A list of 10 Important Tips To KickStart Your Twitch Journey! (Assuming you have your average gaming PC)

1. 10 Important Tips
To KickStart Your
Twitch Journey

2. Having A Good Internet Speed.
You do not need to have a Fibre connection. You need to have a modern-age stable
Internet ADSL/Broadband connection (Recommended to have at least 5Mbps UL/DL)
which can at least support 720p recording output to your modem/router. I recommend
new streamers to stream at 720p between 1800kbps-2500kbps bitrate — downscale
from 1080p if it is set from your OBS, so that your viewers won’t get buffering so often.
The reason behind it, if you are not a Twitch Partner, Twitch Servers don’t support the
Quality Options if you’re not in their Top 10% Streamers list). You can check your
Internet speed via Speedtest.net (always choose a SpeedTest Server which has a
Twitch Server close to you) and put your result to OBS’s Estimator. (Next time, I will
guide you more on OBS Setup)

3. Your Microphone isn’t a “dump” equipment.
As you know that the viewers intend to lurk around the live streams to get interest in
the game genre. It is all about PR or voice communication. You need to get an average
headset (probably with Noise Cancellation) from your nearest IT store, approximately
SGD$20 or RM50 or so. Just to make sure that you’re not living within the tornado. If you
prefer to use wireless model of the headset, do ensure that it may interfere the other
wireless component such as WiFi, Wireless Mouse, those devices which uses 2.4GHz
frequency, as result… It will cause some statics or buzzing sound to your audio quality.
To resolve it, sacrifice some of your wireless hardware device to use a wired connection.

4. Showing Your Face.
I meant it by having a webcam. As you may come across to some streams that have a webcam or
without a webcam. From my experience, people prefer to watch streams with Webcam whereby they
could be browsing your stream through Twitch’s Game Directory. Twitch will take a snapshot in certain
seconds of the time of that stream channel to set as a stream thumbnail in it’s Game Directory. This
will make that user to click on your stream if you have a webcam. As you know, this is like a first
impression. Some of the streams do not have webcam, they have a reason behind it. According to
someone I know of, due to the Internet isn’t good enough to sustain her video output. She has stopped
using a webcam. If you are not aware, webcam uses some Internet bandwidth too. The modern decent
webcam supports at least of 720p recording which you can purchase it for less than SGD$50 or less
than RM150. According to my survey, having a webcam… you will get more viewership than to those
who doesn’t have. If you think the webcam runs on 720p, is giving you some latency… I recommend you
to lower the quality for the webcam but don’t lower the quality until the one can hardly seeing your
face.

5. Overlay.
Overlay represents a type of information is visually relayed to you (commonly means: at a glance, you can see some
information). Most people use OBS like I do, since it is FREE but there’s other PAID alternatives such as XSplit. Start
creating an Art Overlay around your OBS/XSplit scene like designing for your webcam, follower/donation alert notification
(For example: TwitchAlerts), various games that you usually play. Do take note of the game size resolution for DotA,
League of Legends, etc) for it’s placement… Overlay will make your scene more lively and not so boring, it also helps to
attract some viewer’s attention. If you don’t have any art skills, you can seek someone who has art skills for help or ask me
as I have a lot of contacts!
It is a probably a best thing to set an Art Scene for:
-Pre-Stream Scene (Stream is Starting… + Countdown Timer + Your Music Opening)
-Post-Stream Scene (You’re offline, ask your viewers to visit your social media to get notified with other next stream +
Your Music Closing)
AFK/BRB Scene (If you need more time to go to bathroom, eating, etc. Probably you need this…)
*This will encourage other new streamers to do the same.

6. Start with Non-Popular Games.
Just give up on those popular games as you will hardly get spotted compared to them,
the popular streamers. Twitch ranks the individual streams by most viewers first. At the
start, if you might consider something classic game or released long time ago — which
can perform well to your computer specs. If you have a recent-updated specs of a
computer system, I recommend to play those Free-to-Play games/localised released
games/early access games. Sometimes, early access games will lure more viewers
however it might also played by partnered streamers from other regions. If you really
want to play that, I recommend you to stream it at a non-peak timeslot to boost your
viewerships to the top list of the game genre.

