Affiliate Marketing on Telegram: What Works in 2026

How does affiliate marketing on Telegram work?

Affiliate marketing on Telegram means you share tracked links to products or offers with your channel readers, group members, or bot users, and you earn a commission or a fixed payout when someone buys, signs up, or completes a required action. On Telegram the money is usually made in four places: disclosed posts in a channel, a bot that gives each user a personal link, Telegram’s own affiliate programs for mini apps, and an offerwall inside a bot or mini app. What works is relevant offers, honest posts, and per-post tracking. What gets accounts limited is sending links to people who did not ask for them.

For other ways to earn, such as ad revenue sharing and Star subscriptions, see How to make money with a Telegram channel and How to monetize a Telegram bot. The Telegram rules quoted below were checked on October 21, 2026.

Five ways to run affiliate offers on Telegram

Most Telegram affiliates start with links in channel posts and add a bot once they want better tracking.

If you are new to paid actions in general, CPA marketing for beginners explains how CPA offers, payouts, and networks work before you add Telegram to the picture.

Telegram rules that apply to affiliate links

Telegram has no single affiliate policy. The rules come from several documents.

Terms of Service and the spam rules

Telegram’s Terms of Service are short. Users agree not to use Telegram to send spam or harass users, and not to engage in activities recognized as illegal in most countries.

The Telegram spam FAQ explains how limits work. When people press Report spam, moderators review the messages, and if the report is justified the account is limited, usually for a few days on a first offense. A limited account can still message its contacts and reply to people who wrote first, but cannot start chats with strangers. The FAQ says unsolicited ads, links, and invite links draw the most reports, and repeat offenders may lose the ability to message strangers for good.

Bot Platform Developer Terms

If you use a bot or mini app, the Bot Platform Developer Terms apply too. We found no clause that names affiliate links or referral programs, either allowing or forbidding them. These clauses clearly matter:

• Section 5.2(b): your bot must not harass or spam users with unsolicited messages. Broadcasting deals to everyone who ever pressed Start is the obvious risk.
• Section 5.2(d): your bot must not misrepresent what it provides or mislead users into actions in pursuit of an unachievable outcome. The examples include MLM and ponzi schemes and social growth manipulation, so “get rich” style offers are out.
• Section 5.2(f): you must not try to get around Telegram’s rate limits and moderation.
• Section 6.2: digital goods and services sold in a bot or mini app must be paid only in Telegram Stars. A premium deals feed you sell inside your bot must be priced in Stars.
• Section 7.4: mini apps may not directly or indirectly promote cryptoassets that are not based on TON, or link users to external platforms that do. Many crypto exchange affiliate offers fall under this, so keep them out of a mini app.
• Section 4: every bot and mini app needs an accessible privacy policy that matches what it really does. If your bot logs which post a user came from and passes IDs to an affiliate network, say so.

The affiliate program and merchant rules

The program you promote has rules too. Check that it accepts messaging traffic and incentivized traffic (rewarding people for the action), which countries it pays for, and whether you may use its brand name. Breaking them usually costs you the commissions.

Telegram’s own affiliate programs for mini apps

Telegram runs a native affiliate system for mini apps that sell digital products for Stars. According to Telegram’s affiliate programs page, it works in two directions.

Joining a program as a channel or user

• Open Settings, My Stars, Earn Stars to see active programs. You can join as many as you like.
• Each program shows a commission rate and a commission period. You earn that share of the Stars a referred user spends in the mini app, for as long as the period lasts.
• A user only counts as your referral if they start the mini app for the first time through your link.
• When you create a link, you choose which balance receives the Stars, for example your own account or your channel. That cannot be changed later; you would need a new link with a different URL.
• Physical products sold through payment providers earn affiliates nothing. Only Stars purchases of digital products count.

The same page asks you to share links responsibly and warns that sending them to strangers or posting them in public groups could lead to temporary limits on your account. Post them in your own channel or bot, where people chose to follow you.

