How to set goals and be a successful streamer

As a live streamer, you unconsciously set goals. You want to reach a certain number of subscribers, or you want to broadcast at least once a week. Does it make a difference if you actually write these goals down, or can you just keep them in your head? Turns out, you should write them down! According to goal-setting theory, your chances for success increase when you actively set goals. Your motivation, self-confidence and productivity soar.

To be an effective streamer, you should use goals to mark your progress and growth. Take Twitch streamer Kaitality, for example. He used steady goal setting to go from 50 followers to 6,000 over the course of three years. Now, his channel sits at 6,700 followers. Once you know what your goals are, you can set yourself on a clear path toward success.

Why does setting goals matter for streamers?

Writing down your goals helps you plan and keeps you on track. Setting goals leads to chain reactions. The more goals you set and the harder you work toward them, the more likely you are to set even more goals and improve your skills further.

By setting a difficult goal and working hard to achieve it, you feel a sense of accomplishment when you succeed. This boosts your self-confidence, which motivates you to set another, more ambitious goal. By working toward a more difficult goal, you improve your skills.

Overall, goal setting makes you feel positive about the future, which improves your well-being. Setting stream goals doesn’t just lead to success — it also makes you a better person.

How to set goals

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to set goals. How do you know if you’re doing it right? For live streamers, the best place to start is by asking yourself questions about your content.

• Why do you want to go live?
• What valuable information do you have to share?
• What needs to happen with a broadcast to consider it a success?

That last question is the most important. To set goals, you have to measure success. Saying, “I want more viewers,” is stating a goal, but you haven’t given yourself a way to achieve it. How many more viewers? What kinds of viewers do you want?

Set smaller streaming goals

Let’s face it — you aren’t going to become a Twitch Affiliate after a single broadcast. Take that big accomplishment and break it up into smaller tasks you can work on stream by stream.

Let’s take becoming a Twitch Affiliate as an example. You must meet four basic requirements to be accepted into the program. You should focus on one requirement at a time. But you can break up your goals even further.

One requirement for the Twitch Affiliate program is having 50 followers. Now, think about how you’ll achieve that goal and how long it’ll take you. Instead of waiting for people to find your channel, hoping to reach 50, you could interact with 50 other streamers to boost engagement. One streamer per day, for (ideally) 50 days — small and doable.

What are your stream goals?

As a streamer, what type of goals should you set? Goals should have all of the following characteristics:

• Long-term or short-term: You need both in your overall streaming strategy. Getting 100 new followers on Twitch is a long-term goal. Interacting with more streamers this week than you did last week is a short-term goal.
• Specific: Goals should describe exactly what you’ll do and how you’ll do it. A general goal is: “I will stream more often.” But how often is more often? A specific goal is: “I will stream twice a week.” An even more specific (and the best) goal is: “I will stream every Tuesday and Thursday.”
• Meaningful: Goals are more motivating if they mean something to you. Start a live stream channel about a niche you’re interested in. It’ll be much easier to achieve your stream goals if you enjoy what you’re doing.
• Positive: It’s always better to reframe negative goals into positive ones. For example, turn “I want to stop losing viewers” into “I want to keep viewers engaged.”
• Simple: Goals should be straightforward and realistic. “Become a Twitch Affiliate” is not a simple goal because there are several smaller steps involved in achieving it. “Stream to three different platforms simultaneously for each broadcast” is simple and realistic.
• Challenging: Goals should be simple, but not too easy to achieve. Don’t make your goal “I will turn on my webcam today.” Since you can’t live stream at all without completing this “goal,” you don’t learn anything from it.

SMART goals

If you can’t remember all those characteristics for setting goals, use the SMART formula instead. SMART stands for:

• Specific: Your stream should have an objective (speed run, charity stream, 24-hour stream, etc.) to be specific.
• Measurable: To be measurable, you should have a way to track progress toward achieving your goal (raising a certain amount of money for a charity stream, for example).
• Attainable: Attainable goals can be reached during one stream or over the course of several streams, whatever timeline you specify.
• Relevant: A relevant goal should be appropriate for your audience. If you normally do speed runs and suddenly change to an art or creativity stream, your audience will be confused.
• Time-Sensitive: Goals should also have a deadline. If they don’t, you’ll never know when you’ve actually achieved them.

You now have two different methods for setting goals — and no excuse not to get started!

Examples: goal setting for streamers

What are some goals you can work toward as a streamer? Here are eight examples of goals streamers at any level can work on.

