Your Telegram channel will be credible when you are trusted by your audience to deliver on the channel objective. In an insight business, credibility is everything. If your audience doesn’t believe you can deliver what you’re promising, they’ll see little value and move on. 

In trading, your subscribers should not be expecting signals that win every time – financial markets simply don’t work like this. The channels we’ve seen that profess to being able to do this don’t have much engagement.

To gain credibility when offering trading signals, the signal itself needs to be precise, easy to follow and accurately tracked/reported.

We find that on average, the signals don’t have to win for a channel to be credible. In fact, having losing signals, so long as they aren’t hidden and are explained, adds to a provider’s credibility. A channel that promises high success rates that ultimately doesn’t deliver, will end up having much higher churn rates and lower ERR. 

The signalDP platform tracks each signal through its full lifecycle against third party market prices, and provides a Profit and Loss summary in points. A public reporting page is provided that details signal performance that can be shared with an audience. These all seriously boost credibility.

In addition to signal messages, a signal provider can build credibility by being transparent and honest. If you’re having a bad trading day, share it. Well established providers also have a library of resources they share with their client base. Free courses, pdfs, trading aids like spreadsheets and calculators. However, try not to push your resources out of context, because it is likely to negatively impact your ERR.

The signs of a credible channel 

• Clear signals.
• Reporting on the full lifecycle of every signal.
• Third-party pricing used to measure signals.
• Fake channels copying it. There isn’t much you can do about people impersonating you and copying your content. However, you can report fake channels to Telegram, call them out to your subscribers and be sure to really protect your signup process.

Tips for making your signals channel credible:

• Don’t make promises you can’t keep about signal performance.
• Don’t shout too loudly if you have a winning signal – it makes you look like it doesn’t happen often.
• Be transparent – if you have a losing trade, talk about it. 
• Use a third-party market price to benchmark your signal performance.
• When providing signals, never miss a trigger or a completed trade.
• Report on performance regularly, and be accurate.
• Make sure all your partners are credible. 
• Actually trade the signals yourself using your own capital and offer proof of this to your audience – if you don’t, why should your subscribers?
• Don’t delete old messages to make yourself look better (someone will see this).

The content on your channel needs to solve your subscribers’ problems. After landing on your channel, people will quickly decide whether it’ll help them or not. 

This begs the question of how to create relevant content. Far too often, we see trading related channels trying to be all things to all people. We see channels offering education, market news, trading signals, strategies, bots, and so on. The key is to focus on one specific aspect, specifically signal trading. 

The main reason people seek out a signals channel is to make money from trading. They consider the easiest route to making money is to have someone more experienced provide them with a blueprint. Typically, your target audience will consist of:

• Students – They don’t understand the analysis that has gone into a signal but they want to. To be relevant to this group, you need to take the time to explain your analysis. 
• Copycats – They don’t want to understand, they want to copy. This group isn’t looking for explanations, they just want the signal in a compact and actionable format.
• Analysts – They understand the analysis but they want to save time. Channels with this type of subscriber might need to outline the facts and explain why a signal has been generated. However, they don’t need to be educated.

In our experience, most Telegram subscribers are ‘copycats’. To be relevant to this group, your channel needs to deliver content that does the following:

• Provides trading signals – You should try to track and provide timely, clear updates at each stage of the signal. For example, if the trade was triggered, did it make a profit or a loss, and were there any changes? The good news is that the signalDP platform does all this for you seamlessly and automatically from the point at which you create the signal. This should make up the bulk of your channel content.
• Builds trust – This can be done in many ways and is unique to the assets available to the provider. The most affordable way to build trust is to deliver an honest report on your trading performance and be transparent about your thoughts and mindset. Channels that require more time and investment usually provide free resources, like trading courses and guides.

Here is a great example of how to structure a signal in Telegram:

Practical tips on making your channel relevant: 

1. Set a clear objective – Be sure to communicate the purpose of your channel to your audience. This is normally done in the channel info section and by pinning a post to the top of your channel that explains what value people will gain from following.

Here’s a good example of a clear objective in the channel info section:

2. Don’t deviate from your objective – At least not without careful consideration. Even if you think you are adding value to your audience, it’s important to stay within the area of your channel’s focus.

4. Solve a particular problem for your audience – For example, ‘‘I normally provide 3 – 4 trading signals for the US Open on US equity indices, based on my technical analysis and market knowledge. While I have been trading my own account for ten years, I do not make any promises around performance.’’

5. Be specific with your value proposition – Communicate your asset class, timeframe and strategy. For example, ‘‘I provide signals in US indices, and I trade 4h charts and seek to take advantage of long term correlations and short term convergences in index markets.’’

