Top 5 Fave Tools for Livestreaming

What are some of the tools and apps that streamers use to rock their livestreams? I share my top 5 tools to make better live streams. These are simple and affordable tools for those who want to improve your livestreams without breaking the budget.

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🕒Timestamps 🕒
00:00 Start
2:03 MEE audio M6 headphones
4:56 External device
7:03 Mouse Pointer
10:00 Parallels toolbox
13:23 Organisational tools – Notion
17:36 Asana
19:33 Bonus: Totem
22:24 Q+A

📙Resources mentioned📙
MEE audio M6 headphones: https://amzn.to/39yGTb
Pro mouse: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pro-mouse/id1505869474?ls=1
Parallels toolbox: https://saranguyenonline.com/parallelstoolbox
Asana: https://app.asana.com/
Notion: https://www.notion.so/

Livestream software I use and recommend:
Get Restream: https://saranguyenonline.com/restream
Streamyard : https://streamyard.com?fpr=sara38
Ecamm Live: https://www.ecamm.com/mac/ecammlive/?fp_ref=sara64
Melon app: https://melonapp.com?ref=sara-nguyen

YouTube tools
VIDIQ: https://vidiq.com?afmc=7p5
Keywords everywhere: https://keywordseverywhere.com/
Tube Buddy: https://www.tubebuddy.com/sara

Get royalty free music
Epidemic sound: https://saranguyenonline.com/epidemicsound

Top 5 Fave Tools for Livestreaming – Video Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining live with me now, thanks for being here or if you’re catching the replay. In today’s video, I’m going to be sharing my top five and another bonus tool for live streaming.

And I talk a lot about live streaming software and live streaming goods. And I want to share some of the top five things that I use that you can use as well to help you improve your live streams.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help coaches, consultants and creative professionals build their business using video on social media with ease. Now, make sure that you check out the links in the description, because I’m going to go back and you’ll find links to everything that I mentioned as well as all of the timestamps there as well.

Aall of the goodness is all the links will be in the description so you don’t, if you miss something, you can always jump back there. Now, if you’re new here, please, whether you’re watching the replay or you’re live now, leave a comment, let me know.

And if you have any questions, also drop them in the chat or drop them in a comment and I’ll answer them. I could also create a video if there’s enough of you guys asking for same content, and I’d love to hear from you guys as well. Let’s get right into it.

What are some of my favourite tools for live streaming? I want to start by saying that I do a lot of reviews on softwares, live streaming software, and I’m not going to be talking about any of the live stream software provider specifically in this, in this video, I’m going to talk more about different tools.

I’ll give you a bit of variety. Anyway, the first tool that I want to talk about that I think is completely underrated, and this is really useful specifically if you are doing interviews with people on a live stream or you, yeah, you have guests or you’re doing some type of event where there are other people, and this is to have a pair of headphones, right?

And I’ve got this particular pair here and I’m going to go over to my screen now, so you can see what I’m saying. And this is the MEE Audio M6 Wired Sports In-Bud headphones.

And the reason that I really love these headphones one is because they’re quite cheap. And two, is they’re clear, right? When you are on a live stream and you have guests, you need to have headphones, you and your guests need to have headphones.

Otherwise, what will happen? You will get echo. You will get audio loops. You’ll get noise that you don’t need. You need to have headphones so that the audio coming through from your computer, isn’t replaying back through your microphone.

And one of the ones that I love is this, you know, quite affordable, little invisible, let’s not call it invisible, clear pair of headphones. And let me come back to me now and I’ll show you why. Particularly for people with long hair like myself, I find that these clear little headphones are great, because what you can do is, you know, the headphones that you wear over your head, they’re totally fine as well.

But I find sometimes they can be a bit distracting and sometimes you don’t want to necessarily show them. These are great because you can wear them in ear so you just plug them in your ear. And for those of us with a little bit of hair, you know, we can just cover it. Right.

