SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion shares practical, experience-based advice for creating and monetizing successful live streams, drawing from his past Sunday night show and previewing a new upcoming show.
Core Equipment & Setup
• Use a dynamic microphone (not condenser) to reduce background noise in home environments.
• Affordable mic recommendations include ATR2100/2100x and FIFINE K688; high-end option is Shure SM7B.
• Use a 4K webcam and basic lighting (don’t rely on windows).
• OBS (covered in Episode 1061) lets you run your stream like a TV studio.
Show Structure & Consistency
• Pick a clear niche and audience.
• Maintain a regular schedule so viewers know when to show up.
• Use recurring segments to create familiarity and anticipation.
• Make streams entertaining, regardless of topic.
Audience Engagement
• Run giveaways (small during the show, larger at the end to increase watch time).
• Encourage viewers to stay until the end to boost platform metrics.
• Use voice inflection and emphasis to avoid sounding monotone.
Automation & Moderation
• Use tools like Nightbot to:
o Moderate chats automatically
o Block spam links and offensive language
o Run timed promotional messages
o Manage fair, random giveaways
• Automation allows you to run a professional stream solo.
Titles, Thumbnails & Overlays
• Use clear, descriptive titles (avoid being clever at the expense of clarity).
• Create high-impact thumbnails using AI tools.
• Add overlays such as countdown timers, “Be Right Back” screens, and branded graphics to look professional.
Promotion & Growth
• Promote streams via your email list to jumpstart viewership.
• Watch other live streams to learn formats, tools, and engagement tactics.
• Participate in other creators’ streams via Super Chats to gain visibility.
Monetization Options
• Super Chats & donations (YouTube takes ~30%).
• Selling your own products, memberships, merch, or services.
• Sponsorships are possible but usually require large audiences.
• Live streaming builds stronger personal connections, leading to repeat viewers and steady income.
Final Takeaway
Live streaming is a powerful way to build trust, engagement, and multiple income streams. With the right tools, structure, and consistency, even small audiences can be profitable—and the relationship with viewers is far stronger than with pre-recorded content.

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Episode 1062 – Streaming Tips
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] It's Tom here with episode 1062 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today I'm going to give you some streaming tips. I did a show a couple of years ago and, um, had a lot of good response from it. So I'll give you some of the tips from that and some of the new things you can do that you couldn't do back then. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 1061. That's related to this. And it's the free program called OBS. And it's what allows you to run your whole streaming thing like a TV studio. So check that out. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. OBS was 1061. All right, pick up a copy of our automation book. Version 3.0 is the most current one. And check out my mentor program. Well, to get to there you go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And that'll get you to version 3.0 of the Automation book as my gift to you. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV.

[00:01:33] Okay, so I did a show several years ago. It was a Sunday night show and the only reason I quit is my beloved dog Rubik's died and I was just devastated. I did not feel like entertaining and yukking it up and answering questions. I was just shot. Because of that. I had spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with this dog training him.

[00:02:00] We were bonded like crazy. And he was. He was a protection dog, but he he was a dog where a three year old could have him sitting for hot dogs, you know? So it was just a very special dog. So I quit the show. But anyway, I'm going to give you some tips that I use to make that show successful. And I'm going to be rolling out a new show coming out after, I think, after the first of the year. I may do some experimenting with it, if you'd like to hear it and see it. Uh, and I'll do an announcement about that. If you're not on my email list, go to. When you go to YouTube, you'll get announcements of other things that I'm doing. So just make sure you get on that list. Okay. So I'm going to give you a whole bunch of random tips I don't know. 123456789 1011 1213 I don't know 15 or 20 tips on running a successful live stream. And there are no particular order. I try to lump things together that that make sense. All right. So the first thing is you want to have a dynamic microphone, not a condenser microphone. Dynamic microphones are less sensitive than condenser microphones. You might think, well, why would I want something that's less sensitive? Well, the reason is, is most of us are not in sound booths that are cut out every extraneous noise.

