The ultimate goal for any streamer is simple – leverage the power of an existing streaming platform, generate a solid audience base consisting of loyal followers who are always ready to tune in to your broadcasts, and hopefully make a lot of money doing that.
To achieve this goal, prospective streamers usually try to create something unique and valuable that users of the streaming platform can’t say no to. If things go according to plan, little by little, the audience base starts to become larger, the streamer starts to create even better content, and this in turn increases their following even further.
Once this is achieved, many streamers smile and consider it job done. Unbeknownst to many, though, such a plan, particularly one that is restricted to only a singular platform, can end up being highly detrimental in the long-term.
Why You Need a Personal Website
Restricting all your streaming efforts on a singular platform has its advantages. You’re able to focus more and give your best without being distracted by your efforts elsewhere. Sadly, this can also make you overly reliant, and the extreme reliance can end up hurting you badly in the future. The solution? Building your own personal website.
You see, the point of building a personal website is not really to compete with your original platform. At the basic level, it is to give you a degree of control which you wouldn’t necessarily have without it. Without a personal website, everything you do, along with your accessibility to your fans, is determined by the native platform and its algorithm. With a personal website, however, you have total control, and can choose to do with your traffic as you please.
You can also diversify, and most importantly, have more flexibility when switching platforms so that instead of linking to a platform that isn’t under your control, and that can be gone in a few days, months, or years, you can direct a portion of your marketing efforts to your personal website that is absolutely under your control and is there to stay for a long time.
Building Your Personal Website
Despite its numerous benefits, many streamers are discouraged from building their own personal websites because they believe that it is too difficult. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Sure, maybe back in the days building a personal website used to be a herculean task. But with the advent of content management systems, designing a website personally has never been easier. And of course, of all the content management systems out there for personal web design, it is almost a unanimous consensus that WordPress is the best and most advisable.
Why WordPress?
Over 75 million websites all over the world are built with WordPress, more than quadruple its closest competitor. There are quite a handful of reasons why WordPress is the best option when it comes to personal website designs. We take a look at some of the most important ones below:
• Ease of Use
Probably the most predominant reason why so many people use WordPress is its simplicity. It makes web designing so simple that anybody can do it. All you have to do to create a website using WordPress is to install the WordPress software on your hosting package – a process that can be completed in just a couple of clicks.
Once the software is installed and your account created, all that’s left is to get a theme, activate, and start customizing your website. Also, even though you may have to pay for certain themes and plugins, on its own installing and making use of WordPress is absolutely free.
• High Level of Flexibility and Customization
One of the key reasons to have a personal website is to increase the level of flexibility, and WordPress is just perfect for that. No matter what kinds of customizations you want to pull off, or features you want to have installed, you can always rest assured that it is possible on WordPress.
This way, you can start to redirect a chunk of your marketing traffic towards your website’s landing page without letting your audience down or feeling as though you’re missing something.
• Search Engine Friendliness
Many wonder if they’ll get any traffic if they start their own personal website on WordPress. Well, one of the very reasons to start a personal website on WordPress is to be able to leverage this to get additional traffic from search engines like Google.
In fact, when it comes to getting Google search traffic, many believe that there is a bias for WP sites. Numerous bloggers all over the world have taken advantage of WordPress’s SEO friendliness to build successful blogs earning thousands of dollars through Google traffic alone. With the right strategy, you too can take advantage of this as a streamer.
What Should Be on Your Website
Another challenge of starting a personal website is wondering what you’re going to do with it. Well, there are a few options to consider in this regard, starting with a simple website with basic information.
• Basic Information
At the very least, your personal website should contain basic information about you, such as who you are, what you do, and how to contact you. Even the most popular streamers would do well to highlight this basic information on their websites. Steamers can also make use of personal websites to highlight their achievements.
• Content Trailer and Samples
In terms of main content, you don’t have to go overboard and post all your contents on your personal website. As mentioned earlier, it is not a replacement for your main streaming platform. A few samples of your content, media, interesting pictures, and trailers should do.
• Newsletter
You may also include newsletter subscription on your personal website. This goes a long way to consolidate your control over your existing and new audience. This way, you can simply reach them through an email blast whenever you need to pass across important information directly.
• Streaming Profile Page
Lastly, you can even choose to have a similar page to your streaming profile page on your personal WordPress website. How do you do this? Well, some streaming websites allow users to copy the html code for their profiles.
So all you have to do is copy this code and paste into a new WordPress post or page. Websites like Chaturbate, for example, allow streamers to customize their profile with basic HTML.
Design platforms like Designurbate help the streamers create free design templates, which they can then convert to HTML, and post on both their native Chaturbate streaming pages and on personal websites.
Conclusion
A personal website for streamers is far from a luxury. Nowadays, it’s becoming an absolute necessity. As more and more platforms shift to increased censorship and demonetization, it is time for content creators to find ways to improve their leverage and control over the huge following they’ve dedicated a great deal of time and resources to build.
Personal websites are some of the most efficient ways to do this. With WordPress, streamers have the ultimate tool to create beautiful and simple personal websites that are easily customizable, highly flexible, and completely scalable.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an established streamer with millions of viewers, or an upcoming one just starting out, a personal website goes an incredible long way in prolonging your career and ensuring you remain a success.