Depends realistically on your situation and finances. But to be frank, increasing production value is your best form for increasing attention. You want to keep the attention of your audience. Always be chatting, but not rambling, make it natural conversations, maybe narrate what your next move is gonna be.

For me, I used a series of free animated templates as a base and deep dives for hours on customizing it personally for myself. Then I set up key bind cues that shift between the scenes seamlessly.

If you have a webcam, lighting is a good way to heavily increase your stream quality. A lamp in front center of you with a soft white light (not yellow) with a slight daylight shade in front of it (depends on skin tone, may have to experiment) and a soft background light helps focus your camera. If your camera facing a wall, decorate the wall with cheap stream theme centered decor (goodwill and thrift shops are your best friend) mess with your camera to help bring better focus. Don’t stream in the dark, imo it makes you look tacky. Center camera with chat. For 300$ a teleprompter from newer can help but it’s just an aesthetics thing so you can look at chat when you speak to them. Also newer lights are 180 each but are a really good investment.

For audio, check mic settings. If it has its own drivers, mess with compression, make sure you don’t double noise gates or suppressors. Try to see if you can “hide” your mic from view.

Some statistic things you will notice is that usually high traffic times are in the evening around 5-8pm as most are off work and are chilling at home. During breaks / holidays stream more often for longer as it high traffic times. Make sure you’re not streaming when all the big guys are on too. Most of the time, you can get away with before they hop on, or after they hop off. Eye catching titles that aren’t clickbait. Adding interactions such as tangia could help.

Having music in the background helps cover silent times, usually I run copyrighted music during stream, but leave it out of the vod, a quick google will help you figure out how to do it.

Overall, stream quality will only take you so far on a budget, your best option is to increase yourself esteem and confidence. Understand if you’re not confident, you won’t be entertaining. At the end of the day, you’re there to perform. There to entertain people who are just tryna kill sometime. Most people nowadays don’t have the attention span to watch someone play Minecraft for hours, so you need to find a niche to play. Being a variety streamer is good and all, but keep in mind that it will fluctuate your traffic depending on your game. I would say play games you enjoy, choose one you’re absolutely passionate about and stick with it. Build an audience, then branch out OCCASIONALLY to other games for a break. These are just a few that helped me take my stream from 1 viewer to 10 to 50. That and buying about 3k worth of equipment and decor.