How to Livestream as a Content Creator (#297)

How to Livestream as a Content Creator (Solo) – Powered by Happy Scribe

Hey, guys. This is Fei from Feisworld podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. It is my pleasure to be here to introduce you to my live content recorded originally in December 2021, and I’m currently working in the script trying to take out bits that are not as relevant as a basically an audio format. But with that said, I would encourage you to tune in on this first episode related to how to livestream as a content creator and what I have learned and benefit from livestream since 2020. Parts of this audio or video are actually looking at a screen towards the second half when I started explaining restream. I think a lot of the content will still make sense as audio, but at any point you want to see the screen. Good news is that Phase World has become a video and audio podcast. So if you’re tuning in on Spotify, you’re able to switch between audio and video and that is completely up to you. Thank you so much and I can’t wait to present this episode to you and look forward to having you join me in the future for our 30 day Live.

Where we’ll be covering everything related to the creator economy and tools and tips and strategies related to content creators not limited to things. Even including taxes. Health insurance. How to get better clients. How to charge. How to work with brands. Platforms such as YouTube. Podcast. Et cetera. I hope you share this episode. I hope you’ll learn a few things and leave me comments, questions from anchor or from our blog post and look forward to hearing from you.

Since the beginning of 2020. In fact, that’s when I decided to go live with all my podcast interviews. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made. One of the top reasons. For instance, number one, I was able to repurpose all that content to be on YouTube in addition to audio format only. Number two, most recently, at the end of October, Spotify announced video podcast. So I was able to join that crew and be able to immediately release all my videos as podcast content and so on Spotify. Now people are able to basically choose between video or audio to watch or to listen to my podcast. And another reason why I’m recording this by the way, you’re not watching this live and I want to be super transparent with you about it. Once again, I’m going to try to go live as much as possible for all my 30 day live content. Today is a special day. I bring my mom to physical therapy. She’s okay, but there is a slight chance that I might not be able to make it back in time to go live from my office. But I’m able to monitor all the comments, so please send them throughout this livestream.

And I’m going to be typing like a crazy woman and trying to answer your questions as much as possible.

As a reminder, you’re able to send.

Me questions related to this Kogan session as well as the previous ones too, and all the future ones. Second reason why I’m recording this is because I want to be able to show you behind the scenes what Restream, where these live streaming tools actually looks like, what a live studio looks like. It is not intimidating. People always worry about going live and I don’t know, pamphlets or something. A lot of things have gone wrong, like zoom bombing or zoom fail. That just gives us anxiety, and lifestreaming no exception. So I want to show you, like, how easy it is to navigate Restream. And that’s the reason why I decided to use Restream is because it’s simple. I don’t have a co host, and I want something that’s reliable, that works. I don’t need fancy plugins. I don’t want to be messing around with OBS because unlike going live on my own right now, I often use Restream to go live with my guests. And the last thing I wanted to do is for things to go wrong.

So, yeah, I want to really show you the details.

So today you will witness exactly how to schedule events. All the bells and whistles, like lower thirds designs, how to add your logo.

And all that is very accessible.

Also, you get to see the different layout layouts of the videos. You’re going live on your own versus going live with one other person, two other people that sort of think, let’s see what else. Analytics is a huge thing. How can you learn from your previous experiences? I’ll show you behind the scenes what I learned from my live stream on the previous day. And the data isn’t everything. For me, it’s a compass and not a map. I really tried very much not to look at analytics all day, every day, knowing that it can be a weapon. It can be a really useful tool for you to grow as a life streamer, as a content creator, but at the same time, you don’t want to overdo it. All of us want to stare at our square space WordPress analytics, but that wouldn’t be as helpful. That would just bring you to analysis paralysis. We’re not believing that you’re not making progress every day, therefore you should quit. That’s not the reason why I’m showing you analytics, so I hope that’s helpful. If you’re individual, you want to share something, livestream is fantastic. If you’re an author, speaker, you recently wrote a book, great.

Maybe read a chapter, maybe talk about certain ideas, maybe newsjack, what something might.

Be relevant to something that’s happening in.