And it’s clear. It’s not as obvious as if you had like the white iPhone headphones. It’s a sort of, you know, you can see it then because I’m not hiding it very well, but you know what I mean? Like, it’s, it’s a subtle way of having that audio in your ear and not getting the playback.

And then it looks all right. Particularly those of us with hair, we can hide it and it’s a subtle way of doing it. And you know, I’m not saying that you have to, you have to get this pair of headphones in order for the livestream to be great.

But I particularly love these headphones because they’re quite cheap, they’re clear, they sound really good. And they, you know, they do the job in terms of protecting your live stream from having replay and, you know, audio loops and things like that.

The first little one that I highly recommend is getting a good pair of headphones. And this little MEE Audio M6 one is a nice little one. It makes you feel like you’re part of a crew. Like you’re a part of a concert crew and you’ve got like, anyway, I digress.

It’s just a nice little thing to use for your live streams. And it’s quite cheap as well. That is the first tool that I highly recommend a good pair of headphones. Now, the second tool that I recommend you look at getting is a device and you may be saying, a device?

When you are live streaming, whether you are using software such as Ecamm Live, StreamYard, Melon, you name it, you can see the camera feed on your computer as your live streaming. And that’s great. Right.

But one of the things that I have, and I have it live right now is I’ve got a separate device. And on that device, I’ve got a live feed of the live stream as I’m live streaming. Why? Am I watching myself? Yes and no. I’ve got it there so that I can see that it’s still running.

If something goes wrong with the feed, I may not necessarily notice it because of the camera feed on the computer. But if I noticed that it stopped on my device, which is like, you know, an external device that I know something’s going wrong, right?

It’s just for me to be aware of it. It’s not for you to be distracted and to watch yourself and not present any content during the whole live stream, it’s there for you to kind of control and monitor the livestream.

And I always have a device, you know, that’s not my computer so that I can see the feed, whether it is, you know, on YouTube or on Facebook, on, on an actual device. And one of the things I’ve noticed is I get a lot of comments sometimes from people going, I can’t see the video or I’m having problems with the video.

And me having this feed on my device, if I can see it, that means that the issue is probably on their end, right? I don’t need to stop the entire live stream because I can see that it’s actually there and it happens more often than you would realise.

Having it on, you know, advice that you borrow or device lying around is really handy and it helps you just kind of keep control of everything that’s going on. That’s the second tool that I highly recommend that you look into getting just a device so that you can play the feed on your actual, of your live stream so that you can just keep an eye, like keep, keep it in the corner of your eye so you can see it there to make sure that everything is running smoothly.

Now, the next tool that I’m going to show you, we’re going to go back to my computer, is one of the favourite tools that people ask me about and it is a mouse, right? People always ask me whenever I do my tutorials, how do I get this mouse with the colour?

Why do I have it? And I have it for a couple of reasons. When I do tutorials, one of the things I noticed was that sometimes I’m a bit nervous or sometimes I’m trying to get through the point and my hand moves around really quickly, right?

And that little mouse cursor is really small. I want to have like it highlighted so that you can see exactly where I’m moving and that way it’s easier for you to follow along. And it’s easy for you to know what’s going on. Without the mouse cursor, it’s really hard to lose track.

But with the mouse cursor, with this coloured ball on it, it just makes it really obvious and so that you can follow along and you can, you know, if you are looking to use that tutorial to complete, you know, to learn how to do something, you know exactly where I am.

You can follow along as well. I love this particular app and it is a Mac app and it’s called Pro Mouse. And I love Pro Mouse. Not only because it has the ability for you to put that little coloured circle over the mouse, it also allows you to do things like this.

And it’s not working on me now. It also allows you to do things such as draw, right? You have the ability and let me just open the preferences here.

Okay. You have the ability to configure the colour of the mouse, the size of the circle, and then you can also draw, so drawing is a shortcut. Where’s my drawing shortcut? Shift+D. All right.

If I go like this, it’s not working on today’s live stream. That’s okay. I’m also able to draw. Normally I can draw, but today it’s not working because you know, who knows?

