- What's up, guys?
Pete here from Gaming Careers.
Today, looking at a brand new service
that Streamlabs has just announced, called Creator Sites.
Nowadays, if you want to become a successful streamer,
or content creator, it is vitality important
that you have a presence online.
In countless videos now,
I have talked about how important it is to engage
with social media, interact with your community,
and build a brand online.
But, with all these different social medias,
it's a little bit of a mess.
You have your Twitch channel where you livestream to,
you have YouTube where you probably upload videos.
You have Instagram and Twitter,
where you share posts and photos with your community,
as well as interacting with other streamers.
All of these social platforms are amazing
and you should absolutely be using them
'cause they're very good at doing their specific job.
But you don't really have a central location
where you can share things about you
and control the type of content that you share.
If somebody wanted to learn more about you
and see all of your online presence in one place,
they'd be stuck.
There isn't a single page location
that you can send people to, to learn more about you.
People have typically tried
to use their Twitch profile to do this,
using those panels that you have
below the Twitch video player
to describe some things about them, talk about sponsors,
advertise, merch, and things like that.
But it's still just so restrictive
as to what you can and can't do.
You can't embed recent YouTube videos,
or Twitter posts, or Instagram posts.
You can't advertise and actually sell your merchandise,
and you can't even accept donations
without linking off to an external page.
Maybe worst of all is that,
if you do share your Twitch profile with somebody,
and you're not streaming when they click through
to look at it, your main page that you arrive at
is taken up by a massive offline image.
So it's not really a great experience
for sharing what you're all about with somebody else.
At the rate that the streaming market is growing at,
there are so many companies arriving at this space
looking for influences of all sizes to work with.
And you might think, yeah,
but they're only wanting to work with the big guns,
the people at the top of the directory.
But there's actually now a massive push
and lot's of research done,
behind what they call micro-influences.
People that have smaller followings
but very, very loyal followings.
And a lot of companies are now looking
to work with smaller creators as well.
So the only real way of solving this problem in the past,
was to create your own website where you could advertise
what you're about, your schedule, your merchandise,
you can sell things through there.
You can talk about the equipment that you use,
you can bring in all of your different social medias
and things like that.
But creating a website is a complicated thing to do.
You could go the self-hosted, or WordPress route,
where you have to deal with things like DNS records,
HTML, things not really looking as you want to.
You have to do a lot of research,
and probably quite a lot of work,
to get things looking as you want them too.
Or, you could use a service like Wix or SquareSpace.
They've become very popular in the previous years.
And you get a very nice looking website,
and it's much easier to work with.
But they've not really been built
for Twitch streamers or YouTube creators,
where embedding things like your livestream and chat,
they haven't really got the functionality to do that yet.
Well that is the problem that Streamlabs are trying to solve
with their new Creator Sites.
Creator Sites are highly customizable,
yet incredibly easy to build websites
that you can use to show your livestream,
your chat, your social media posts, recent videos,
your streaming schedule, sell your merchandise.
Basically, anything you want to do,
all in one central location for both your audience
and any potential brands looking for creators to work with.
Now, I totally get it.
If you're new to streaming
and you're wanting to grow your audience,
you're just starting out,
creating a website probably isn't at the top of your list.
You have a hundred other things that you need to be doing
to try and grow your audience.
Especially, if you're having to deal with a full-time job
or school, or something else that takes up the majority
of your time, and streaming is really just a hobby.
But for those of you that are wanting
to represent yourself online in a more professional way,
or you're nearing that tipping point of going full-time,
or getting partnered.
I really do think spending 30 to 45 minutes
creating a website where you advertise all of the things
that you're doing online is well worth it.
So what exactly do Streamlabs Creator Sites allow you to do?
Well, as I said before, it's a super simple,
yet highly customizable, website builder.
You can choose from some predefined themes
to get you started or completely create your own,
which allows you to upload your own background images,
choose colors, fonts, and styling, and things like that.
As you can see here, Streamlabs have already pulled in
some things automatically from my Twitch account,
like my avatar and name.
But here is where the real fun of customizing begins.
You can simply drag and drop to add whatever elements
you want into your website.
Choosing from an absolutely massive list.
Things like contact forms, social feeds,
images, sponsor banners, leader boards, your livestream,
your merch, your streaming schedule, your social reach,
tipping module, YouTube videos.
And you can choose exactly where these go
and how they are arranged in your website.
Obviously, I would recommend adding your stream to this page
and stream chat automatically pops in, if you are live.
So, imagine that you're streaming on Twitch, or Mixer,
or on YouTube, which ever player you add into your webpage,
when you go live, the stream will auto-play
and the livestream chat will pop in
from the right hand side.
