The one silver lining from the pandemic was that everyone learned how to connect with others live in Zoom. Sure, it was awkward at first to be live on camera. But, as time went on, it just became second nature and allowed for some genuine connections.

If you haven’t transferred those skills to YouTube Livestreams yet, you are missing out on a potentially great source of traffic, views, and deeper connection with your audience. Plus, it’s a GREAT way to sell something. Today, I’ve got a Livestream strategy that you can incorporate into your YouTube Strategy right now.

Live Streaming

I know what you’re thinking, “I do long-form content. Why do I need to livestream?” Well, this spring I had the chance to sit down and talk about live-streaming with Luria Petrucci, from ​Livestreamingpros.com​ and, Luria argued that live streaming is the most effective tool you have to grow your audience, connect with your audience and sell to your audience. Now, we are not saying that live-streaming is a magical thing to just start doing and it’s going to immediately help in all these areas. You still need to have a strategy. With each stream you need to decide if it is geared to building community, growing your audience and selling. This is going to drastically affect how you livestream.

Grow your Audience

When you are intending to grow your audience, you leave room for chatter at the beginning and the end, but in the middle you get into your preplanned content. So you have a plan going in of what you want to present. This is content that is full of value for your audience whether they are watching it live or later. Then after you are done with your livestream, you cut out the beginning chatter and the ending goodbyes and use it for the intention of the replay.

Building the Community

When you are intending to build the community, your structure is much more relaxed. The goal is to get to connect with your audience and for them to connect to each other as well. It might take the form of answering questions, playing games or showing them things. But I would still encourage you to have a plan going into this. Even if you are just planning to answer questions, have some pre-planned questions to answer ahead of time to get the questions flowing. And these can still provide value to the viewer, but the main point is to interacting with the viewers and being vulnerable with them and encouraging them to be vulnerable with you as well.

Title and Thumbnail

It IS worth your effort to still make a good title and thumbnail for your live. This content will be able to live evergreen on YouTube forever, so put in the time and energy to create a quality title and thumbnail for it. It will be worth it for the replay views for sure.

How to Get Started

I know it seems daunting, but just pick up your phone and go live. Don’t worry about video quality, etc. Instead, just embrace the rawness of the phone. Drop your “camera voice” and be vulnerable. Don’t worry about embarrassing yourself. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. You will make mistakes – but these mistakes just humanize you.

And don’t worry if no one shows up. Luria recommends covering up the view count and presenting your content as if 100 people are watching. Just do you and then allow it to be valuable for the replay. Don’t let the view count ever get you down. It only takes a few of the right people to see it to make a huge difference.

Have a plan going into your livestream. Luria suggests to have a tease, three bullet points, and a conclusion. But, be flexible! This is not a script – just a plan. Talk from the heart and the plan will help keep you on track. It doesn’t have to be a big ordeal. You can pop on for 5-10 mins to chat, share your thoughts and pop back out.

There are so many directions you could go. If need some ideas, try “Top 3 reasons to…” “3 ways to accomplish…” “Behind the scenes – How I create this or do this, etc?” What does your audience want to know about you? If you don’t know, ask them!

Selling with Live Video

The first place to start is to be real with yourself. How do you view your community? Are you focused on the numbers or the people who are behind those numbers? What do you know about your audience? Do you know details about their personal life? Do you pay attention when they share in comments? Do you ask about them? Do you even care?

The true mark of a community is not just them knowing you, but you knowing them, too. And when your community know each other as well, that’s a great benefit of community. It doesn’t have to be all about you all the time. You can just be the elbow that connects people to each other.

An audience is very different than a community. An audience is comparable to people sitting in rows looking up at a stage. When the person on the stage stops performing, the audience goes away. But with a community, the people in the audience turn and look at each other. When they can connect to each other, people will stick around even after the person in the stage stops performing. This allows deeper connections and trust. In turn, they will give you more because you are serving them better. The transactions then become more of a result rather than the goal you were going after all along.

Game-a-fying your sales can make it fun and draw them in. Something Luria does around a product launch or black friday sale is something the audience has deemed “Pocket Callie.” Callie is their community manager that pops into the corner of her livestreams for these events and anytime someone buys something she hits a piñata and calls out their name. People have bought twice simply because they like to hear their names called out. It’s so silly, but it’s fun and engaging and brings the community together as they see when the candy will come out. And it turns selling from sleazy to fun.

Also, don’t allow the rules to squelch your joy. Learning about strategy is so important. But, it’s just as important to find ways to make it your own. You have to add your own magic to it. Experiment and see what works well for you and for your audience. And enjoy the process! Be yourself and connect with people. That is really the goal.

Power Tip

Up until now, community posts that included upcoming live streams or premieres, you did not have a way to notify people who might be interested in that. But not anymore! Now, YouTube has provided a new “Notify Me” button that will help creators prompt their viewers to opt in to notifications and remind them to join a live stream when they happen.

Keep Changing Lives!

Tim Schmoyer

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