But anyway, it allows me to draw and it allows me to just really emphasize the point as I’m teaching on a live stream. This is one of the tools that I recommend. It’s quite cheap. And it allows you to, I guess, just keep people captivated.

Now you may be saying, okay, I don’t have a Mac or I don’t really want to spend on apps. And that’s okay. There’s another app, which is a browser-based app for Chrome.

It’s called Page Maker. And it does the similar thing and it allows you to draw. You can install it. And once you activate it, you can pick a colour and then you can actually draw, right? This is a free one that allows you to do the same thing.

And it’s great because once again, it’s just about keeping people’s attention, you know, showing them what you’re doing as you’re doing it and being a little bit engaging. These are like not expensive tools and these are not complicated tools, but they, they elevate, you know, your teaching, they elevate the live stream.

Particularly if you do a lot of tutorials like me, particularly, if you do a lot of screen-sharing like me. I absolutely love it. All right. Let’s go on to the next tool. The next tool that I want to talk about is Parallels Toolbox for Mac and Windows.

What is this Parallels business? One of the tools that I use all the time, particularly before I actually go live on a stream is Parallels, right? And it literally is a set of tools you can see here, and there’s so much here.

It allows you to do like hide your desktop. It allows you to, you know, do screenshots. It allows you to do a bunch of things. But the thing specifically that I use this for is I use it for the free memory function and the clean dry function.

What are they and what do I use them for? As you know, with live streaming, it is incredibly like resource intensive. What I would do before I live stream, before you go and see me, is I would make sure that I free all the memory so any apps that are using memory, I can clear them by clicking these free memory button.

And it will tell me, you know, this is how much memory I’ve got. These are the apps, you know, this is the app memory, wide memory, available memory. And then when I click free memory, it will clear all of the apps that are holding onto the memory so that the live stream can run smoother because it’s not being hogged by, you know, Adobe, or it’s not being hogged by, you know, some other app.

This is a really important one because it helps, you know, clear the mess from your computer so you can live stream cleanly. That’s one tool in Parallels Toolbox. The other one is clean drive, right? And clean drive looks quite similar, but it clears your cache ’cause you don’t want to dirty cache.

I have this joke all the time. It’s like cache causes a lot of problems. But before a live stream, I’ll clear the cache, I’ll free all the memories so that the live stream has the best chance of going as smooth as possible because sometimes the problems that happen are due to, you know, having, you know, cache issues or they’re due to apps that are hogging processes.

Before a live stream, I’d use Parallels Toolbox to clean everything, and that, you know, makes a big difference to how smooth your live stream can actually run. There are so many tools within Parallels Toolbox, like I don’t use them all, but you can like record your screen, you can take screenshots, you can like hide your desktop as well.

So many tools that you’d probably wouldn’t use them all. But the couple of ones that I’m talking about, like clean drive, free memory, hide desktop, those itself are worth it for me ’cause it’s all in one place so I can just click through and run through it before a live stream to help make it as smooth as possible.

Parallels Toolbox is quite cheap. It’s about $20 a year and they always, every year they always have a Christmas sale and a, you know, a black Friday sale.

You can get it quite cheaply as well. It’s a mega tool that I’ve used that works really, really well. And although it’s not specifically a live streaming tool, it’s one that I use for live streaming all the time. The fifth tool that I’m going to talk about today is some organizational tools.

If you were on the live stream or you’ve watched the video from vlogmas, you know that I’ve got a big list of videos that I need to get through. One of the tools that I am using and love at the moment to help keep me organised is a free tool called Notion.

And you may have heard a little bit of hype about it because there’s a lot of YouTubers, you know, big YouTubers reviewing it. A lot of people talking about it. I love it because it’s free.

There’s a free and paid version, but the free one is more than what you need. And Notion, I like as a tool to organise myself because of a couple of reasons. Firstly, I can access it, you know, via my web browser, but I can also access it on multiple devices as well.

