Tips for Every Creator from Mighty Networks' Creator Summit

The Creator Summit is an online event for content creators to learn how to further develop their presence online. Sponsored by Mighty Networks, speakers talk not only about content creation strategies, but also about community building and other essential tasks for all creators. We’re not affiliated with Mighty Networks in any way, but there is a lot of great information in these streams for all creators, and here are some of the key takeaways!

Everyone can be a creator

Everyone can create.

This may sound like some fake inspirational poster, but it’s true, now more than ever. It takes a lot of work to do it full time, but you can do it with effective planning, determination, and a bit of luck.

The very start of your creator journey, according to Martinus Evans of the Slow AF Run Club, is like planning a party. You should spend some time thinking about the community you want to host, the people within that community you specifically want to invite, and what you want them to learn while attending. As the host of the party, you’ll want to welcome everyone in and make sure that everyone has a good time and feels like they belong. And as a good host, you want to make sure your guests enjoy each other’s company as much as they enjoy yours. You don’t need to be an expert with all of the answers–you just need to be an accommodating host who is willing to share your journey, and in doing so, encourage others to share their journeys as well.

After you work out your initial party details, it’s time to put up the decorations and break out the punch. Jamar Diggs, a YouTube marketing expert, talks about the nuts and bolts of getting off the ground. He naturally focuses on YouTube, but his approach can be applied to any type of platform and any type of content. Once you know who you want to attract and what you want to tell or sell them, you can start building out your channel, graphics, important links, and a power statement to reel them in. Important links include any links to your other social media, or any website or storefront you want your audience to visit. Your power statement should give a quick summary of what your audience can expect from your channel, helping them quickly determine if it’s the right place for them to spend their time.

With the basics set up, you can use Google to find frequently asked questions inside your community, and start tailoring your content to those search results. Jamar suggests four types of content that can work together as a cohesive unit.

How-to/FAQ - Explain a concept for how to do a task. These are the anchor pieces that will drive traffic to your page from search results.
Shifting Perspective - Show people different ways to think about a problem they may be experiencing.
Combatting Objection - Similar to Shifting Perspective, but more direct. In these pieces, you can explain why you disagree with a popular topic and talk about the alternative solution you're proposing, which can be based on your wisdom (or experience) or through your community.
Personal Stories/Testimonials - Share your personal journey related to your niche, or have others who have benefited from your content tell their own stories.

As an example, let’s say you are an influencer with multiple popular Instagram accounts, and you want to put out a series of videos on how to build a community on Instagram.

Here’s how the four content types might look in this case:

How-to/FAQ: How to Build a Following on Instagram - A step-by-step guide on how to build a following on Instagram with practical tips and strategies.
Shifting Perspective: Experimentation is Good - A piece for people who feel like they struggle with community growth. You can talk about ways to experiment with new types of content, and how to measure if those posts were successful.
Combatting Objection: Engagement is More Important than Followers - A video that opposes the idea that having more followers is always better. In this video, you can talk about how having a smaller amount of dedicated followers instead could be better if your smaller audience engages with your content more.
Personal Story: Follow Along As I Build My Community - A personal behind-the-scenes video showing the choices you made when building your latest community.

These four types of content help you to tackle one topic from multiple angles, appealing to more people while also giving you more content to work with.

Once you've created some content and started attracting an audience on your platform, the next step is to make sure you’ve set up a system that will let you maintain what you’re doing now and also scale it in the future. Dan Go of High Performance Founder Inc. suggests finding a mastermind, a group of people with similar goals who support each other as they grow over time. This can give you someone to share ideas with, and also get feedback on your projects.

From there, the most important thing is to keep showing up. If you go to the gym (or perhaps more so if you don’t), you know that there may be days when you really don’t want to go. However, if you force yourself to go anyway, you always end up feeling better for having gone. Creating content is a lot like this. You need to be consistent and keep going to cut through the noise and find your people. This means publishing on a regular schedule, and continuing to publish even if you don’t feel like doing it at times. The unfortunate truth of content creation (and community building) is taking a break is a death knell. Publishing sporadically will get you sporadic results. Build a routine that’s reasonable for you, and stick to it.

On that note, while stick-to-it-iveness is important, so is being realistic about what you can accomplish. Amanda Goetz, a high-performance coach, states that at the beginning of your creator journey, you will likely overestimate what you can do in a day and underestimate what you can do in a year. Slow and steady is far more important than periodic sprints.

But how can you know when something isn’t working? One way to do this is by setting a period of time–like a month or a quarter–to focus on a single project, and just work on that thing for the entire period. At the end, see what you’ve accomplished and reassess. If it performed well, double down; if not, try pivoting to something else. Even though you may not know if something works until you try it, setting a fixed period helps to minimize your overall time investment. It’s important to set clear goals at the start of the period to prevent yourself from moving the goalposts as you go. Set your target and take the wins on your prescribed goals, and not on any extra things you may have thought of along the way.

Perfection is not required

Perfectionism stops you from creating.

This may sound counter-intuitive to those who want to only produce the highest quality of content, but striving for perfection can stop you from creating anything at all. Perfectionism allows you to make excuses for not publishing, pulling you into a permanent feedback loop where you never finish anything. According to Topsie VandenBosch, a mindset and emotional intelligence coach, this affects a lot of creators, and is often a reason why people talk themselves out of ever getting started on any project.