The world right now. If you’re a company, it doesn’t matter if your mom and pop shop or if you’re a medium sized or even a large sized company, it’s a great opportunity to think about how you can livestream, connect with your customers, talk about your products, talk about your recent successes and failures. Be transparent. Livestream is a wonderful tool. And I’m just hoping at the end of these 30 days, I’m going to be so addicted and I want to go live all the time. I want to hear, to help at least one more person. It’s going to make me super happy. So before this gets too long, let’s dive right into Restream, shall we? All right, see you at the end of this.

So this is my Restream interface. This is a tool I’ve been going live with since, I think, early 2020. And since then, Restream has become a partner of Face World as well, and really sponsored a ton of content on my channel super appreciative. So as you can see from here, what I love about the app, even since the beginning, I was a user first, before I was a creator for them. So here’s a dashboard, and I basically just easily connect my channel. And they allow you to connect to one of the 30 channels, including some of the Chinese ones, which is really fascinating. But my platform basically is just my YouTube channel, Facebook, both my page, as well as my personal profile, my LinkedIn profile, my Twitter account. Frankly, I don’t know how I feel about going live on Twitter. It’s probably not the most popular. But for 30 Day Live, since I am being very consistent for the first time, I just want to see what it looks like. And just so you guys know, this is an experiment and exploration for me to test out new grounds. And if me or if I were you, don’t want to basically play with it.

So you can just turn it off, on and off very easily. And what I also have done for this series called 30 Day Live is I have a series of events, as you can see here. And so the first one already went away. It was yesterday. And now here’s day two as I’m going live.

You won’t be able to see this.

Anymore, but you have day three, four, all preconfigured to create a new event. It’s really simple. Click on Create New Event and you have the ability to use their Restream Studio, which is neat and simple. What I use because I’m lazy. I don’t have a clothes with me. Restream Studio allows you to stream directly from your browser. Of course, those of you guys who are fancy pants, you can use headstream from OBS, Zoom, Vmix, etc. Or you can also, as I mentioned yesterday, you can actually schedule your video to go live, meaning this is a prerecorded live. So that’s it, and boom, you have all of this. What I want to do right now is not to actually go live, but show you what I have access to behind the scenes. So let me go ahead and enter Live Studio. And here I’m able to, as you can see, preconfigure reconfigure my video and audio setup. I’m going to quickly just turn the lights here as well, my studio lights. And here I can go join stream. And don’t worry, you’re not going live just yet. See right here, you’re here. But you don’t need to press Go live.

In fact, you can even just use stream offline this entire time. So I’m not going live at the moment. And I have the option since just me right now, like these sections or these options won’t really be applicable. But if there are two of you, you can see the preview. You can have landscape of both of you or you can have like portrait views. You can have three of you. These layouts are just so much more I know, so much better, more sophisticated than those default zoom settings. And once you have guests join in, you see my cursor on the left hand side. It will come in here whether it’s one, two, three more guests. You can also invite guests as you’re going live. So just click on Invite and it’s going to just copy that link. You notice something called a pair with your channel. That means once you invite people, not only you get the link to join in, they also have the ability to connect with their social media channels. And that is a huge feature. I have done a couple of videos already on my YouTube channel to talk about instead of going live exclusively on your own channel and to be able to go live simultaneously with your peers.

You’Re just going to double, triple your.

Reach simply as that. And to the right hand side, you don’t have to feel overwhelmed by default. You’re looking at the graphics, right? So see down here in the lower left hand corner, I have FAW from Phase Feisworld Media and I can change the layout to something rounded to the news look and feel and then just regular Face World. I can change my primary color here too. So for me, I’m going to go with a deeper red color. You can put in your Hex number to make sure you get it right.

Yeah.

All right, let’s see default graphics. So Restroom comes packed with these really cute and really not very distracting graphics. Very universal because you can still obviously show your face. They fade in the corner by design. Previously, I have separate videos to have a separate video to explain how I use these things. But you certainly can create these things called the lower third and a different style. As you can see here, Face World live on which episode on Leadership, you can now putting an image right in front of you. So to do that, all you have to do is pre upload your images, the ones that you want to use. Make sure that if something completely centered, that will likely block your face or you have to move to the sides. And there are also video clips that are really nice. You can also hear sound. So that’s it. While the video clips were playing, you won’t be able to hear me or hear me live. And there are also things like background. You won’t be able to see any background right now because I’m basically taking over the entire screen. But in some of the other setups, especially during interview format, if there are any empty bars such as this option here, both of you are in landscape mode so there’s going to be a background above and beneath you.

