734 – The Ins And Outs Of Streaming

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John Lint

Episode highlights:

01:17 – What is streaming, exactly?
02:57 – So you want to stream – what are your options?
03:53 – The three main elements of streaming
04:59 – Popular streaming tools
06:56 – Live training, straight from your membership
08:09 – Unlimited streaming capacity
12:01 – Tracking actions and no shows
13:37 – Stream like a boss
15:26 – Mixing live with the pre-recorded
19:41 – What else should you know?
22:05 – The basic equipment you’ll need
24:25 – Wrapping things up

Stay on top of the latest business trends with help from James

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 734. We’re talking about video streaming. And I’d like to welcome my special guest, John Lint. Welcome back.

John: Hey, hello, everybody. How are you, James?

James: Good. Thanks, John. Always a pleasure to chat. I like chatting to you, you’ve got good marketing ability and also technical understanding. You and I both have memberships, and we both speak to lots of other people who have memberships. And right now, we’re getting a lot of requests for people who want to be able to stream. Perhaps they have not been doing it before, which is one thing I’m encountering a fair bit of lately. And then there’s other people who are just starting up their memberships, and they would like to now start broadcasting to their members.

What is streaming, exactly?

So we’re going to talk about a few different types of streaming today. Firstly, we should talk about, what does streaming actually mean? Because we’ve often heard about webinars, but I dare say some people out there still don’t actually know what a webinar is. So I’m always cautious to actually use that. And I’m sure people don’t actually want a webinar, they want the result of whatever that will be spoken about on the webinar itself. So why do you use the word streaming?

John: Yeah, streaming is basically, it’s what everybody uses in terms of describing the activity that we’re doing. What is it that we’re doing? We’re broadcasting ourselves, so our camera or our microphone, just like you and I are doing now. But we’re streaming. We’re broadcasting it live so other people can watch us being live and just interact or just send questions. And you see it in many different platforms. YouTube does it, Facebook does it, and there’s a ton of other platforms out there. Twitch.tv is a very popular streaming platform, and a lot of people are basically streaming all sorts of things. They are streaming Q&A calls, they are streaming lessons, they’re streaming their video game footage, they’re streaming sports. And now, you know, with everything that’s happening, you can see it more and more – people are streaming different things and different types of content.

So that’s in a nutshell what streaming is. And obviously, for us as an online entrepreneur or an information publisher, being able to connect with your audience is extremely powerful, not only from an attraction perspective, where you want to attract people to your brand, but also from an engagement perspective. If you’re doing this, for example, in your membership site, and you want to connect with your own members, and you want to do some type of streaming event where maybe you’re doing Q&A calls, then it’s a very powerful thing to do.

So you want to stream – what are your options?

James: So let’s talk about some of the options. You mentioned the attraction side of things, actually getting people to become aware of you. We often see people doing Facebook Live. That’s one way of streaming live. That’s usually within the native platform. There’s a couple of tools you can buy that will let you stream on Facebook, and there’s a few that will do it for free as well. Why don’t we go through a little shortlist there? Because maybe we want to go out to Facebook Live or maybe some of the other platforms and start broadcasting what we’re doing and get a bigger engagement. So I think platforms like Facebook really love this as well.

So firstly, you can do it within Facebook. So no tool required, just switch on a live.

John: Yeah, exactly.

James: You can do it with Zoom, I think you can connect that up to also stream to Facebook.

You can do it with Ecamm Live. And you can also do it with StreamYard. And you can do it with OBS, Open Broadcaster Software. Well, can you actually do that? I know you can do it with Twitch and YouTube.

The three main elements of streaming

John: Absolutely. So basically, the first thing to understand when it comes to streaming is that you have those, there’s three main elements, right? Three main elements of streaming. There’s the, what we call the streaming software, or what allows you to basically send the data. So your camera is filming you, your microphone is recording you, we need to be able to send that outside. So that’s the first part. It’s either a software that you install on your computer, or some kind of web-based software that will control your microphone and camera, that will then allow you to send that data.