[00:03:23] We're at home offices and living rooms and basements and places where there's background noises. So dynamic mics help keep those background noises at bay. All right. So I've got lots of information on that kind of stuff. But anyway, now high end budget would be the one I'm using right now is an Sm7 B by Shure, but I've got ones that some of my students have found on sale for $62 that are just spectacular. One is an ATR 2100 or 2100 x either one and another one. A guy that I listened to once in a while says a 15 f I f I n e k 88 is really good for $6,070. And I think if you buy a bundle, it gets a microphone arm with it so you can mount it to your table and you don't have to have a mic stand in between your legs and, you know, messing you up. So. So that's that. Then you've got to have a decent webcam. You should have a 4K webcam nowadays. A lot of times your new computers will have them built in, but you can get Logitech ones and other high quality ones for less than 100 bucks. If you want high quality video. And then you should have some lights. You know, a lot of people say, well, just use get near a window natural light. But how are you going to do it at night? See? So having a few inexpensive lights and I have a whole episodes on lighting and how to light a person and yourself and all that stuff.

[00:05:00] And so that doesn't have to cost you a lot. And some of the newer lights they can make like, I don't know, like thunder and lightning effects if you want to, you know, have the lights be more than just regular lights. So you can do that fairly inexpensively. Okay. So that's some some of the equipment you need there. All right. Uh, again these are in no particular order, but you should pick an audience and you should have a regular schedule to your show. Like that was a show that was 8:00 in the winter and 9:00 when the times changed in the summer because people were outside till 830 at night in the summer. So I had a 9:00 show in the summer, an 8:00 show in the winter. But it was regular. You knew it was going to be on, and then you pick an audience, so you have to talk about a particular subject. Now I'm known as an internet guy, but the one that I'm coming out with in uh, uh, shortly is called Highly Educated Idiots, and it's a commentary on common sense and all the stupid things people are doing out in the world. And yeah, it's going to be entertaining because I'm kind of a cut up and I'll be blasting people for stupid things that they're doing and doing reaction videos, showing them doing stupid things.

[00:06:25] So, so, but it'll be that type of audience. It'll be entertaining, but it'll I'm sure it'll have some type of political aspect to it, because a lot of the people are going to be politicians that I make fun of. So that's what's coming up. But it'll be a regular audience. They'll know that that's the, the, the topics and that's it'll just be different people and different groups that are doing stupid things. So it'll be entertaining and like I said, have a political aspect to it. Uh, let's see, um, On the show. I had regular segments for interest, for instance, even though this was an internet related thing with because that was my well-known expertise. Having been selling on the commercial internet since it started in 1994, I still was known as entertaining. And so I had a segment on, I think it was the Dumbest Criminals and that, you know, people like a guy robbed a 7-Eleven store and ran away through a field. But he had those shoes on like little kids that light up in the background. And so the police were able to catch him. Yeah. So so stuff like that. But what regular segments could you have that people would look forward to? All right. So that's uh, makes it fun. Uh, giveaways. Now there's several ways to do giveaways. You could do multiple giveaways throughout your program or one.

[00:08:00] The technique people use is to tell them, hey, if you watch till the end, we'll show you how to, uh, to jump in on the giveaway. And that gives you more watch time get people and that makes your show look better to YouTube. If you happen to be on YouTube or wherever you're at, they do pay attention if people are watching or leaving. So if you get them to stay till the end, uh, maybe, maybe you had little giveaways during your live stream and then a really big one that's going to be at the end, and you're going to tell people how to how to join for the big deal, you know, so you get to pick that stuff. And it could be ebooks or gift cards or, you know, whatever. Now you can monetize these things once you get monetized in whatever platform you're on. I think you got to have 1000 subscribers, but that's fairly easy. Now with YouTube shorts you can on YouTube, you can get 1000 subscribers pretty easy compared to the old days, just using the long form content. Yeah, so you can people can do super chats and donate money to you. In mine. I'm going to give a percentage of any super chats to my school, in that I'm going to put that money aside for scholarships for disabled persons. So it's got a charitable aspect to it, but you can do it any way you want.

[00:09:25] Super chats. A lot of times people will, if they really want their chat to be shown on the screen and you talk about it, then they they throw some money in. All right. So you might not be that get to do that right off the bat. If you have very few viewers until you build up your viewer base and then you can there's all ways, all kinds of ways to monetize these live streams with your own products, just like I do with this podcast. You know, I don't you never, virtually never see me promoting other stuff. It's usually my school, my mentor program, my own books, my own courses, my podcast guesting course. You know, all these things are my own things to monetize. I never shoot for sponsorship. However, I wouldn't turn it down if people offered them to me. But you have to have pretty big numbers to make sponsorship even worth the trouble. And the same amount of, uh, with very low viewer count right off the bat. My first episode, I made money by just offering some ebooks of my own. Say where sponsor wouldn't want you on your first episode because they wouldn't get anything back from it. Okay. Let's see. Now, you can automate a lot of this to run by yourself. Now I'm using a a thing called Nightbot Nightbot. And it's automatically moderates my chats. So just for instance, I can use it to block people from putting links in because people will want to spam your your chats in that putting promoting themselves instead of contributing to the conversation.

