The Three Keys to a Successful Stream

Pursuing livestreaming as a career is an amazing journey and experience. However for most people, it can be a very difficult and risky task.

Today we are going to break down into three parts what every streamer needs to cover to produce a successful stream.

Quality

Content

Exposure

These three realms are very important and they depend on each other. Without all three you will find that streaming in 2020 will be very difficult. Each category requires a lot of your time and attention and as the streamer, it’s your job to ensure you cover all of them.



Quality

Since it’s the easiest, lets start with quality. What is it? Well, with streaming quality is very simple but extremely important. Quality sets you apart from all beginner streamers. Quality is having a basic camera, a mic, steady internet and no choppyness in the game capture. Smooth city. Now don’t misunderstand, you don’t have to have expensive equipment. You just need the very basics. If we can see and hear you clearly without a bunch of distortion or background noise, then that arena is covered. You can always upgrade later down the road if you find it to be necessary. The best thing you can do is keep things simple and smooth.

Content

Content is a great challenge for many people and comes in many forms. For a streamer, content is a combination of their personality, the vibe and art style of the stream, the game/footage on screen, and most importantly the performance of the streamer. Many streamers go live on twitch and simply play a game. With so many people doing only this, it has become saturated and in my opinion, is no longer a viable form of content for a stream. You have to do so much more. Imagine yourself on a stage with a mic, and thousands of people are watching you. You have no game, no video to react to, only you. You and you alone. You are now tasked with entertaining the crowd.

Not every streamer can just up and do this naturally. It has to be developed over time. Most of us are just gamers and lovers of internet media. We don’t have professional training or even much practice. Every time you get in front of that mic and camera, when you hit the start stream button take the opportunity to extend your personality and practice being the performer. It’s your job as the streamer to entertain the viewers! This takes much practice, and with as much as most people stream, there is plenty of time to be doing that.

People are attracted to magnetic personalities, and being magnetic is not something that is unattainable to those who don’t have it naturally. Next time you talk about “the grind” don’t think of it as grinding followers and subs. Think of it as grinding your own skill set as an entertainer.

Exposure

To be fair most streamers have the quality and content part of things down pretty well. Most of you reading this are probably of that crowd. However most streamers also do not have the exposure problem solved. Most streamers do not understand the value and importance of exposure, and go live time and time again without an answer to this critical need.

Without exposure, it’s very difficult to get viewers. Many of you reading this probably do not have many viewers and always wonder where they hell you can get them from. I see people post go live tweets on accounts that do not have large followings. I see people posting in twitch support forums. I see people participate in lurk 4 lurk schemes. I see people try to get other streamers to give them hosts. None of these methods work.

Exposure is by far the most difficult chunk of the formula to figure out. Every streamer is different! And many successful streamers have solved this problem in their own unique ways, ways that most of us will never know. It is the duty of the streamer to bring themselves real life exposure by any means necessary.

Example methods:

Build yourself up on another platform first and send relevant traffic back to yourself. This article is a great example of this. Streamers are reading this, and sometimes you guys come check me out. Relevant off platform content. Very difficult to pull off successfully.

Befriend bigger creators and try to squad up with them while they are live. If you are extremely high skilled at your common game, hang out in someones community long enough, you can attempt to get a message to the bigger streamer through their mods. Hang out in their streams, like all of their tweets, and have a big presence in their discord. If you do it right this can work!

Host tournaments for games and advertise them on tournament websites and your stream title. This exposes you to all the people looking at these sites and keywords. It’s like magic! Make sure your tournaments are up to expected standards for whatever game you host them in.

Host custom matches in games with server browsers. This exposes you to all the people looking for custom games. A good example is PUBG. Create a custom game, name it after your twitch url, and watch people flow in.

Rent a game server in a popular game and name it after your twitch stream. Manage the server well and it will always be full, promoting your stream.

These are just a handful of methods I have personally used, but again, it’s up to the streamer to figure this out. There are many unique methods out there just waiting to be discovered!

Conclusion

In conclusion, without the three elements listed above you will have a difficult time getting your stream to take off. People don’t want to watch choppy streams, people don’t want to watch boring streams, and most importantly, people can’t even find a choppy boring stream without it being available to them to know about.

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