I can have it on my phone. I can have it on my computer. I can have it on my iPad. And that allows me to have, you know, one space where I can keep all of my notes. As I get more ideas for vlogmas, or as I get more ideas for other videos, I can add it to Notion and it’s all in one place because you need it to stay organised.

Particularly if you’re going to do videos, particularly if you’re going to do lots of live streaming, you need a central place to kind of put everything. The thing that I really love about notion is it’s not just, you know, what you see here is just a list of notes.

You can also build really easily like some organisational things. This is a bit of a Kanban board. My workflow is that once I’ve got a video that I’m ready to take from my list, and either start working on in terms of a video that I will upload or a video that I’ll do for a live stream.

I take the video, then I’ll drag it into in progress, whether it’s upload in progress or live stream in progress, you can see there’s a couple here now. And I can move it there. Once it’s done.

Then one, it came off the list. And two, so tonight I’m doing live stream tools after tonight, I’ll move it over to completed, right? I’ve got a visual representation as well of where I’m at with all 25 videos.

And it’s a great way of getting organised. And you can kind of structure Notion to work for you because it’s pretty much a blank canvas, but they’re so versatile in being able to do lists in being able to do like boards and having a calendar and just really making it work for you.

And everyone’s brain, everyone’s functions really differently. I love the flexibility that Notion has where you can kind of build the page really easily. And literally, it’s a matter of, you know, let’s go to the bottom here, type in what you need, whether you want to add, you know, a text page, a to-do list, you want to add tables, you want to add, you know, so many different things like a board, or you want to add a calendar.

There’s just so many different things you can add. And the fact that you can have it all in one place, across multiple browsers and for free. I used it to organise all of my ideas.

I’m using it to organise myself for vlogmas. And I’m using it also as a place that I can put all of my notes, right? A central place where all of the notes, which has made a really big difference to just staying organised in being able to access things really easily.

That’s the fifth tool that I have. The other one that I want to talk about as well, I use Notion specifically to organise myself. I wouldn’t do YouTube and live streaming all of my own. I do have help, I have some amazing, you know, community managers and I have an amazing assistant who helps me with a lot of the stuff that happens after the live stream.

It’s not over after a live stream, right? After a live stream is completed there’s a lot that happens. I get the video transcribed so that it can be accessible so that I can also repurpose the content.

I get it added to my blogs. I create Pinterest images for it. I share it. All of that stuff happens and I have a team who help me. I use Asana, which is also a tool that has a free and paid version. The free version is more than what you need as well.

The paid version is great, but for organising yourself and a team of up to 15 people, Asana is great. This is an example of Asana. And you can see here, this is like live behind the scenes of what’s going on.

In progress at the moment, my team and I are working on the videos for this week and when it’s ready, what happens is I’ll create a card for it. And then my team will pick it up and move it into in progress. Once they’ve done the work on the actual card, so each card will have, you know, the list of things they need to do as well as all of the information that they need to use it.

Once they’ve done that, they’ll move it to ready for review for me so that I can go in and I can see, all right, where are we at with all of the videos? Like who’s stuck? Is anyone stuck? Do I need to do anything? I can see it visually all in one place as well. And it’s really easy.

It’s, you know, there’s no learning curve. You simply create a card, move the card along and then that’s it. And that’s how I kind of try to stay organised with my live streams. And I think being organised and being able to see it visually for me, ’cause I’m a very visual person, and I’m a, you know, I’m a content person, I’m a creator.

I need to see it visually, so having a tool like Asana, having a tool like Notion is really, really handy as well. Let’s talk about my sixth tool and this is definitely a bonus. I talked about having five tools, and the sixth one is a bonus.

And the sixth one is something that I learned from people, you know, something I learned from some of my performing musician friends, and that’s to have a totem, you may be like, what are you on about? I know that a lot of, you know, musicians, performers, and artists, they will have a thing that they always have for every performance, every concert, every gig that they do.