7. Channel Moderation Bot.
If you are a viewer of a channel, you might notice that there’s bots named Nightbot, Xanbot or Moobot.
These are Moderation Bots which it is good to have it in your stream. You can visit to the individual bot
channels to learn about how to invite it to your channel. You have to /mod it so it can start to
moderate your chat, some of these bots (Nightbot, Moobot) have a website to manage. You have to
login with your Twitch account to get it started after you have invited the bot into your channel. These
bots are good to moderate those unwanted/spams links or anything that could be harmful to your
viewers if they have clicked on it and get redirected to elsewhere. Some chats have been viewbotted
(means a massive wave of bots entering to the chat and advertising or even spam messages in your
channel) as a source of advertising. Get prepared first than sorry. Don’t ever ever use view bots to keep
your channel viewer counts high even though you don’t have any intention to advertise. Twitch system
tracks client connection, if you have been tracked by them, you can get banned and you will never get
partnered. You can also host your own Chat Bot such as DeepBot (Paid — USD$10 One Time) — See It’s
Features or AnkhBot (Free) — See It’s Features, which will be running on your Windows System. All for
these chat bots have their own features such as Stream Currency System, Song Requests, Custom
Commands (such has basic introduction, your social links, etc), Custom API etc. One more bot to add,
RevloBot (Stream Currency System, Leaderboard, Campaign, Rewards, Raffle, etc)

8. Socialise.
When you’re playing your game, it is hard to know who has entered into your channel.
Take your time to look up the userlist and give them a warm welcome. If you are a bad
multi-tasker, you get a chat bot to help you out for welcoming them or thanks them for
the follow. You also can use TwitchAlerts for such follower-notification labels to put in
your Overlay to thanks them for follow. If you don’t like to repeat the basic introduction
of yourself like your name, the place you live in etc., you can indicate the information in
your Twitch Panel or add in summary to a command in your chat bot. As we are
humans, we have feelings too, if someone asked you about something, just reply them
politely and be nice just like how you talk to people in real life. If there’s someone
harassed you or make you feel annoyed in the chat, you can warn them in the stream or
even timeout/ban them. You can make your regular viewers as a mod to assist you to
timeout the user in the chat when you’re in-game or you think you can’t multi-task well.

9. Get A Team Mate.
I highly recommend the streamers to use Discord than Skype, TeamSpeak (Have to Pay), CurseVoice.
Discord is a voice chat app just like Skype, TeamSpeak, CurseVoice. It uses lower bandwidth, CPU
usage and Memory compared to those. The thing is… It is completely FREE! Setup your own Discord
Server. (If you need help, you can ask me by granting me as your Discord Server Admin while I help you
with the rest).
Before you start streaming, hop into your own Discord Voice channel and ask your team mate to join
in with you. If you are playing a single player game, you can also ask your friend to talk with you. Just
do some casual talking about life, games, etc. This is also an advantage tool when you are
collaborating (coop) with another streamer. If you are too focus on your game and have no voice/chat
interaction, you will lose some viewers. The viewers will find your stream is too boring, they might not
return to your stream again. This is a first impression, just put yourself in their shoes.

10. Stream Schedule.
I recommend you to start using Google Cal (Signup a Google Account if you don’t have it) to input your stream schedule details and
share the calendar link in your Twitch Panel. I have received from a lot of people that they claimed that they do not have a fixed
schedule and didn’t bother to create a stream schedule. Having a stream schedule on Google Cal, you can still update the changes
whenever you have a last minute changes. No one will predict what will happen in the next few weeks time. People are more likely turned
into your regulars if you have a fixed schedule than just streaming whenever you want or feel like. Do post to your Social Media before
you start streaming… You also can leverage on my Twitch Tweet Bots to tweet out your Twitch Streams, it will retweet for you to it’s
Twitter’s followers.
If you are from:
– Asia (@TwitchAsia)
– SG/MY (@TwitchSGMY)
– HongKong (@TwitchHK)
– Taiwan (@TwitchTaiwan)
– AU/NZ (@TwitchOceania)
– North America (@Twitch_NA)
– European Union (@Twitch_EU)

11. Get Involved.
It is good to involve in other streams as a viewer too, rather than being just a streamer. But don’t be an
arse to advertise your stream in a stranger’s stream, unless you want to get ban. Do not feel miserable
if your stream has just 1 or 2 viewers, I do encourage you to /host someone else after your stream
which related to the game that you just played. When the time flew by, you will eventually becoming a
close friend of that streamer, he/she will /host or advertise you in return. It is just a matter of time and
you will definitely reach at a point being a Twitch Partner.

12. Repeat it as a habit.
Be yourself is the key but you have to build with a good streaming habit. Treat these as
your streaming SOP (Standard Operation Procedures).