[00:11:09] So you can block that automatically. You can set a timer to show an ad for your stuff, or to remind people to subscribe or, you know, whatever you want to promote. Every so many minutes. But as long as there's so many comments in between, so you wouldn't want your your automated chatbot to just keep hitting over and over and over again when there's only three viewers and not many people in the beginning, you might not have a lot of people, but anyway, you can have it set to. After so many chats and so many minutes, it pops up and ad to subscribe or check out my school or whatever I want to promote. Also, you can have a blacklist of words in your in your nightbot. And like I said, Nightbot is not the only one. It's just one of the most popular. You can have a blacklist of words that if those words are in a chat, it times out that person and keeps track, keeps an eye on them for you, and it can give them a message and say, hey, you can't use that n word in in our chat. Sorry. And if you do it too many times, you're going to get banned. You know, you don't have to say that the first time, but I mean, for that kind of word, you you might want to get rid of that person.

[00:12:32] I don't know. And then also, it can handle your giveaways. So you can tell it to okay. Uh, everybody put, uh, the word or the phrase screw the commute in your comment. And so everybody's going to start bombing a bunch of comments, which makes it look like you've got engagement, which you do. And then the nightbot randomly picks a winner. See? So it's not like you're doing any favoritism. So the nightbot just picks a winner. And you can do it for subscribers only if you want the, you know, the only people that can participate if they subscribe first. Uh, and there's all kinds of parameters you can do with these giveaways. So that's all from Nightbot. And I don't think I paid anything for Nightbot. I don't even think I signed up for a free trial. I just started using it and I don't remember paying for it. Okay, so that's, uh, some automation that you can use so you can run this whole thing by yourself. And of course, a lot of these things interface with that. Obs, which was the last episode, 1061, where I told you how to use it like a TV studio to run these things for you. Okay. What else? You should have really good, understandable titles for your live stream. Because, you know, if you get cute new people that never heard of, you won't know what it's about and you're going to hurt yourself.

[00:14:08] So getting cute. Uh, if it doesn't make sense and is clear to somebody that never heard of you is going to hurt your your stream because they won't click over to even check you out because they don't know what it's about. Also, you can go to ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini or any of the AI things and say, hey, I want a really impactful thumbnail to promote my live stream. Say so. It's amazing. Now you don't have to get custom artists to do this stuff anymore, but you can have a good thumbnail that's. And actually you can tell them, hey, this is my topic area. Go out and evaluate the top thumbnails for that had the most views in on YouTube or something, and come back and make me one. Here's the title for mine and it'll do it all for free within a very short period of time. Okay, now another thing to make a tip to make it more professional is called overlays. So you might want to have a custom. I mean they have stock overlays uh sets. So maybe they got five or 6 or 7 different overlays for around 30 bucks. I think you can get those at, uh, like stream Tools.com or Stream Lab has them and they have overlays, which is just a fancy kind of I don't want to say thumbnail, but, uh, graphic. Some are animated, some are just static.

[00:15:51] But for instance, I'll have an overlay that's going to say five minutes till showtime, something like that. You don't have my name on it and what the show is about, and I'm going to have an animated one that has the a bunch of synonyms for stupid coming on the screen, flying in and out of the screen. Some of my, uh, like my banner for my channel, for my YouTube channel for this is is cartoonish. So I don't want to look too mean. Like I'm being mean. I'm just doing a fun thing. However, I'm probably going to do a rumble show where I've got some really nasty stuff I'm going to do for people that are really bad, but that's another story. Okay, so you should have a good title that's clear. A thumbnail that grabs people, overlays an overlay with a countdown timer of when the show starting. You can have an overlay of be right back if if you've got to go to the bathroom or get a drink or something because some of these streams can go several hours. Don't have to. But if you get lots of people and they keep giving you super chats and keep giving you money, you might want to just keep going. So some of the ones I watch have going for three, 4 or 5 hours. Okay, now to get started, you might want to use your email list to to tell people about your new stream, your stream coming up.