The second step is the hosting of that data. So that data needs to be sent somewhere. And those hosting platforms are, for example, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram, Twitch.tv. There are tons of others, but those are usually the main ones right now. So that’s the second step.

The third step, the third element, is basically the display of that information. Okay, so now, where is this going to be displayed? Where are people going to watch? They can either watch it on YouTube, they can either watch it on your Facebook page, they could watch it on your Instagram account, or if you are streaming to Twitch.tv, they can watch it on what’s called your Twitch channel.

So these are the three things, right? Software, hosting, and then display.

Popular streaming tools

In terms of Facebook, and any other type of streaming hosting solution, then they usually will allow you to stream to them in multiple ways. Either they’re going to provide you some kind of tool that you can do, or you can maybe use a web page to do that, or they will give you what’s called a stream key. And a stream key is just a series of numbers that allow you to connect to now your own accounts. And with that, you can use anything you want, any kind of software.

The one I use, and the one that is being used by most people in the world, is called OBS, because it’s 100 percent free, and it’s extremely powerful. So when you see all these people that are streaming on YouTube, or on Twitch, and they’re doing this professionally, meaning they’re streaming every day, or that’s really how they’re building their brand and how they’re making money, they’re usually starting with that software, because it allows you to do a ton of different things and different scenes and really have that broadcast quality that you see on TV. So that is a software that I like. I always recommend that to my members.

I actually teach that, the entire process of how do you do this whole streaming thing, to my members, to the KLEQ.com members, a hundred percent for free. We have a class that I call Streaming Like A Boss. And we show them exactly all of that. And I show you my process, because part of becoming a KLEQ.com member, what I do is that as a special bonus that every single week, I’m live, streaming on live, answering questions from my members. And I basically wanted to share my process of how I do it. And the software I use is OBS. If you want to use another one, something else, that’s totally fine. But the process, though, is usually the same. You have a software, they give you some tools, and then you connect, either to Facebook with the key that you got, or to YouTube with the key that you got, or to anywhere else. Usually they give you what’s called a streaming key. And that’s basically the process in a nutshell, without going too deep into the tech stuff.

James: Right. So the main decisions you have around are what software you’re going to use, what hosting platform, and what you’re going to do to display that. And there’s obviously stuff that’s live, can be recorded. I’m going to talk about how I use it as well.

Live training, straight from your membership

You’ve mentioned that you run live training for your members, and you run that within your membership, right?

John: Yeah.

James: So you can actually embed the live stream inside your membership and you can start and stop it and you can display calls to action, you can have a chat pad under it. And you’re using this just within KLEQ and not any other paid tool.

John: That’s correct, yeah. You know, I use OBS, which, like I said, it’s free. It’s available on PC and Mac. And then I use my hosting. I use YouTube, but if you want to use Twitch or anything else, it’s fine.

And then I would display that inside a special page in our members area in KLEQ, that, like you said, gives you a ton of more tools, such as being able to tag members when they show up to the call. We can tag them in our emailing system. Why? So then we can do some follow-up sequences, if you wanted to. You can definitely see who is live, you can control the pace, like you said. So if I wanted to, I could of course open and close. But I can, for example, display a button whenever I want. Maybe I’m telling them, hey, go there to check this out. Or maybe I’m doing an event with a partner. Like, for example, if you and I were doing something, I would tell them, “Hey, check out SuperFastBusiness,” and I can have a button that will appear whenever we talk about that. And then members just need to click and they can go there. So there’s very, very powerful things.

Unlimited streaming capacity

Again, chatting. Our members can send me questions, I see the questions, and then I can interact with them and I answer any questions they might have. All of that basically is free, and all of that is built in with KLEQ. So that’s what we do. You know, it’s making sure that we can have all the tools that we need to succeed online.

James: And you can have that on a public page or a private membership page, is that correct?