So yeah, those backgrounds were great. So quickly on captions. Captions are things that you can type and prepare for also prior to going live. And these are some of the questions I was able to address and now I think about it, right, that this feature will be particularly interesting for me to go live to talk about taxes, health insurance, how to make money as a YouTuber, how to start your YouTube, that sort of thing. So I can prepare them ahead of time and be able to display them. So for instance, this is how they look. The value of solving problems, solving higher than you think. Email list is king and here’s why. So that really guides you through and in addition it gives people that visual interest so they can focus as you’re talking. And people remember they hop on and off all the time on your live stream. So if you’re in the middle of a sentence, if you’re in the middle of explaining something, having what you’re actually talking about on screen could be helpful. Something to keep in mind. Lastly, I’m switching to the left of the screen here. Here is chat functionality.

You have the ability to overlay chat. So for instance, I’m going to just say here is you can actually display your chat as well, but when you use a chat overlay, that chat is going to appear on the right hand side the whole time. That’s not something I do on a regular basis, especially when I go live on many multiple channels. I just don’t know who’s going to be tuning and I’m not too concerned about spams on my side. I don’t see a lot of spammers once again, but this gives us an opportunity so that just manually created a background. You see here oh, this is so nice. And actually looking at this for the first time really. These are the built in video backgrounds that you can play with. I am a huge fan of just abstract art in the background, that sort of thing. So very cool. And you can also hide it and just go back to that. What’s my favorite so far? This is so speak of a distraction, right? Yeah, this is very fun. Okay, I think I explained most of the features but down here you have the ability to share screen as everything else.

So you can share screen such as now I want to share my final cut pro. But I also have the ability to turn that Share screen. I can do that. And now because I have Share screen, I’m able to basically lay them out however I want. Like I talked about earlier and having these a picture in Picture Cinema and Thumbnails. So pretty sweet, I would say. Also you’re able to add a source. So a source means that you can now share a video locally on your computer and you can share background music, add endless background music to your stream. I would say definitely keep the background music low and make sure you test this ahead of time. You can go live, for instance on a private channel, like a private YouTube channel. Is there such a thing? Sorry, take it back. You can go live maybe on a private Facebook group or that you set up just for this. I’ve actually done that before. It’s really helpful to not know what livestream will appear to be on Facebook. So I actually still do probably have a private group where it’s just me and my producer and we can go in and take a look.

But here for local videos, you’re able to select a video. Let me see. Oh actually I do have something. So let’s use that. I just uploaded a very brief video. So for instance I can just and I can drag back and forth like this. So a super short video. This is something I did for my lovely client and friend Michael Lucky. And it doesn’t loop assume, but you’re able to play the video from beginning to end. There are so many features, guys, and that’s really the point of all of this. Just when you think that you need more features, think about how you can leverage the existing features when it comes to any software for a content entrepreneur.

Because over the past year or so.

During the pandemic, different people from around the world will come to me and say I really want my lifetream to look so sharp. I’m going to hire team of people and I will produce all these things. I have multiple people on screen, I have a moderator. But at the end of the day, you might not want to do that, especially for your first event. Sometimes keeping events simple is not a bad idea. The more bells and whistles you push into your LifeStream, the more connections you have outside of for instance, this is restream, but if you’re plugging in, zoom this and that, it is more likely for the live stream to break. Trust me, I’ve been there. I’ve had lovely guests on my live stream interviews who will show up and with their fancy camera, instead of what I’m using here, which is some rudimentary like logitech 1080p, they’ll have their 4K camera all plugged in and guess what? Things just start to go wrong within the first five minutes. Then we have to triage in real time, it can be really messy. So I hope you find this helpful. And I would just say that in closing, I would love to see your questions and comments and I’ll try to answer them as quickly as possible.

