- What's up guys?
Welcome back once again
to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel.
This whole channel is completely dedicated
to helping you learn how to livestream,
and this video really encompasses that
as we're going to be trying our best
to get through 100 livestreaming tips in under 10 minutes.
Now this idea actually came to me at TwitchCon,
a fan came and suggested this idea.
I think they had just watched a video
that was similar to do with film making
where they tried to cover 100 tips in 10 minutes.
So ever since then I've kept a note on my phone
where I can jot down all the ideas
that I have for these 100 tips.
Obviously, I'm going to be rattling through these tips
at a pretty rapid speed,
so if there is anything that you need more context on,
be sure to check in the description
in case I have expanded on it at all,
or come into the Gaming Careers' Discord and ask,
as there are plenty of helpful people in there
that can point you in the right direction.
Just before we jump into the tips,
a quick message from today's video sponsor.
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alerts, widgets, and sound effects for your livestream.
I have used Nerd or Die for my livestream for years,
way before I started the Gaming Careers YouTube channel.
You can use the link in the description below,
as well as the coupon code GAMINGCAREERS
for an extra 10% off.
So I have absolutely no idea whether or not
I'm going to cover these within 10 minutes.
You probably do, 'cause you're watching the video now,
but either way, I will have a timer
in one of these bottom corners
to keep track of how long it has taken me
to get through the 100 tips.
So without further ado, let's get started.
Create a private second account on your streaming platform
and test stream to that account before you go live.
Just recording as a test isn't enough
as you won't be testing your internet connection.
The closer your mic can be to your mouth, the better.
This can help eliminate keyboard and background noise.
You can set up automatic profiles on your Stream Deck
so that different profiles get shown
when certain applications are open.
If you use a webcam, make sure you are lit well.
All cameras and webcams perform much better with more light.
Make sure to have some water nearby you when streaming.
It is really important to stay hydrated.
Set up a limiter for your microphone
in your streaming software, so that even if you scream
or shout, your audio doesn't peak and distort.
Write down a plan before you go live.
What games are you going to play
and what stories are you going to tell?
It's important to make sure
that you have things to talk about
in case your chat aren't interacting.
Watch some other streamers of all sizes
and ask yourself, what are they doing differently?
And what can you incorporate into your stream yourself?
Spend some time after your stream
creating clips and highlights of the best bits
that you can share on social media for the following days.
Ask some other streams who you are friends with
for some constructive criticism on your stream.
It's important to get feedback
from those who are in the industry.
Watch back your own streams with a critical eye.
What could be done better?
Is it entertaining enough for people to stay?
Use stream markers to mark certain times in your livestream
that you want to look back on once you've finished.
You can do so from your Twitch dashboard
or from a stream deck if you have one.
Ask some of your regular viewers
if they want to be moderators.
They can help with keeping chat as you want it
as well as responding to common questions.
Set up a chatbot that does some auto moderation for you
and can promote your social medias on a timed message.
Don't become obsessed with the statistics.
Having little to no viewership
when you are starting out is normal.
Focus instead on learning and becoming a better streamer.
Add a cool scene transition between scenes
to keep things interesting and show some branding.
You can use specific transitions for specific scenes.
If you only have one monitor,
then you can use the restream chat application
to overlay your chat on top of your game,
so that you can keep up.
Try and reduce as many background noises as you can.
Close windows, turn off noisy fans,
and use a quieter mechanical keyboard.
You should be constantly keeping an eye
on your stream info while streaming.
Nobody like a stream that is dropping frames constantly.
Add alerts for followers, subscribers, and donations
to encourage your viewers to interact with you.
(coughs) Nerd or Die. (coughs)
Start your stream with a countdown
or a stream starting soon scene
to gather your viewers in anticipation.
Just don't leave it for more than five minutes,
as nobody likes to wait for ages.
Add your Twitch chat as an overlay
to your intermission scene between games.
People love seeing their names on screen.
Use the Twitch Inspector to solve stream issues
without actually having to go live to your audience.
Use Twitch Strike to find games
that aren't overly saturated,
yet still have a decent enough viewer-base for you to grow.
Use a Noise Gate within your streaming software
to completely silence on your mic when you aren't talking.
Set some realistic goals for yourself
that you want to achieve each week, month, and year.
Don't make these goals number specific,
but things that will actually help.
Try out some different streaming software available,
even just for 20 minutes.
We now live in a world with multiple options for streaming,
OBS, SLOBS, OBS.Live, and Xsplit,
and you might find something you like.
Group your webcam overlay sources together,
so that moving and resizing them becomes easy.
Avoid the red part of the mixer.
If things are hitting that, then you need to turn them down.