John: Yeah, exactly. So what I described is a membership-style, you know, Q&A, but you can mimic the entire experience in a public page. And now it becomes what’s the word that you used at the very beginning, which is a webinar. And a webinar is just an event, basically, like, a class or a presentation that’s happening online. And it’s usually live. And basically, that’s exactly what it is, right? People are on the page, they watch your presentation, they learn something cool. At the end, maybe you make an offer.

And by using the technology available in KLEQ, you have that, you can provide that whole experience. A hundred percent, you know, built in, and you are controlling the room, you’re applying those tags that now become even more important on the public type of campaign on a webinar, because it’s what you need to do. Like for example, people register for the webinar, and you want to know, well, who has actually attended? Because if they did attend, you might want to send some emails that are going to be obviously different than the ones who registered but did not attend. Maybe the ones who didn’t attend, you can offer them to register for another session. But the guests who did attend, maybe you want to follow up about the offer.

And then you can also do a different type of thing such as, well, who has actually stayed till the offer, to when you talked about the offer, or when the button appeared? Well, we can tag that. We can do these extra actions that would allow you then to then follow up with those guys in a special way. Like for them, the guys who saw the button, obviously, stayed till the end of the presentation, which is much more valuable than someone who just came in and left maybe after five minutes. You might want to follow up with those people in a different way and send them different emails. That’s the power of automation, power of segmentation. All of that is built in. And yeah, we can control the room and provide that awesome webinar experience right there on any page we want to.

James: It’s just so powerful. Because I’m thinking, the way that I have things set up at the moment, I’ve got my membership, and I’ve got a GoToWebinar account, which I’ve had for over a decade. And it’s luckily at legacy rate, but it’s definitely not affordable for most people. A lot of people are using Zoom these days, but there is integration challenges too, I remember, it’s just kind of complicated to set up a capture page from a webinar that captures the email. I have to use a third party tool, and then I have to push them into my email system. And then I have to register them for the webinar. So I needed some kind of tool that pushes them into all these three separate places now. And then I run the webinar, and then we get the export of the people who came and who didn’t, and it’s manual. So we have to do this in a difficult way. Even for my membership, I have to set up a recurring training and then I have to register members and then we have to manually remove people who are no longer members, and they have to log on to a third party tool that’s away from my site. I just love the fact that both public and private, what I’m hearing is, with your system, we can set up a squeeze page that will capture the details, apply a tag, you can then email them to the training that’s onsite and captive, and then you can send different emails depending on how they behave. And it’s all in the same system.

John: Yeah, and the beautiful thing is that when you want to set up a webinar campaign that comes with, you know, a series of pages – opt-in page, thank you page, the event page that we just described, where people are going to watch the presentation, hopefully click on that button to then go to the order page, and then after that, the thank you page. And then maybe after the event, you want to have maybe a replay or like a sale deadline. Well, the beautiful thing with KLEQ is that if you want to have all of that set up, you simply need to click one button. You go to add a campaign, you select the webinar campaign that is pre-built for you with all of these templates already pre-built; you give it a name, whatever name you want, and that’s it. All the pages, all the logic, all the tools are going to be set up. So that’s already a big advantage.

Tracking actions and no shows

And the second advantage is that all of those pages are on your website, which means that you can track the process. How many people went to the optin? how many people that went to the thank you after they registered, how many people actually went to the event page? Because that’s not something that you can do when you’re sending them to another tool like Zoom or GoToWebinar. You’re going to lose that tracking, right? Here, it’s all built in. You can simply just go to the admin area, you are in that campaign, and you can see the pages. And what we do in KLEQ is that we display the number of visits of the last X days right there. You can see it and you can quickly see, okay, well, this is how things are performing.

