- 2019 saw massive growth for the live streaming market.
Not only in terms of the number of hours watched across all
of the different live streaming platforms but also in terms
of the number of creators that are able to reach partnership
and hence, make a full-time income out of it.
This growth is predicted to continue through 2020
and especially now, with these platforms competing
to make sure that the big streamers
are streaming on their platform,
the opportunity to make a full-time career from streaming
is greater now in 2020 than it ever has been before.
So, how exactly can you take advantage of that
and make 2020 the best year for growing your stream?
We're going to be talking about that today in this video
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Realistically, if you want to make streaming
your full-time income, you need to start treating it
as a business, not just as a hobby.
In the past, when sites like Twitch were smaller,
fewer people were able to make a full-time income out of it
and hence, people were just streaming for fun
and growing organically.
That's why you get a lot of the OG streamers, people
that are incredibly popular now but started a long time ago,
saying that they just started streaming for fun
or because they were playing games anyway.
The kind of growth that they have seen is
because they were some of the first adopters
of the live streaming platform.
So, they have grown hand-in-hand as Twitch has.
But now, in 2020, is a completely different landscape.
If you actually look at the data, the number
of viewers per channel on average
has gone down over the last few years,
as Twitch and streaming in general, has become so popular.
Now, the purpose of me telling you this isn't
to demotivate you.
It's actually to motivate you because so many
of these streamers that are streaming
are making the exact same mistake.
Just streaming as much as they can and hoping
that one day they'll get a big raid or a big host
from some massive streamer and then instantly, overnight,
they will become incredibly popular
and that's just not how it works, unfortunately.
If you want streaming to become your full-time income,
you need to start treating it like business
and putting in the work, putting in the hustle required
to get noticed in such a noisy environment.
The first thing that I would recommend doing
is writing down a list of goals for the year 2020.
That's been something that I've been doing personally
and for the Gaming Careers channel for the last few years
and I've been really surprised at
how much of a difference it has made.
I'd recommend writing a list of anywhere between three
and, sort of, 10 things that you want to achieve this year.
And avoid writing any goals that contain specific numbers
for things like followers, viewers or subscribers.
These things, they're all kind of out of your control
and actually require someone else to take an action
for you to meet your goal.
Instead, you want to focus on goals
that will help you improve the content you are making
and, therefore, increase the likelihood of someone choosing
to take an action like following or subscribing
to your stream.
Some good example goals are
to maybe learn some basic graphic design
so you can create your own emotes for your channel
or to post X number of times to Instagram
or Twitter per week, sharing some aspect of your life
with your audience.
Or maybe you could write down a goal
of attending a Twitch Meetup in your nearest city
to meet and network with other creators.
Now, once you've written down these goals,
there's a few different ways
that you could track your progress with them.
If they're more longterm goals,
then I find just putting them somewhere
that you see them quite often like on your fridge
or maybe by your streaming PC can help motivate you as to
why you're doing the things that you're doing.
But if they're more granular things,
things that you need to be doing multiple times a week,
then you can use many different types of apps to be able
to track your progress and making sure
that you're keeping up with your goals.
The second thing that I would encourage you
to spend some time working on is your schedule.
And I'm not just talking about your streaming schedule.
I see far too many streamers just spending all
of their time streaming.
As soon as they get home from work or school,
they start their stream until they kind of go to bed
and they're doing this multiple times a week.
Not only is this unhealthy
but it's also not a productive use of your time
if you're looking for growth.
Twitch, as I'm sure you know,
has a massive discoverability issue.
You need to be using more discoverable platforms
like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, even TikTok
to grow your audience and then you can bring them across
to watch you on Twitch.
The reason these other platforms are more discoverable
is that they rely heavily on recommending content
to their users and there are countless examples of creators
with very small followings having their content recommended
because it is good enough.
So, what this means is you need
to schedule your time more wisely.
Not only when are you going to stream but when are you going
to edit, post to socials, hang out with your community,
record a podcast.
All these other tasks that are required now for growth,
need to be scheduled as well.
As a general blanket statement,
I would recommend spending anywhere between 25% and 50%
of the time that you're currently streaming
and spending that on growing on different platforms instead.
It might sound counter-intuitive
but as long as you are streaming, as well as,
creating content for other platforms,
it's going to be a much better return for your time.
The third thing that I would recommend you do
is spending a few minutes defining your content.
What type of streamer do you want to be?
Do you want to be someone who is incredibly skilled
at a particular game or genre of games?
Who talks their way through the actions and strategies
so viewers can learn a lot from you as you play?
Or do you want to be more of a personality
that people want to hang out with and hear about
what's going on in your life?
Feel free to really hone in here as to
what you want your content to look like.
Do you want to come across as the type of streamer
that is very family-friendly and, generally, positive
or maybe somebody a bit more divisive
with some hard-hitting opinions?
There really is no right and wrong answer.
It's just completely up to you as to
what you want the content to look like.
The reason this is such a useful exercise, is
because it makes you look at your content
for what it really is.
For me, personally, in Gaming Careers,
I've got some really exciting goals for the year of 2020.
Some of which you'll be hearing about as soon as
the next couple of weeks.
So, if you do want to hear about updates
and some behind the scenes of them,
make sure to follow across on Twitter and on Instagram.
Also, if you haven't yet joined the Gaming Careers Discord,
that is a great place to post your goals, ideas
and questions with a whole bunch
of different like-minded creators and links to all
of their social medias are in the description of this video.
Hopefully, you've found this video useful
and you are in the process of writing down some goals
for the year of 2020.
I would love to hear from you what your goals are
so leave them down in the description below
or if you do join Discord, post them in there.
And, hey, if you aren't yet subscribed
to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel,
we'll have plenty of content helping you
with your live streams coming this year.
So, hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell
so you never miss an upload.
Thanks, as always, to my patrons
who have helped support the channel this month
and I wish you all a Happy New Year and looking forward
to hearing more about your streaming journeys in 2020.
Peace.