- 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.