If you want to go deeper, you can obviously then start looking at different dates, how many people showed up on those dates, etc. You can then set up in what we call the funnel tracker where maybe you want to track exactly the conversion, the percentage conversion and all that. All of this is built in. You don’t have to mess about with different tools. You don’t have to struggle with different things and get into a nightmare of integrating plugins and scripts and and then if one thing breaks, then you don’t even know who you should even talk to, like which support team should I reach out, or what should I do? You know, everything is one. Everything is one. You talk to one team; if you have any issues with support, you have one tool to use; you click on the few buttons to set things up. And that’s our goal. That’s our mission. That’s what we want to do. If it’s a tool that we need, then I’d like to have it too, and then chances are it’s definitely already there in KLEQ.

James: I like that you’ve got advanced things so you can put a pixel on certain pages for remarketing audiences. Whether they’re in the early stages or the late stages, you can put your conversion pixel so you can know how much your traffic is converting and if it’s worth buying advertising to that.

Stream like a boss

Now you took me through Streaming Like A Boss recently. I was a complete rookie. Like, I’m not technically solid, my team do everything, normally. You set me up with OBS, we put it to my SuperFastBusiness Google account on YouTube. We set up a private video, we embedded it inside one of the pages. It was fascinating to watch. And then you show me how when you finished recording you can actually capture that recording. The team can then just download it. And you can make that part of an evergreen funnel if your webinar happens to convert, right?

John: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because now that’s the beautiful thing, is that now you have a video that is, basically, it was recorded on the fly. The high definition version is usually available within 15 minutes, or maybe a little bit longer. But whatever you have, basically that video, you can then download, you can stream, you can basically build, you have that awesome presentation. And if you want to turn this into an automated webinar, which is, from a technical perspective, if we just think about what is an evergreen webinar or automated webinar, it’s just a video that plays at the right time, and it behaves and tries to mimic a real experience, meaning that if you say that the webinar is 2 pm, and someone shows up at 2:15, then in theory, the video should not be starting from zero. It should be up on 15 minutes into the presentation. That’s really just what the automated webinar does.

Can you do automated webinars in KLEQ? Yeah, absolutely. We have actually five different kinds of automated webinars that you can leverage. And it’s all there. But yeah, you do have that video, you do have that experience. That’s exactly what I do every single week. On Thursdays I do my live stream, I answer the questions. In the afternoon, my support team comes in, the person who does that, he downloads the video, trims up a bit, maybe the beginning and the end, uploads it to our accounts. And that’s it, the replay’s available there and all the members who couldn’t be live or wanted to get their questions answered, but they couldn’t be live, then they can just watch the replay. So it’s really, really cool.

James: Nice.

Mixing the live with the pre-recorded

And the other thing I like is, using that studio software, you can actually mix in different scenes. You can have a live component, so you can have it on your camera, and then you could actually transition to something that’s already been recorded and play that. So you can actually have a hybrid of live slash recorded. And then you can, for example, answer the questions that come underneath the video if you wanted to direct your attention there.

John: Yeah.

James: If you wanted to enhance the education. But I really liked the flexibility of that.

So just a quick summary. You can basically get the software, the hosting, and the display all figured out using various different tools. You’ve got the free stuff, or the frontline stuff that brings people into your catchment.

And then you’ve got the delivery of content, which is definitely the way I generally do webinars. I run webinars every week. I run them for SilverCircle, I run them twice a month for SuperFastBusiness. I’m using an external tool for that. And then we capture recordings for SuperFastBusiness and we put them inside our membership. And I don’t have an easy way to track and register and add people and I don’t know how to email the people who did or didn’t come, easily. It’s not happening. So what we’re going to do, John, is we’re going to set up a demo streaming webinar on a new site that I built on KLEQ. We’re going to learn this and demonstrate it ourselves in the short-term future. So I’m looking forward to that experiment, and we’ll demo this and see how it works. And we’ll send out an invitation to our SuperFastBusiness podcast listeners.

John: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, this is very powerful. If you want to do virtual summits, which is really something that everybody should start considering, especially with what’s happening. Virtual summits, if you want to do live webinars, if you want to do like, what you said, a hybrid webinar, which is extremely powerful. And that’s what I tell my members, especially the shy ones, the guys who, you know, they’re not very experienced doing stuff online or doing webinars.