[00:17:18] And so probably I'll do another Sunday night show when I roll this out and I'll email, everybody says, hey, I've got a new live show tonight, 8 p.m. eastern, and check it out, you know, and I'll tell them what it's about. So that helps you get a bunch of viewers right off the bat if you have a decent email list. So again, I just have to emphasize you want a regular schedule now doesn't mean you can't pop in for a, you know, breaking news if it makes sense for your, you know, your topic and your industry, but if you got more subscribers, they'll get notice of it at least. And you can still send another email out that says, hey, I usually do Sunday nights, but, uh, I'm doing tonight, Wednesday, because of this breaking news, you know, so that can make you an extra revenue stream for that week if you're only doing once a week. I mean, some of these people do them every day. Some of them do them five days a week, three days a week, you know, and, uh, and I watch a lot of them, which is one of my tips for you, is to watch other live streams. And all you have to do is go to YouTube, pick a channel of somebody you like, and then click the live button and it'll show you what live streams they've done.

[00:18:37] And see. The live stream will turn into a permanent video after the live stream is done within a few minutes. So you can just you don't have to watch them live. You can go back and look at some of the other lives that they've done, which is what I did to get ideas for my new live stream and the software. I started recognizing same kinds of software they're using on different live streams. So then I went and got it myself. I mean, I'm not sure Nightbot even existed when I did my show a couple years ago. So, so so there you go. Okay. Now, uh, you should make it entertaining. I mean, no matter how serious your topic, everybody, including when I do speeches, expects an entertainment value. So the more you can do that, and if you're if you're not good at it, just go find stuff in the news that's funny and just repeat it or show it during your live stream. So don't fret about that. But make sure that you do it because people don't want just boring talking heads for hour or so or more. And one thing I always tell people when I train my professional speakers is how to be more interesting, like instantly. And it's by emphasizing when you speak instead of saying, oh, it's a good idea to do wonderful live streams, that's monotone. To practice being more interesting is you in general emphasize the adjectives and the verbs.

[00:20:16] And so good idea would be, uh, a good would be an adjective. It's a good or great idea to create wonderful live streams. See. So that's just like a two second baby course on it. But if you practice doing that, you're you're way more interesting to listen to. All right. So voice inflection and like I said one thing to do is just watch a bunch of other streamers and get ideas on what you could do with your show. And there you go. So that's some tips on streaming, but it can be very valuable to you. Why you would bother with this is because it creates a much tighter connection with people. I mean, you should see some of these streamers that are just talking about stuff and people, the money, you can see the money coming into their account just from the super chats. And then some of them stop every once in a while and read the super chats and display them on the super chats and display them on the screen. And that makes that person feel like, oh man, my, they they gave some money and they got their promotion out of it because you're your username shows up. So whenever I get my show going, I'm going to go to some of these other big shows. And when I donate to them, basically by doing a super chat, it's going to have at highly educated idiots right there.

[00:21:45] And so chances are the host is going to look at that and make a big deal because that's a cool name. And then they'll people that are watching this will say, hey, we need to go check out highly educated idiots. So that's one way to build your show. Basically it's a form of advertising, but it's donating to the other person's show that's already further ahead than you. But yeah, so you'll get great ideas by doing that. But the connection that you build with the people, some will come back every time you stream, some will donate. I've seen donations or superchats of $500. That's the highest one I've seen recently, but I see $100 all the time and sometimes it's $2. But the thing is, it's all just straight money. Now, I believe you have to give 30% to, uh, to YouTube because they collect it and all that stuff, but still, it's just you talking and people throwing money at you. And there's other ways, though. You can take direct donations through PayPal or something, and you can sell memberships. You can sell your own stuff that that YouTube doesn't get any money for, you know, and you can put, you know, when I talked about moderating links in the chat, you can still put all your links in there and people can click right over to your stuff and buy stuff from you. And a lot of people have merchandise, hats and t shirts and mugs and things like that.

[00:23:16] So all kinds of ways to monetize this. So so there you go. There's a little primer on streaming if you want help with this and the other million things to be successful online. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. And my school with I'm certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. The school's been operating for, I think 13, 14 years now. It's a boutique school. You get plenty of attention, uh, one on one, uh, and then it's self-paced so you can go at your own speed anytime, day or night. So, uh, so very, very powerful thing for you or a loved one in your life. See, if you're in my mentor program, you get a free scholarship to my school, and that you can gift to somebody. It could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars with a worthless four year education, which I don't even want to call it education. It's more of an indoctrination to teach you how to protest. So so you have a highly in-demand skill and as little as six months. And we've actually had people making money long before they even graduated. So check it out at IMTCVA.org and my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and I will see you streaming. See you later.