99% of people that learn to stream fail and then quit because they don't understand the reality of being a successful streamer it can be a lot of work and a ton of frustration at times so let's use the kiss method to prevent that and no I'm not going to give you a big smooch unless you're into that kiss stands for keep it simple stupid so let's do exactly that in three steps and all three of these steps work together so don't skip a step I'm watching you if I started streaming in 2023 the first thing I would do is develop a Content strategy and our content strategy is going to consist of three simple steps so we'll start with the first one and that's going to be streaming less and planning more but Cody how am I supposed to grow if I'm not streaming 8 hours plus a day to 0 to two viewers calm down there friend I got you first I would focus on developing a bunch of interesting stream ideas and coming up with a gimmick or hook for the stream you'd like to do for example instead of just playing through Dark Souls like a normal streamer would you could add a gimmick like every time I die in Dark Souls my keybinds randomized which would be crazy and chaotic that'll give you so much more of an interesting Edge to your competition which will make you stand out and your viewers more likely to choose your stream over theirs and you could even title the video beating Dark Souls but every death my keybinds randomized so that'll already make your stream Stand Out compared to the competition but they'll also be more willing to click on your stream if you're rocking a fresh new overlay and that's where today's sponsor comes in own.tv is honestly one of my favorite place to design my stream especially with their stream design bestseller packages there's so many different ones to choose from for example we can click on this cool Enchanted series 1 and we can look at the stream preview on the left hand side and make this bad boy full screen you'll see that we get literally everything we need for our stream including webcam overlays alerts panels below our stream and starting soon ending and gameplay scenes so if you want to make your stream Stand Out amongst all the competition I'll leave a link down below where you can grab one then after our stream is looking fresh and we got our stream idea picked already then we can move on to step two and that'll be a combination of picking out where to stream and how to get the most out of our content we'll first focus on our live content and then we'll see how we can repurpose that live content to our viewers even when we're not live streaming so let's quickly zoom out we can think of the four major platforms twitch kick YouTube and Tik Tok and these will be our main vessels and platforms that we can use to our advantage three of these platforms being twitch kick and YouTube will focus on the live content for whereas Tik Tok and YouTube once again will focus on making offline content for this way we'll have a nice balance of online content as well as offline content so that way we can get discovered even when we're not live streaming so my plan would be to either just stream to Twitch or multi streaming to kick YouTube and possibly Tik Tok live studio if you have access to it now I left twitch out of the multi streaming because it's currently against their terms of service to multistream from twitch to YouTube or kick however they actually haven't done anything to enforce that and I haven't seen anyone get banned or any repercussions from it so if you want to multistream please do it at your own risk however I do not condone that the choice is entirely up to you and the reason for multi streaming at this point is that our audiences are split everywhere now there is a big chunk on Twitch but there's also new audiences on Kick YouTube and Tik Tok as well so really you want to try and cover all your bases also if you're new to streaming and you want an in-depth guide holding your hand step by step to learn how to stream to Twitch and build a twitch channel from nothing you can check out my Ultimate Guide to starting a twitch Channel Down Below this video but after you've chosen where you want to stream and have actually done that live stream then we can move on to step three and that's editing down your live stream into a long form YouTube video as well as little short form content clips that we can post to Tik Tok YouTube Instagram Twitter wherever now for the first portion of making that long form YouTube video basically what I would do is use a free video editor like Da Vinci resolve that's the one that I use and I would edit down your live stream to just having the major parts and getting rid of any awkward and dead air that normal live stream would have so it's basically like a condensed package of that long live stream you did while still hitting on all the major aspects of that stream once you're done editing that down into a nice condensed YouTube video then you can focus on making a nice clickable thumbnail which is honestly really important when it comes to YouTube and discoverability because how are people supposed to even watch your stream or the video if the packaging the title and thumbnail aren't worth clicking on a free program that I use for all of my thumbnails is pixler which I'll leave link down below and there's literally tons of guides on YouTube for making thumbnails and pixers but then once you're done with your thumbnail you got to focus on making a nice and catchy and clickable title because the title and thumbnail are everything for YouTube and you can use tools like I do like this one it'll help you with titles and more to help grow your channel and get more views on your videos I like to use this tool specifically to see what people are actively searching on for help to get more traffic on my videos and actually show up in search rankings which could be a powerful growth tool and that's even on the free version but I really like it for the paid features like being able to upload two thumbnails for videos and it'll tell me which one's better and will get more views so I'll also leave a free trial link just for you guys down below as well after you're done making that long form condensed YouTube video of that stream you can then edit out short moments like funny or crazy things that happen during the stream and then turn those into short form vertical format videos where you can easily post them to YouTube shorts Tik Tok Instagram reals or Twitter and you can use free tools like streamlabs cross cut or cap cut in order to turn that stream from a horizontal video into vertical format videos and they honestly make the process pretty simple and easy that way you get so much more utility and use out of just that one live stream now because after your stream is ended people will still be able to watch and experience your live stream through the offline content that you've created on YouTube Tik Tok Twitter and more the offline content is honestly where the secret really lies in order to start growing your stream because you simply can't be live streaming 20 4 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year and still be entertaining that's literally crazy that's why you should be using all of these platforms to your advantage if you want to learn how to multistream using OBS or streamlabs watch the top playlist here or if you want to grow your YouTube channel watch the bottom playlist but my name's Cody and I'll see you in the next one