And maybe you’re a bit nervous about, you know, delivering that presentation. But you know what you’re talking about, you prepare that presentation, you create this amazing presentation, and you record it before. Now you have a video that is all about the content. And you do that because you’re considerate to people who are attending. You don’t want any, you know, like uhms, and you know blabbing about stuff. You just want to keep that presentation perfect, on point, helping people, helping your audience with, you know, helping them get results or solve their problems. Perfect. Now you have the perfect presentation.

You can absolutely do what we call a hybrid webinar, where now you’re live, you’re welcoming people, play that presentation. Go back live at the end. “Hey, I’m here to answer any questions you might have about this.” It’s the best of both worlds, because now you deliver the perfect presentation. You haven’t bored your audience. They are here. And also, you’re live, you’re serving them right there on the spot.

So that’s what I recommend everyone who is a bit stressed about doing webinars, and I know a lot of people are, you don’t have to be anymore. Here’s a beautiful way of doing it. I teach you how to do that in KLEQ.com as part of the Academy. You get a ton of different bonuses when you join. And if you are going through that streaming course, then you’ll know everything that you need to know about how to get guests into your webinars, how to share a presentation, how to use the different tools that are going to be very cost effective, free, so that you can do all of those things and create virtual summits or maybe help your members get more results by doing members Q&aA calls like I do.

Jmaes: KLEQ cost less than what GoToWebinar costs each month.

John: Right. Exactly.

James: I like that. You gave me a great suggestion. You said I could run SuperFastBusiness Live as a summit after the event. So I could take the recordings, and then have the person who was presenting live introducing, and we can answer the questions afterwards. So run the training, and we could do it over a particular period. And then you can turn it into an information product and sell the modules separately, if you want. So there’s so much flexibility. I love it.

We’ve covered a few different streaming ideas. Yes, by all means, use the native platforms like Facebook Live to give them what they want. leverage those recordings inside a membership if you want. Get yourself out there. It doesn’t suit everyone. I tend not to do live streams. I think I’ve done two in the last year to the public. I’m a bit shy, I think. I prefer to pre-record stuff. I pre-record all my little videos, I pre-record my podcasts, and then I produce them and publish them. I do my live trainings inside my memberships. That’s my preferred way to do it.

John: Yeah.

James: And you’ve got the tool that will do any of those options. So great stuff.

What else should you know?

Is there anything that we should say to finish off? Because I know that there’s different types of things you could livestream about, there’s different ways, you know, whether you’re using keynotes or face to camera, those sort of things.

But really, I don’t think there’s a rule book on this particular stuff. It’s about finding a style that works for you, right?

John: Yeah, absolutely. About finding what you are comfortable with, what you like. Do you like to be on camera, or do you don’t mind, or do you want to just do a presentation? It’s totally cool. You know, like, people do it their own way. As long as you know, we are helping people, as long as we are trying our best to, you know, help them with whatever they need help with, then that’s, for me, that’s what matters. If you usually, you know, maybe show up on camera and say Hi, that’s always a nice touch. But if you don’t want to do that, then don’t do it.

If you want to share your screen and maybe show, what I do is I show people how to use KLEQ as part of my members only Q&A. So what I do is I share my computer screen, actually. And you can do that if you want to do that. I know a lot of YouTubers actually do it that way when they are reporting on news, they basically share their screen, and by using exactly the same tools I’m talking about right now. And all of those guys that you see that are stuck at home, like the news reporters, or the guys who were working at ESPN, like you know, sports analysts and all that, now they are all doing that from home. And you know, they are busy calling each other, they’re broadcasting that, and then that’s it. That’s like, the show.

