756 – Real time customer growth: Tom talks Live Streaming

Episode 756 – Live Streaming
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute, the entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multi-millionaire. Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 756 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about live streaming. Now, this can be a great addition to your business to build credibility and connection with your audience. And you can even start right from your cell phone. All right. I hope you didn't miss Episode 755. That was social media success tips. A lot of little known things that are going to save you enormous amounts of time and give you a chance of being successful on social media rather than just banging out postings that nobody looks at. That's episode 755. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was 755. And today is 756 with live streaming. Make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and grab a copy of our automation book. You're going to thank me for this. I'm telling you, if you just do a portion of what's in that book, you're going to save yourself hundreds of hours of time into the future. So that's at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:33] All right, let's get to the main event. Live streaming is a way you can broadcast video and audio in real time to your audience. And people love it and they can see your personality and brand values while you're engaging and entertaining and educating them. You can build trust with your audience because you're willing to interact with them instead of hiding.

[00:01:58] Like many of the shyster marketers do, you can tell stories and show people your human side, and you can even take them behind the scenes, which we call candid marketing. Now, people really saw my genuine emotions. That's another thing. They can see more of you. When my dog Rubix passed and I was doing a regular Sunday night funny news and comedy show and I just couldn't bring myself to yuck it up when he passed. And I can tell you, nobody complained that they didn't get their weekly dose of crazy comedy because they saw I'm a real person that cared so deeply about that dog. And and nobody complained. And they saw a different side of me than they usually saw. Live streaming can make a stronger connection and loyalty with your audience, too. But there are also some things you have to watch out for, and I'm going to cover them here also. All right. First, you need a good Internet connection, and that's mostly in your control. Unless you live in the boonies, you should probably hardwire yourself to your router with an Ethernet cable instead of relying on Wi-Fi. Now, if you're doing an interview or having a co-host, you can't do much about the other person's connection other than warn them how important it is and maybe even teach them how to do speed tests on their own connections.

[00:03:28] Basically, you have them go to speedtest.net and keep a log during the day and on different days and record both their upload and download speeds. Upload is the most important here because you and the other person are sending your voice and audio up to the internet upload. Right. These speed tests could give you an indication of the best time of day for them to do interviews. Or it could cancel the live stream altogether. If their speed is poor and they aren't willing to do anything about it. Viewers, admittedly have become more tolerant of bad connections since the pandemic hit, since even all the cable and major networks had people interviewed from home. And some of it was really terrible, but it still made it on the air, which in the previous years it would not have. You have to decide the quality you want to keep on your live stream because there will be people that leave if they experience a poor viewing experience. The next thing is, if you want the most participation, you should have a clearly defined topic. If you think just having a general discussion about anything and you'll get maximum participation, you may have some trouble. Yeah, people have been successful with this, but it's much harder because people don't know what to expect on each live stream and they don't know if it's worth if it's going to be worth their time to show up live.

[00:05:06] Most successful streams have an exact topic, and even though they think participation will be less and maybe it will be, you know that every single person on the live stream is highly interested in that topic. This helps with more sales. If you're selling stuff, I'd rather have fewer excited people about the topic on the stream rather than a bunch of tire kickers who don't even know what you're going to be talking about. All right. So you need to plan this a little bit. So I really do suggest that you plan out what you're going to be talking about and have notes handy either by teleprompter or taped up on your screen or even on the desk in front of you. No problem. You can have a plan for the topics, the questions to pose, to co-host and interviewees. You can have quotations that you can just read right off a piece of paper in front of everybody. Jokes, news and whatever else you need to cover. The last thing you want is dead air, where you're fumbling for what to do next. You don't want that. All right. Now, what platforms are good for this? Well, most people are familiar with YouTube, live, Facebook Live, Instagram Live and Vimeo. Now lesser known is Twitch, which I've watched in the recess whenever they had a recess of the Johnny Depp trial, but I never used it personally.

[00:06:38] And another one is called Periscope. These are considered consumer grade platforms and for most of us, plenty easy to use and perfectly acceptable to use and have the least amount of hassle and technical requirements. I mean, you also have companies like Streamyard which will send your live stream to multiple platforms. That's what I use. In addition, there are super high quality platforms. That's beyond the scope of this discussion. But because they take expensive equipment and and services and probably a crew to run things for you. Now, if you want to delve into this for your company, just Google live streaming services. Now, one upgrade you can make is streamlabs obs, but you need to be at least a little technical to make it work. And with that you can have multiple cameras and do lots of cool stuff. And guess what? It's free. It's called open source. Now I've left some links in the show notes on different platforms and the pros and cons of them, so make sure you check the show notes for this episode. Now, if you want to get really fancy, I left another link for all the high end equipment you can possibly get to do this stuff. If you want to have multiple cameras and now stream Streamlabs obs will do multiple cameras. But I mean if you want to have something that's easier to use but way more expensive.

[00:08:09] Check out that link If you want to make your live streams more exciting, you add graphics and videos and you can put great viewer comments on the screen really easily. With some of these systems, you can have scrolling tickers across the bottom with extra information. Streamyard does all this stuff and I'm sure some of the other ones do too. And all of this makes for a more interesting and exciting viewer experience. Now, this is going to get more people sharing to their friends to get more viewers, and you should remind them to share the stream if they're enjoying it. And the platform's a good platform will make it easy for them to share. Now, this is another reason, the sharing stuff. That live stream should be longer, not like a 32nd video because this gives the time for viewers to share your live stream with their friends and their friends to see the share and actually get on the live stream. And of course, all of this depends on it being exciting to watch and interesting. Now, if you just pop on and off, they just don't have time to do the sharing. All right. Some other stuff to watch for. Well. A flash in the pan doesn't usually work that well. In other words, just do one and quit unless you have some way to tell people about it. Like like with my big email list, I could have a very successful one time live stream and maybe I will when my documentary premieres.

[00:09:39] But in general, if it's a regular time, people, you know, like weekly or what daily or whatever you're going to do. People can plan to attend and they're know, you know you're going to be there. See, if they never know when you're going to do it, then you might get virtually nobody watching the stream and you're there talking to nobody. Now you can make money with this. Some people use Patreon. Gofund me. Of course I'm going to sell my own stuff and affiliate stuff. Those are, you know, there's nothing really spectacular here. That's the same thing as you sell stuff on any other thing. But you do need to keep in mind you don't want to make the live stream just a big sales pitch or nobody will share and they'll leave and never come back. So live streaming can be a great addition to your business and it can simply be started on your cell phone. You can do this right on your cell phone, but if you really like it, you can pick up your game and get more equipment and add some more professionalism and polish to your streams and really make it a significant part of your business. And again, I put links, a bunch of links in here that will give you way more details on live streaming and what you need to know and all that stuff.

[00:10:54] So if you like this and help with the other thousand things you need to know to be successful online, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. And I have no trouble saying that. And I triple dog dare people to put their programs up against mine and nobody will because they'd be embarrassed for all the unique things that you get from this that you just can't get anywhere else, and also have a new program on how to be a great podcast guest. I can put you in, teach you how to be in front of hundreds of thousands of people with warm introductions and get invited back. And it's way more than just what you do during the interview. It's and there's loads of stuff there, little tricks and tips, but it's what you do before and after the interview that gets you invited back and impresses the heck out of the host. All right, so that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Check out. Great. In this case, if you just want the podcasting training, that's screwthecommute.com/greatpodcastguest And of course that's free if you're in my mentor program. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.