Your voice should be in the orange section
and all other sounds in the green.
You can move sources up and down in the sources list
using Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down,
or you can move things to the top or the bottom of the list
using Ctrl+Home or Ctrl+End.
Ctrl+F will automatically scale a source
to fill the full screen.
Ctrl+D centers a source in the very middle of the screen.
You can then use the up, down, left, and right arrows
to fine tune its position.
You can hold down the Alt key
and drag the bounding box to crop a source.
You can hold down Ctrl key
to temporarily disable source snapping,
which allows more precise positioning.
If you find yourself dropping frames,
that means you haven't got a stable connection
to the server that you're streaming to.
This usually means that you can't keep up
with the bitrate that you have set.
So try lowering the bitrate.
Make sure your camera and audio are in sync with each other.
The easiest way to test this is to clap in frame.
If thing need changing,
you'll either need to delay you video
or delay your audio using the sync offsets.
For capturing games, use Game Capture wherever you can.
The performance hit on your PC
will be less than Window Capture
and Display Capture is usually a bad viewer experience.
If you're confused about where to start
with your stream settings, run the auto-configuration wizard
to get a rough starting point.
If you are constantly having to swap scenes
whenever you get into game,
look at using OBS' Auto Scene Switcher plugin
to handle this automatically.
Twitch might not be the best platform to start on.
Consider using a service like restream to stream
to multiple platforms simultaneously whilst starting out.
Use a free or cheap overlay when starting out.
You can invest more as your stream grows.
Socialize and interact with other streamers
on Twitter, Twitch, and Discord.
Making friends in this space is absolutely vital
for your growth and sanity.
Use a webcam filter to make your webcam look more cinematic.
I have a pack of 30 free filters
that you can download from my website.
You can unlock and rearrange the layout in OBS
to look however you'd like.
Customize it to help manage your stream.
Use a green screen if you want
to isolate yourself from your background.
There are plenty of cheap ones available on Amazon.
If you have a fun background where you can display
some cool things about your personality,
then don't use a green screen.
Use Streamlabs Face Masks or a Snapchat Lens
to add comedic filters to your webcam
when somebody donates or subscribes.
Stop streaming Fortnite and complaining
about little to no growth.
There are currently 3,000 people streaming Fortnite.
You're only going to make things hard for yourself.
Do whatever you can to attend TwitchCon or TwitchCon Europe.
It's an absolutely awesome experience
and you'll meet loads of like-minded individuals
and come back hungrier than ever to stream.
Unless you need it for streaming, put your phone aside.
Checking your phone or texting every time you're bored
is a surefire way to ensure any viewers will be bored, too.
Tweet out and post in your Discord
something interesting before you go live.
Try not to do just a generic live tweet,
but something a little more engaging.
Use a cheap boom arm to get your microphone off your desk
and close to your mouth.
Use a pop filter on your mic to help prevent P's
and B's from peaking your audio.
Talk to anyone and everyone who comes into your stream.
Even when nobody's there,
talk through what you are doing in-game.
You need to be filling that silence.
If you have a newer NVIDIA graphics card,
experiment with using NVENC as your encoder.
It'll free up your CPU and can help with system performance.
Use the Twitch Test Tool to test your connection
to all of the Twitch servers.
Select the server with the highest quality,
and if that matches another server,
then choose the one with the best bandwidth.
Don't go spending thousands of dollars
on your streaming setup when you are brand new.
That investment can come later on
if things go well for you.
Instead, start a stable livestream.
Have a stream schedule.
Even if it's just once a week and for two hours,
having that schedule where people can know
when you'll next be live is key to growth.
Make use of the tags when you set your title
and game for your livestream on Twitch.
You never know what will help somebody discover you.
Have some events for your stream.
24 hour charity streams,
spicy nut challenges, or even just nights
where you play games with your viewers directly.
People love an event, just keep it rare enough
to actually keep it considered as an event.
Enable Studio Mode if you want to be able
to edit a scene whilst you are live,
It looks much more professional
since you won't be editing the scene
that you are displaying to your audience.
Set colors for your sources to help you easily identify
which is which at a glance.
Name your scenes and sources properly.
There's nothing worse than not knowing which source is which
because you were too lazy when setting it up.
You can hide individual sources
from a scene by clicking the eye icon.
Click the lock icon next to a source
prevents it from being able to moved.
Assign a hotkey to muting your mic.
You'll never know when you need to cough or sneeze
and it will help prevent deafening your audience.
If you want to record your stream,
set the recording type to MKV.
Yes, it's super convenient to have mp4,
but if anything happens, like your PC crashes
or your stream crashes, the whole recording will be lost.