So really nowadays, you have all the power that you need to really do TV-quality stuff right there from your computer. And you know, it’s really up to you how you want to do it, how fancy you want to do it. If you want to keep it simple like I do, I just basically have my camera, I take questions, I answer, I share my screen. If I want to share a keynote, I do that. But if you want to then spice it up, have logos and, you know, things flying left and right, you can do it. Because definitely the tools are definitely there, and they definitely work.

James: Yeah. You know, for what I’m on, I just do audio. Q&A audio, no camera. I’m old-school with that. And yeah, long live the audio call. It’s easy for people to access without having to do hair and makeup. So don’t write those ones off, because I’ve seen a lot of people, they do Zooms and they’ve got a screen full of people, but that’s not how everyone likes to do it. I find people get uncomfortable. In our own team meeting, we don’t use cameras. We don’t need to use cameras. We’ve been working at home for 10 years. We’ve got the hang of it. And we quite like the privacy of being behind…

John: In your pajamas.

James: Yeah, with the camera off. That’s fine. And in the summer, you don’t have to wear a T-shirt. It’s great.

The basic equipment you’ll need

In terms of tech, I would say it’s worth investing $100 in a reasonable microphone. You can these days get a USB microphone for 39, 59, 79, 129 dollars, that will do the job. You could get a USB headset that has a little boom microphone to give you a consistent sound. Try not to use the one that comes standard with your computer, it’s not going to give your audience a good experience. Also, I’ve noticed the camera in my laptop, it’s a Mac Air, is rubbish. So I ordered an external camera. Logitech makes a good external camera, that will give you a much better quality camera setup than the one on your computer. So those two things make it nice and easy. If you want to go all out, you could get upgrades like an Elgato stream deck where you can put little buttons and things. You can get a RODE Caster Pro, podcast production studio. You can put in sound effects and automate things. I don’t have any of those things. I’m a USB kind of a guy, right? Plain and simple.

John: Plain and simple. And I don’t recommend that to anyone who is, you know, getting started. You guys don’t need this. Even if you have just, you know, your webcam for now that’s built in, as long as you have good lights, you know, like maybe put your computer in front of a window, and then you’re always, you’re gonna get the light from outside, then the quality is definitely going to improve. If you’re trying to upgrade, then obviously Logitech, they do very cheap cameras. The Logitech C920 is probably the most-used webcam in the world right now. The C922 is also very good, the same thing. In terms of microphone, RODE USBs or Blue Yeti USB, these are, you know, the standard microphones that most people will use, and they’re quite affordable. Yeah, this would be the recommendation.

James: It also could be good to use headphones. And pay attention to your backdrop. If you’re going to go on camera, please fix up the backdrop. People absolutely will look at your backdrop, they will judge you for your backdrop. Don’t think anything other than that, it’s 100 percent fact. The amount of comments I get about my backdrop are insane. So that’s the first thing people notice, and they’ll form opinions. If you have a bookshelf, you’re going to look smart. If you have a mess, you’re going to look disorganized and scattered. So that’s a really important thing to pay attention to.

Wrapping things up

I think we’ve given a good start on this streaming thing. If you’ve got a question and you’re listening to this episode, go ahead and ask us the question. We’d love to get the questions. We’ll answer them on a future podcast. We’re going to be setting up a test stream with some of the content from SuperFastBusiness Live as an experiment.

Also, John, remember we were able to make my iPhone feed into OBS the other day, which was a bit of fun. So, you know, you probably already have the equipment you need to make a pretty decent webcast or streaming summit, whatever you want to do. Do it, get out there, the tools are there. You’ve got some ideas.

If you happen to be a KLEQ member, of course, you get Streaming Like A Boss, and you’ll be able to set up. It took John about 18 minutes to set me up and hook up the things we needed to make me streaming on my website. So I was pretty encouraged by that. If I can do it, you could definitely do it. Thanks so much, John.

John: You’re welcome. Thank you.

James: There we go. That was John Lint from KLEQ.com. He’s a regular guest on the show, because he’s got the data and he’s got the marketing chops. We’ll see you on a future episode.

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