Running a program for your own mini app

If you own a mini app, you can start a program from its profile, and only the owner account can create, change, or end it. The rate and period can only be raised after launch; to lower them you have to end the program and start a new one.

How to disclose affiliate links in a Telegram post

Telegram has no built-in label for affiliate links, so the disclosure is up to you. In the US, the FTC’s Endorsement Guides FAQ says the closer the disclosure is to your recommendation, the better, that readers may not understand the words “affiliate link”, that “paid link” next to the link should be adequate, and that a single disclosure on a home page is not sufficient. It also says disclosures should be visible without clicking “more”. The same thinking carries over to a channel:

• Put the disclosure in the same post as the link, in the first lines, not in the channel description or a pinned post from last year.
• Use plain words: “I earn a commission if you sign up through this link” or “Paid link”.
• In a bot, put the disclosure in the message that carries the link button, not only in /help.

Other countries have their own advertising rules, and this is general information, not legal advice. Affiliate disclosure rules covers the wording and the main regulators in more detail.

Track every channel and post with sub IDs

Telegram shows post views, not sales. Sub IDs fill that gap: values you add to a tracked link and get back in the network’s reports and postbacks. What are click IDs and sub IDs? explains how they travel.

Route posts through your bot

The cleanest setup sends every post link to your bot instead of straight to the merchant. Telegram’s bot deep linking lets a link carry a start parameter of up to 64 characters, made of letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens. When a user opens the link in a private chat, your bot receives it as a /start message with the parameter after a space:

https://t.me/YourDealsBot?start=ch1_p482

Your bot reads ch1_p482 (channel 1, post 482), stores it with the user, and builds the outgoing link with that source in the network’s sub ID fields. You see which post brought each click, you can show the offer’s current requirements first, and you can swap a dead offer without editing old posts. Mini apps have the same idea through the startapp parameter described in the Mini Apps documentation.

A sub ID plan for Telegram

Never put a username or phone number in a sub ID.

eCPM and EPC explained shows how to compare sources this way, and CTR vs CVR helps you see whether a weak post lost people at the click or at the conversion.

What converts on a Telegram channel

Readers chose to follow you and can mute you with one tap. The posts that keep earning would be useful even without the link.

• Offers that match the channel. A gaming channel promotes a new game with a level goal; a travel channel promotes a booking app. Off-topic offers cost views on every later post.
• Specific, honest posts. Say what the reader must do, how long it takes, and what they get: “Install, reach level 10 within 7 days, earn the bonus. Took me about two evenings.” Copy the requirements from the offer page, not from memory.
• Country fit. CPA offers usually pay only in certain countries. Say which countries an offer is for.
• Timing you measured. There is no universal best hour. Tag each posting time in sub3 and keep the slot that earns most per 1,000 views.
• A steady ratio. Keep most posts free of links, or readers stop opening them.

Growth comes first. How to get Telegram channel subscribers covers building an audience that reads, which is what affiliate income depends on.

What gets Telegram channels and accounts limited

If you believe a limit was a mistake, the spam FAQ says to contact @SpamBot. Limits cannot be lifted early.

How an offerwall in a bot or mini app differs from posting links

A posted affiliate link is the same for every reader. The merchant pays you if someone converts, and the reader gets the product. An offerwall works the other way round: every user opens it with a link your server signs for that user, the advertiser pays you per completed offer, and you credit part of that payout to the user in your bot’s own currency. Offerwall vs affiliate links compares the two models in general.

Because a signed link credits whoever it was built for, you cannot paste it into a channel post. Instead, the channel post links to your bot, and the bot replies in the private chat with that user’s own link, the same deep link pattern as above. Sharklio’s rules do not allow paying or rewarding people to click tracking links outside the wall, so the reward must come only from completing offers through the user’s own link. Promoting your offerwall: allowed and prohibited ways lists the rest.

For the build, follow Add an offerwall to a Telegram Mini App or the /earn command in the Telegram bot guide. If you are deciding between charging users Stars and letting them earn, Telegram Stars vs offerwall runs both models on the same channel.

Frequently asked questions