Building community

Before building viewers and followers, you need a community. You could use gimmicks like giveaways to try to capture attention, but that engagement won’t be genuine. Instead, focus on ways to connect with your audience. Which community are you a part of, and what can your streams offer to that community?

Gaining more followers on Twitch

Twitch has two ways viewers can show support for streamers: subscribing and following. The number of followers you get is publicly displayed on your profile, and these users get notified when you go live. If you’re signed up for Twitch’s monetization options, a higher follower count can also mean more monthly revenue for you. A subscriber, or sub, is someone who pays a monthly fee for exclusive access, content, or benefits from a streamer’s channel. The number of subscribers you have isn’t publicly displayed. When you’re first starting out, making a follower goal is more realistic than a subscriber goal, as there are thresholds to meet before you can qualify for subscribers.

Monetizing your stream

There are several ways to monetize your live stream. You could ask for donations directly through the platform or a third-party platform like Patreon. Twitch, Facebook Gaming, Mixer and YouTube all have paid subscription programs too. You can also use ads, sponsorships, affiliate deals, or sell your own merch. Choose your monetization method based on your income goal – some ways are more lucrative than others.

Earning more revenue on Twitch

Twitch is one of the biggest streaming platforms out there and many new streamers start out on Twitch. If your channel has enough viewers and subscribers, you can earn revenue from your Twitch streams. How much? It depends which monetization methods you use or qualify for. Twitch offers the following ways to make money:

• Ads: Earn about $250 per month for every 100 followers.
• Subscriptions: Ask viewers to subscribe for $4.99, $9.99, or $24.99 per month. Split your subscription fees 50/50 with Twitch.
• Bits: Get a “bit” or tip from viewers. One bit equals roughly $0.01.

To take advantage of subscriptions and bits, you have to be in the Twitch Affiliate program. The requirements for the program are a minimum of 50 followers and eight total streaming hours over seven days.

Gaining partnership with a streaming platform

Many streamers want to become Twitch partners or affiliates. These Twitch goals are broad, however. They should be broken down into smaller, more manageable goals, like we saw with our earlier example.

Increase broadcast frequency

Try to broadcast on a regular basis at first, so your audience knows when to expect you. After you’ve had some success, see if you can stream more often.

Increase views and subscribers

Views and subscribers are an easy metric to track. Remember to be reasonable when aiming for how many views and subscribers you want.

Achieving personal goals

You can create personal goals that have nothing to do with income, popularity or your audience. Use streaming as a chance to work on things you might not be good at, like scriptwriting, video editing, communication skills, confidence on camera or staying more organized.

Tips for being a successful streamer — TLDR

• Be consistent
• Go for personal growth
• Celebrate small wins
• Analyze streaming metrics

Reaching your goals and becoming a successful streamer

You know what makes a good goal. You know how to set goals and some good examples for streamers. Now, how do you reach your goals?

Be consistent

Set your goals and stick to them as much as you can – consistency is the fastest way to build an audience. Maintain high quality in your streams, broadcast at the same times each week, etc.

Factor in personal growth

When you make your streaming goals about improving yourself, you’ll be much more invested in them. It’ll also show in the quality of your streams, which your viewers will thank you for.

Celebrate small milestones

You don’t have to wait until you hit 100,000 subscribers to celebrate. Recognize every goal you hit, even the small ones like responding to more viewers on chat or gaining 10 new followers after one stream.

Learn from streaming metrics

Keep track of how well you’re doing and use those metrics to set more goals. Look at trends in viewership and subscribers, and watch for audience engagement metrics too.

How Restream Studio helps you achieve your streaming goals

Restream Studio helps you get closer to reaching your viewer and subscriber goals. The multistreaming feature lets you reach a wider audience by streaming to more than one platform at a time.

Restream Studio also centralizes the chat windows from each platform into one feature, so you can read, reply to, and highlight messages from your audience all in one place. If one of your goals is to engage your audience more, then you need an easy-to-use chat feature.

You can use Restream Studio’s analytics to measure your performance and track your progress. The graphics, captions and background functions also help enhance the quality of your live stream – an important factor for consistency.

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Wrap-up

Hopefully, by now you’ve realized how beneficial setting goals can be to your success as a streamer. You don’t need goals to be a streamer; you can just turn on your webcam and see what happens. But if you ever want to improve, you should think seriously about where your channel’s going and how to get there. Setting goals keeps you organized, motivates you, and leads to more goals! If you haven’t thought about your stream goals yet, today’s the day to get started.