Category: Livestream schedule

Back to livestreaming and youtube

Posted on by BogusRed

I’ve just published a new video where I cover 10 steps pro artists use in their art process to create professional art.

10 steps pro artists use to create amazing art

This is a condensed version of a Livestream I hosted a few weeks back.

After nearly a year of no streaming or videos I decided to come back to livestreaming.

I originally stopped for a few reasons. I found the process of creating YouTube videos quite time consuming to make them at the quality I really wanted them to be.

Livestreaming was a bit of a mixed bag. When I did “chill streams” where I just hung out and did art, I felt it didn’t really provide value to the PaperDemon community so I ended up not promoting the streams, this getting very poor engagement. I also found it was not so great for my anxiety because I was needing to be social, rather than having planned content to talk about.

When I did educational Livestream I felt more comfortable because I planned the content ahead of time and was confident that the content was valuable educational art content. But doing these streams regularly was also time consuming due to the planning involved.

Interestingly I found that even though I hadn’t posted to YouTube for a long time, we were still getting new signups to paperdemon and the discord from these videos compared to our other social media marketing efforts.

I think this is because the content is more valuable and more evergreen. On twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, posts typically only get seen for a day or two, then are forgotten about. But content on YouTube is continually searched and discovered even years later.

Because of this I decided to come back to livestreaming and YouTube videos in an effort to market PaperDemon.

But to be more realistic I’m only planning on one Livestream per month with quality educational material and demos along with an occasional extra video here and there. This is a pace that feels reasonable to me.

I’m also experimenting with YouTube shorts to share shorter advice stuff.

I may have to take another break when the baby comes but we’ll see. I may be itching to do videos. Livestreaming might be hard to coordinate around feeding and nap time.

I decided to stream on YouTube going forward instead of twitch because I’ve heard so much from the experts in this space that twitch has poor “discoverability” compared to YouTube. Plus it makes things so much easier. If people subscribe to my stream, they’re also subbed to my videos and vice versa.

My next stream will be this Saturday 11am pst and I’ll be talking about composition, a topic requested by a member of the PaperDemon community.

2021 Livestream plans

Posted on by BogusRed

I’ve decided to take a break from Livestreams for the next few months whilst I focus on making improvements to PaperDemon.com. I’ve got a ton of features and upgrades planned for this year and I want to focus on making these improvements because these are blockers for us turning up our marketing efforts.

I’d also like to make some changes to the frequency and content of my streams…

Content changes

It was in 2018 when I first began experimenting with livestreaming. I originally saw it as an opportunity to better connect with the PaperDemon community and reach a new audience. I initially began with educational streams about art fundamentals. But over time these ended up changing into “art chill streams” where I’d draw and chat with folks who walked into the chat.

I still believe in the potential value of educational streams but over the past year I didn’t have the time to invest in it regularly. The attendance and engagement of my chill streams wasn’t great and part of the reason for that was the value to our community wasn’t there. I don’t really have much talent or ability as an entertainer but I think if I focus more on my strengths, such as teaching, I can do more with it and bring more value. I also won’t have as hard of a time promoting it because I can promote it guilt free on PaperDemon because I’ll know it’s of more value.

Educational streams also have the added bonus of the recordings being reusable as valuable content later down the line. I can edit them into more concise videos and maybe even use them as bonus content for signing up.

I also have long term plans (thinking maybe 3 years out) to offer paid gamified art education content to compliment the Art RPG content. My original concept for PaperDemon’s gamification was actually going to be something like that but I decided to pivot for various reasons.

As for topics, I think I might do some streams on drawing basics like using shapes to create characters, composition, as well as color and style. I’ll be doing a poll with my community in discord in March to determine the first topic.

Frequency changes

Previously, I had livestreams scheduled every week (but often cancelled them at the last minute). When I start streaming again I will be limiting it to 1 stream per month and will keep the schedule rather than canceling due to anxiety issues. This will allow me to better prepare useful content and make them more manageable. And because I have announced them ahead of time with curriculum, it holds me accountable and makes me more reliable as a streamer to my members. As I’ve heard, consistency is important.

Platform change

I’ve also decided to switch to streaming from Twitch to Youtube. The main reasons for this are that according to the experts I’ve listened to (Devin Nash and Alpha Gaming), Youtube has much better discovery for small streamers. It’s very difficult to grow an audience on the Twitch platform. You often have to grow your audience outside (such as with youtube videos or a blog or mailing list) and then link that audience to your Twitch page. By streaming on Youtube I at least have a chance of reaching new people that maybe haven’t come to PaperDemon.com yet.

It also makes things easier for those who want to watch the recordings since Youtube has a better watch interface and automatically archives the streams to your youtube channel. And unlike Twitch, it won’t delete the recordings after a month or whatever.

Dates, times, topics and more info to be released at a later date!