For the social feeds element,
you can add Twitch clips, Tweets, and YouTube uploads.
And these posts then get chronologically shown in the feed
and they're automatically pulled through
from those networks.
So you never need to come in and manually update
with your latest YouTube video, or something like that.
It's all automatically pulled in
and displayed live on your website.
You can also add all sorts of other platforms
that you are active on and they will display up here
in the header of your website automatically.
This makes it super easy for people to come to your website
and find all of the different platforms
that you're active on.
You can also really easily add in any of the Twitch panels
that you're already using on your Twitch page.
If you already have info in your about me section,
or you're using something like the Streamlabs' Countdown
and Schedule plug-in, you can include them
in your website easily with just a couple of clicks.
One really nice feature,
if you are using Streamlabs integrated merch store
to sell some merchandise to your audience,
is you could simply include the merch element
into your website.
Show off, and directly sell through this website as well.
The idea behind this whole Creator Sites system
that Streamlabs have built, is that it's really easy to use
and it's perfect for those online content creators,
streamers, or YouTubers.
People like that, that want to have a central location
on the web telling more information to their audience
and any potential brands what they're about
and also displaying all of the cool stuff
that they're doing online.
So, Streamlabs have two different tiers
for these Creator Sites.
There's the free tier that allows you to do everything
that I have just talked about.
And they also have a paid version,
that they're calling Prime,
which allows for some additional features
around a domain name, some custom email addresses,
some advance SEO settings.
As well as a bigger selection of different themes
that you can start working with.
This paid tier, Prime, costs $150 a year,
or $12.50 per month, and I'll go through some
of the advance features that you get now.
The custom domain name option allows you
to host your website at a completely custom domain.
So something like, for me,
something like gamingcareers.tv,
or gamingcareers.com, gamingcareers.live,
or absolutely anything that you want.
Obviously, for you it won't be Gaming Careers,
but it'll be maybe your username.tv, or username.com,
whatever's available.
One thing worth mentioning here,
is that you can't buy a .gg domain.
I presume this is probably because .gg domains
are incredibly expensive.
I think they're like $80 per year or something, anyway.
So it wouldn't really make sense
for Streamlabs to be able to offer this included
in their package price, anyway.
So, .com, .tv, .live, there's absolutely loads
that they suggest for you.
And, also, if you do already own your own domain name,
you can, of course, move that across
and use that domain name to host the website as well.
The custom email addresses allow you
to then use this domain name that you have chosen
and create any kind of professional email address around it.
So, instead of using like a gmail,
like I use to have hihamingcareers@gmail.com
when I started out.
But instead, now, if you did go for the Prime option,
you could use hello@gamingcareers.com,
or pete@gamingcareers.tv,
or steve@gamingcareers.live, whatever you like.
So it's any name, at, and then your domain name
that you've chosen at the end.
Although this doesn't sound like the most important feature,
I can't explain how much better it feels
to talk to somebody, or some brand,
and be able to give them a proper company-style
email address.
It just sounds so much more professional
and they're going to know
that you take yourself quite seriously in this.
Now, $150 per year certainly isn't cheap.
But when you compare it to the likes of Wix and SquareSpace,
they're nearer about $300 per year.
So, about half the price of that.
And I really hope that Streamlabs continue
to poor lots of development time into these Creator Sites,
giving you more themes,
more things that you can embed into it.
And basically, just more customization
to make these really personalized
and really advanced as well.
Obviously, since there is a free version,
I'd recommend everybody really goes over
and plays with the free version.
At the very least,
you're going to make a more appealing donations page
that you can use for your streams.
If you do decided to upgrade to their Prime,
and premium option, then Streamlabs have been kind enough
to offer me a voucher code that you guys can use
to get yourself $10 off.
I'll leave it on-screen here,
as well as down in the description below,
if you do want to use it.
I'm really excited to see what people do
with these Streamlabs' Creator Sites.
And what Streamlabs does in terms of the development
and the continued improvement of them as well.
As I said before,
this tipping point of people going full-time with streaming,
is always coming down.
It used to be maybe a hundred creators, then a thousand,
and now there's so many people who are partnered
and able to do this full-time.
And I hope that we see people start
to represent themselves more professionally online,
using the Streamlabs' Creator Sites.
If you have enjoyed the video, please do give a thumbs up.
And if you haven't already subscribed,
I would highly recommend doing so.
Finally, I do want to give a massive thanks
to all my patrons this month.
These people help me do this as a full-time job,
keep creating content for you guys,
and tutorials, and things like that.
So, I am massively thankful to all of them.
And subscribers, I'll see you in the next video.
Peace!
(upbeat music)