One mistake out of the many I've made on YouTube over the last decade, and on Twitch too, is thinking about quantity. I kept asking myself what the masses would just pour into my live stream for. What I've done today that's helped me is to flip that around and think about my top fans instead, the people who love Jerry Banfield. What am I going to be able to do that drives the top Jerry Banfield fans nuts? What is going to get them really excited? What are they going to absolutely love? What is the best show I can put on? What is the best I can give to my very top fans?
I know you've heard the idea of a thousand true fans, but in my experience we get distracted always trying to go after those thousand fans instead of focusing on the ones who are already here. Two of the very top fans on my streams are Superman Crypto and Lisa Ladybug. What I've done a lot in the past is think, well, how do I get all kinds of people who don't even know me into my stream? But instead, what if I thought about how to make something that drives Lisa nuts, or that Superman just has to watch?
Today Lisa came in while I was live on YouTube and dropped 25 gift subs and a $20 super chat, plus a gift sub over on Twitch. Lisa is really excited to see some Warzone again. I've been struggling with this so much, to stop thinking quantity and start thinking quality. And the thing is, this is so easy, because your top viewers are going to talk to you. Your top viewers are going to tell you, hey, I like this, or hey, I don't like this. Not that you should always be a slave to your top viewers, but ideally you want to laser in on the people who really care about your content and figure out what absolutely drives them nuts in the best way.
Make something for the people already watching
I want to make sure I'm making this today, so I remember it for five years, for ten years. I want to make something that someone like Superman or Lisa sees and goes, nice, I'm so happy to see this, this is awesome, this makes my day, this is fun to watch, this is why I followed you. I've had people follow me for years and I've not made one single thing they wanted to watch in all that time. Then I go around trying to get new people to follow me. Why do you need new people to follow you when you already have people following you?
You want to make lasting impressions and deeper relationships. Even if fewer people watch a particular thing, the real question is, what am I going to do today that builds a lasting relationship? This really applies to live streamers. With video viewers you're often not going to get as much engagement, but the principle still holds.
The one metric that actually matters
One of the things I've been trying to hone in on recently is what the single metric is that I should pay attention to. What is the metric that matters? Because when I stay glued to my studio dashboard looking at views, looking at followers, looking at how much money I made on a particular stream, I've just constantly been confused. The algorithm is very fickle. What the masses like changes all the time, and I don't want to go around chasing the masses every day. I want to make stuff that is fun for me. I want to make stuff that stands out. And I want to make stuff that the people who follow me forever are going to be really happy to see.
The way you get to that, in my experience, is to change to a qualitative approach. Did my most loyal, most engaged, most active followers enjoy this video or this live stream? Did they get really excited about it? Because that's what matters. I've had videos that got millions of views, and I don't know that I got even one Lisa or one Superman out of all of them.
At first this is tough, because you don't have anybody to give you feedback. But when I started out, I had my friends and my family watching. When you first start out on YouTube, it's actually kind of easier. It's like, okay, what video am I going to make that's going to make my friend laugh? I don't ever want to get away from thinking like that on YouTube again. I don't ever want to fall back into what I've been doing, where it's all about the numbers. The numbers can be faked easily with bots. The platforms are pushing certain narratives all the time. I want to always laser in on YouTube and Twitch and ask, when I go live and my followers see I'm playing Warzone, how are they going to feel?
It's definitely different for different people, too. Some of my followers, all they want to see is ICP live. For those followers, I can just put a video up and they'll be satisfied. But for live stream, this is different. So today I'm mainly talking to myself. I'm just telling myself, please remember this, please don't forget this. To me, this is one of the most important things to remember about being a live streamer especially, but also a content creator on YouTube. If you want to go deeper on the mindset and tactics behind this, I've gathered more of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.