It you set it to MKV,
that means that you'll never lose a recording
no matter what happens,
and when the recording is done,
you can go to File, Remux Recordings,
select the MKV file and the destination,
and it will convert the MKV into mp4
so that you can use it in any editing program.
Setup multiple profiles to have different settings
for different use cases.
So you sometimes use OBS to do something different,
like to record a tutorial or a podcast maybe?
Scene collections are your friend.
Collaborate with other streamers.
We have a channel dedicated to finding collabs
in the Gaming Careers' Discord,
and it's a great way to not only meet other streamers,
but get exposure to each other's audiences.
Add your friends' channels to your auto-host list.
This way Twitch will automatically host them
on your channel whenever you aren't live.
It's a nice way of sharing the love.
Raid another channel when you're ending your stream.
It's a cool way of interacting with other streamers
and giving your viewers somewhere to go.
Browse through the Twitch Extension page
and find some cool ways
to add more functionality to your stream.
If you reach affiliate or partner,
make some emotes and badges to reward your subs
and encourage your viewers to subscribe.
Add some seasonality to your stream.
So if there's a big national holiday coming up,
like Christmas, adding some Christmas lights to your layout
can be a nice surprise for your viewers.
If you're heading to a convention or a meetup,
get some business cards printed for cheap
that you can give to people
that you've had a good conversation with.
Add a live countdown and a schedule to your Twitch panels.
You can even use a Twitch Extension
that will automatically convert your schedule
to the viewers timezone.
Have some kind of branding for your stream,
even if it's just as simple as a few colors
that you use consistently across
your social medias and your stream.
Use the Twitch Panels editor to add
some more information about yourself below your stream.
Be interactive and energetic on stream.
You're the host of the show,
so you need to be bringing some form of value
for people to watch.
You can skip or replay alerts
from either your Streamlabs or StreamElements dashboard.
Enabling text-to-speech for new subscriptions
is definitely a way of bringing entertainment
to your stream, but I'd recommend setting some level
of moderation to this to prevent spammy repetitive messages.
If you're gaming with friends on Discord,
have a push-to-mute and push-to-deafen hotkey setup
so that you can directly talk
with your stream if you want to.
Email your subs once in a while,
thanking them for their support.
Just don't do it so often that you'll be considered spammy.
Make sure that you update your stream title
and the current game that you're playing each stream.
There's nothing worse than your fans expecting you
to be playing something you aren't.
When sharing a highlight on Twitter,
download it first from your Twitch dashboard
and then upload that video file to Twitter,
rather than just posting the Twitch Clip link.
Twitter prioritizes video uploads in Tweets over links,
and they can autoplay, making them more engaging.
If you are good and high skilled at the game that you play,
tell your viewers exactly what you are thinking in game
and why you're making certain decisions you do.
People on Twitch will tune into high-skilled streamers
playing the game they like to learn and improve.
Display your social media on stream
so that people know where they can follow you
once your stream is offline.
Use animated backgrounds over static ones
to keep things interesting, as long as your PC
is powerful enough to be able to run it while streaming.
You can use powerful VST plugins for audio
if you want to delve deep into your microphone setup.
Use the NDI plugin for dual PC setups
without needing to purchase a capture card.
If you can, then put your streaming setup in a carpeted room
or use a rug to help to reduce reverberation.
Keep things simple, most people don't want
to see a scene with 50 different sources
that distract from gameplay.
Take a day off if you're not feeling up to it.
Tweet something out.
I'm sure your fans will understand,
and then you can come back to streaming
when you're feeling 100%.
Use Ethernet, not WiFi, if you're going to be streaming.
Get some exercise before your stream.
Not only will you feel more refreshed,
you'll also be more focused,
and generally be in a better mood.
Set your expectations.
Ninja did not become the number one streamer overnight.
He's been streaming for over five years.
This is not an easy career path,
nor is it a get rich quick scheme.
Stick to a game or a sub-niche of games if you want to grow.
It's much more difficult to grow playing variety.
Streaming video games is literally
one of the coolest things you can do,
so remember to have fun.
So that was it.
Or wait, is that 99?
Is there one more?
I guess you better subscribe to Gaming Careers
with notifications on.
So I have absolutely no idea how long that took overall.
It felt like longer than 10 minutes,
but when I'm cutting it together,
maybe I'll just be bale to nip end it.
I don't know, but hopefully there was 100 useful tips
in there that you can implement for your livestream.
I would just like to say a massive thanks, as always,
to my Patreons this month.
They help me run this channel full time,
and without them I absolutely couldn't do it.
So massive thanks to my Patreons.
If you would like to consider supporting the channel,
then do head over to my Patreon page
and consider supporting.
Subscribers, I will see you in the next video, peace!