And it’s not necessarily, you know, a massive thing, but it’s a thing, whether it’s a crystal or whether it’s, you know, a spoon or whether it’s a special coin or something like that.

When I just started my live streaming journey, some advice that I was given was have a totem, have something that is just for me, that’s kind of like a good luck charm that you always have for every live stream and doesn’t need to feature in every live stream, but it’s there for you.

And the totem that I have, and that I use is this little elephant, right? Sometimes it’s featured, I’ve featured her in my videos, sometimes, you know, she’s always in the room regardless, but I’ve always had my elephant, my blue elephant, that’s an elephant in the room.

I’ve always had my elephant in the room, physically, and maybe literally, I don’t know, I’ve always had the elephant in the room as my totem and it’s something for me. And I know it’s really weird, but I just always know that my little totems here is a thing.

I don’t know, it’s me, it’s a bit woo-woo, some people have crystals, some people have, you know, medallions and people will have a piece of jewelry, whatever it is. A totem, I know a bit weird huh, but you know, that’s what you came here for.

Those are my top tools for live streaming. I talked about getting, you know, pair of headphones, particularly if you are live streaming with a guest, you need to have headphones so that you’re not getting feedback through the microphone.

And I talked about, you know, this, this little MEE pair, which is like really cheap, and then you can hide it, hide it quite nicely because it’s also clear as well. I talked about getting a device so that you can monitor the feed so you can see what’s going on at a glance so that you know, that you’re still going.

It’s always important. I talked about getting a mouse pointer, you know, just so that people can follow along. Mouse is really big and it makes it a bit easier for them to, you know, for accessibility. We also talked about Parallels Toolbox.

Being able to use tools that will clean your drive, clear the cache, as well as provide you with lots of other options as well. And then we talked about organised, getting organised. It’s really important to have some system, it may not make sense to everyone else, but a system that makes sense for you, a system that works for you.

And the two tools that I talked about, there were Asana and Notion. Those were my five tips. And then I talked about having a totem, having a little charm, having a thing that’s just for you that is there for every livestream. And that’s it.

I’m going to jump to the comments now. Let’s have a look. Let’s check this out. Hey, Paul, from True North, thanks for joining me on the live stream today. Gigi, good to see you, Giga Art, always supporting the live streams. Love having you here.

And if you’ve got any questions about any of the tools, please drop them in the chat. I’m just scrolling through them now. Thanks everyone for being here. It’s always lovely to get all of the support.

Okay. Gigi from Giga Art says, ‘free cache or else’. That’s it. You got to free your cache. No one likes a dirty cache, right? You need to clean clean cache. Paul says,

from true North, ‘Notion! So much better than Evernote.’ A hundred percent. I think I like most people in this world have been on the struggle street of ‘I need a tool where I can keep all of my notes where I can access it on multiple devices that I can organise myself’ I wanted to like Evernote, but I found it a little bit ugly and also I didn’t want to pay for it.

Notion is a great free option that really does everything that Evernote kind of does. And it’s really growing as well. I love that, you know, the Notion community are building templates out for it and it’s, it’s really becoming so incredibly robust.

I absolutely love Notion. Yes. David says, ‘elephant emoji’. True North says, ‘love the elephant in the room’. You know, I sometimes even forget she’s there, but she’s always there.

The elephant in the room is always there. The blue elephant’s name, Paul, is Ellie. Ellie, the elephant. I know original, right? But yes, that is the blue elephant’s name. That essentially wraps us up for tonight’s livestream. And I hope that you got lots of value out of this video.

And if you got value out of this video, please give me a thumbs up, like, and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. I do lots of live streams about live streaming, lots of video tutorials to help you grow your business with video with ease.

Now, if you haven’t already make sure you grab a copy of my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets. It’s a super simple guide to get you up and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.

I’m going to put the link in the description. You’ll be able to click on it on the screen. Thanks so much everyone for being here tonight and joining me. I’ve had a blast as I always do. And I’ll see you in the next live stream.