its API token to the FanPlusOneBot. Why? Because your newly created bot doesn’t have a backend (server) yet.
Now we’re ready to make your membership bot alive! Just paste the token you got from @BotFather in the @FanPlusOneBot chat.
FanPlusOneBot will check your token and will register itself as your Telegram Bot backend. Now, your bot is alive!
Here, you can preview what the link will look like to potential customers who go to this link. Additionally, you can customize certain aspects of the link, such as whether or not it’s password-protected, which can be useful for exclusive groups. Once you hit “Create link,” you’re done!
Share it with your friends, post it on social media, or simply wait for the opportune moment to use it. Whatever you decide to do with it, you’re ready to start selling access to your Telegram group!
At the same moment, the project owner will receive a notification:
Now it’s time to build your bot! Please contact us at @FanPlusOneSupportBot if you need any help.
Launch @FanPlusOneBot
Troubleshooting
I can’t enable Add Users permission
In some Telegram clients (iOS, for example) there is a known bug — you can’t enable Add Users permission for the bot.
The workaround is to enable this permission in another Telegram app. We recommend Telegram Desktop.