There are a lot of people going live everywhere right now, LinkedIn in particular, and Facebook, but I see more and more on YouTube as well. LinkedIn has a very different appeal compared to pre recorded content or fully edited, super polished content. So if you’re starting out, please know that it’s okay if things go wrong, actually, your viewers might just be there to support you. And if you feel like you’re talking to an empty room, that’s also not a bad idea because when you start out, you have the ability to fail fast, fail early, and nobody’s gonna blame you. Instead it’s you trying something new and you’ll be very glad that you’ve taken that step forward. Again, showing up is 99% of the work. Just by showing up, it will help you grow as a content creator even in moments that you don’t realize it at all. That’s a live stream mindset. Again, if you want to tune in on future episodes, we got a list right here. Here’s my live content. Oh, I just turned that page off. This is my YouTube channel and you see what’s going on here. I thought it was really interesting.

So this is really quick YouTube. I used TubeBuddy as an analytic tool for my YouTube channel and there were many more views gained as of November 27. And that’s when I was pushing pretty hard for live stream. But yeah, that’s pretty interesting, right? Like when you go live you actually generate more views as a result of it. But going into my playlist, I am incredibly excited about livestream as my new content, which is right here. All right, so here is the link that you saw in the description and I am going to go live to talk about all of these topics. Super excited, really, truly. And so today we covered how to livestream as a content creator and so tomorrow we’ll be talking about how to start and become a content creator. If you’re new to this journey and you’re thinking like, I don’t have much to say and I don’t know where to find a video editor or an audio editor, I don’t know what to write about, that’s what we’ll be covering. So we have day four, five health insurance, how to quit your job the right way. So definitely take a look, set yourself.

Reminders, ask your questions before, during and after the live stream. So I think I skipped over a feature that’s rather important.

So within analytics as people want to.

Know how their livestream went, comparing your first session compared to old sessions, where your followers are, how they have interacted with you during Live all Adjazz, how many people actually left comments. And so I find this to be this section to be really helpful. So it’s still loading. Actually, while it’s still loading, let’s go back to the last session. Some of the number here, I feel like it’s not always entirely accurate, but it gives you an idea. So, for instance, I was able to.

Interact with people live from LinkedIn, but.

Clearly that’s not tracked. But this is helpful.

As you hover over, you can see.

That this is really cool. You can see where people’s interests peaked and where it probably died down and.

How it differs from channel to channel.

And for me, while going live for only 15 minutes today, I accumulated 51 minutes watch time, which means people collectively watch like an hour of this. One thing to keep in mind, by the way, guys, if you’re new to.

Live streaming, people sometimes just tune in.

For 30 seconds, a minute, maybe a few minutes, and they go off to do something else. They might come back later on.

So when you see people on the.

Screen for me today, I was constantly seeing six people at a time.

But those are often not just not necessarily, but almost never the same six people.

So you can look at the chat trends, how many messages people left and.

Where they’re coming from. So it’s really interesting.

And yeah, you can look at all the sessions you’ve had, you can go into each and every one of them and just don’t go into the analysis paralysis situation.

But you can learn so much from data quickly on video storage.

So I have the Pro account, I’m.

Able to upload videos and just schedule them.

So this goes back to the prerecorded live, which is a really sweet feature. And whenever you have a recording, such as what I did today, there is a storage for that. So you’re not going to and here expires in 15 days so that in.

Addition to having the download from Facebook or your YouTube channel, you’re able to.

Watch it right here and you have the option to download it. So look, in addition to just a.

Full video, you have full audio and you have split audio tracks. In this case, it was just me, but if it’s you and a guest.

Or other guests, this feature is going.

To be really helpful when it comes to podcast editing.

So I hope that this was more thorough explanation to behind the scenes for.

Restream and maybe some of these features that you might find helpful too.

All right, that’s it guys. Thank you so much for tuning in today and I would love to learn more about your live stream ideas. If you run a company, by the way, I forgot to mention, it’s a great idea for companies to also go live with their products, with their product releases, answering their customers questions, burning questions, and demystify what’s going on in their specific industry. And I think livestream content creation, especially in the format of video content is very powerful. This allows you to connect directly with your audience, with your customers. So much just goes without you realizing how powerful of a tool that this is.