6. Align your marketing message – Make sure that your marketing messages tie in with the problem you are solving for your audience.

When creating a signal channel, your aim should be to provide real value to your end users. You want to create a channel that your subscribers will love, trust and return to time and time again. 

In order to achieve this, your channel needs to have four characteristics:

1. Relevance
2. Credibility
3. Engagement
4. Consistency

If you genuinely achieve these four, then you’ll have a channel that’s primed to make money.

What is a trading signal?

A trading signal is a trigger for action, either to buy, or to sell a security, generated by analysis. It can be used by many audiences, including those who outsource their analysis, and those who want to learn how the signal was generated. 

A trading signal is not copy trading where you automatically have the trades of someone else copied in your account. Nor is it account management, where someone else is trading your account on your behalf. 

A trading signal is just the information required to trade – the market, direction, target price and the exit levels. You still need to decide whether to follow the signal as an order, how much to stake, and what financial product to use.

Here’s what a signal looks like:

Traders use signals because it provides the perfect balance of trading your own hard-earned funds yourself, while saving time by having a third-party expert doing the bulk of the analysis.

What is Telegram?

Telegram is used by over 700 million people worldwide. It is a super secure, private and feature-rich messaging app. As a method of communicating trading signals, it is unrivaled. Using channels, signal providers can send as many one-to-many messages as they want. 

The nature of Telegram’s public and private channel architecture means signal providers can monitor who subscribes to their channels. It’s also very fast, with instant global messaging, which is important when communicating time sensitive signals. 

The app has no limit on channel subscribers. It’s free, although a premium service was recently introduced for a small monthly fee, which is worth considering. Signal providers control their own channels, so there’s no need to send audiences elsewhere. This is really important when trying to develop a business in this niche, as sending your audience to another app to consume your signal means giving up your most valuable asset.

If you don’t already have the Telegram app, you can download it here.

What does SignalDP do?

SignalDP is the world’s first decentralized trading signal distribution platform. We distribute and monitor trading signals in the provider’s Telegram channels. We work with signal providers on Telegram to help them add credibility, save time and monetize their insight, while retaining control of their channels. 

We’ve seen thousands of signal providers from all over the world, so we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

You can learn more about SignalDP here.

A word on analytics

All successful channels analyze their performance in some capacity. The best channels measure key metrics carefully, and analyze how changes in approach and content impact on the metrics that count. As the saying goes, ‘what gets measured, gets managed’. 

Telegram is relatively new, so there isn’t a huge range of analytics solutions out there. The ones to consider are:

• TGStat – If you run a channel.
• Native Telegram Statistics – Available to channels with >1,000 subscribers.
• Popsters – For message analysis.
• Chainfuel – For group management and analytics.

With a service like TGstat, all you need to do is integrate it, and leave it to collect data. It captures a lot, although you’ll probably find that some metrics are more important than others, at different stages of your channel’s development. 

When in the early stages of creating a signal channel, the important metrics are:

• Engagement rate of subscribers (ERR) – This is how many of your total subscribers read your posts within a certain time period, normally 24 hours. The higher the better. 
• Post popularity – This can be measured by views, shares, forwards, comments (if enabled) and reactions. Comparing the popularity of posts will tell you what content is working with that audience.
• Churn rate – This is how quickly people leave your channel. You want people to stay engaged with your content as long as possible, so you want the churn rate to be low. This is calculated by dividing lost subscribers in the period by total subscribers at the start of the period, and multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.

This guide has been written by the experienced team here at signalDP. We’re the world’s leading decentralized trading signals distribution platform. We help providers distribute, monitor and monetize their trading signals in their own Telegram channels. Our platform is free to use and aims to transform the way you do business.

Throughout our time with signalDP, we’ve come across thousands of trading signal providers, a lot of which are on Telegram. We’ve seen the best of the best, with a seven-figure business being created using little more than a respected trader’s insight, a telegram channel, an understanding of their target clients, and some hard work. 

We’ve also seen the hidden gems, the shooting stars that burn out, and yes – we’ve seen the outright scams that thankfully die out pretty quickly. We’ve taken all of this experience and we’ve condensed it into an easy to follow, step-by-step guide.

The book begins with a refresher section and assumes that you already have a basic understanding of financial markets, social media, Telegram and business. It covers the main characteristics that make a high-quality trading signals channel and includes some practical tips, examples and processes for developing one. 

The second section assumes you’ve followed the first, and focuses on how to monetize your channel. Although we see it a lot, there’s little point in trying to monetize a channel with poor content.

We hope you’ll find the information here useful. We truly believe that this guide contains everything you need to know to make more money from offering trading signals on Telegram.

To your success,

The signalDP team.