People are not perfect. We make mistakes, and we don’t always take the most optimal path. This should also be true of whatever you’re making. Your audience doesn’t always want to see the super polished presentation; they also want the nitty gritty underneath. When creating, if you feel like you can’t get your production values to where you want them to be, try to think about the people who are waiting for your knowledge or service, and ask yourself the following questions.

Who loses out when I don’t release a video?
What knowledge is not being transferred when I stop producing or when I spend an excessive amount of time on a project?

It may be a bit embarrassing to think of creating in these terms, but even the smallest channels have audiences who benefit from the content these channels provide. These people deserve to see what you have to offer.

Of course, you still need to make sure that anything you create is still worth creating. As you’re creating, go through your work frequently to see if everything makes sense to you in broad strokes. You don’t need to nitpick or cut every “hmm” and “um,” because they make you human, and therefore relatable. You just need to make sure that everything flows and that your personality and message come through.

If people engage with you or your content, then you’re probably on the right track. As Dan Go points out, you can’t control the outcome of what you create. You can’t know what will take off and what will flop. But you can control how you work and how you react. Make sure you’re spending the time focusing on what your community needs, rather than making something perfect.

Grow from a single voice to a collection of voices

Remember that you’re the host, but the focus is on the party.

Once you’ve built your core community, it’s important to set yourself up for growth. According to Chenell Basilio, an email growth researcher, the next important step is to start building relationships and becoming part of the wider community around your topic. Going to events in your field is a great way to meet people and share your work with other creators. Collaborating with fellow creators in the same niche by being guests for each other allows your communities to discover each other and grow together. You can also find more masterminds to work together with. As Martinus Evans said, “Never miss a handshake.” If someone reaches out to you, reach back as often as you can. You never know who may bring an opportunity to you.

As your community grows to the point where managing it is no longer a one-person job, you’ll need more voices to help keep it healthy and strong. Getting moderators and helpers from the community can really help. They’re already intimate with the community, and they understand its values. Start thinking about this early, make it a part of your community values for members to introduce themselves and help show the ropes, and these people will naturally appear. The bonds that they build together will help take the pressure off you and make things more interesting overall! Encourage discussions within the community by creating an environment where everyone feels free to share their opinions, rather than relying on you to lead the conversation.

Of course, it’s still important to be involved with individual members as much as you can, but make sure you do it sustainably with the time that you have. Spotlighting member issues or having Q&A sessions are a great way to be personal without driving yourself to exhaustion!

Take burnout into consideration

Burnout is real, but you can overcome it.

Burnout is a malicious phantom that lingers behind every creator, ready to strike at the most inopportune moment. The first step to staying out of its way is to recognize the common burnout traps that all creators face.

According to Amanda Goetz, there are two types of burnout traps. The significance trap is where you start to believe that things are more significant than they really are. Things are significant when they are impactful, and when they help drive your content and community. It’s hard to know what these are at first, but the more you create and grow your community, you’ll start to make better decisions on where to spend your time. Keep track of the decisions you make and their outcomes, and you’ll improve with each result. Perfectionism can also be a part of this trap. It makes you allot excessive time on correcting things that your audience likely doesn’t care about, taking time away from other tasks you need to do, which can also lead to burnout.

The other type of trap is the urgency trap, where you think that things are on a tighter schedule than they actually need to be. When you’re swamped, prioritize the most important tasks for your content and your community, rather than tasks with arbitrary deadlines. You don't need to do everything—multitasking can take away your focus. Just ignore the rest and get things done one at a time. Focus and finish.

Burnout can also come from worrying too much before you even get started. Sometimes, the idea of doing something is more stressful than actually doing it. Performers experience this all the time: feeling stressed and anxious right up until they go on stage, then instantly feeling fine once they begin. Similarly, creators can burn out simply from overthinking before they even begin to create something.

According to Dan Go, making a schedule and sticking to it is the best way to combat this stress. It helps you to keep going even when you don’t feel motivated and prevents you from burning yourself out in the process. Any schedule you create should include the entire creation process, from ideation to publishing and engagement. After doing some basic quality checks to make sure everything makes sense and the meaning flows well, when your work is finished, you need to publish it. It's easy to worry about the quality of your content or whether the topic will resonate, but until you've created a lot of content, it's hard to know what will actually kick off with your audience. (Even experienced creators may be surprised by a sudden hit!) You need to put things out and see how they do. It comes back to focusing and finishing.

Finally, the biggest thing to take on to keep burnout at bay, in the words of Topsie VandenBosch, is to stop overdelivering. People talk about going “above and beyond,” putting extra care into your content and community to make sure that needs are met and problems are solved. Overdelivering is different from this—it’s going above and beyond at the expense of something personal, such as your health or time with your family. Being consistent is important, but you also need to be realistic with what you create.

When creating your schedule, make sure to keep time and resources aside for your other needs, and add in some buffers in case any issues pop up. Check in with yourself every once in a while to make sure your personal needs are also being met. If they’re consistently being ignored, then reevaluate your schedule. It may be worth lowering your production if it’s coming at the price of your health.

Where to go next?

Each Creator Summit video contains a lot of information important for all creators. Some of the key takeaways that popped up in several videos have been summarized here, but if you’d like to learn more, or get the content straight from the source, you can check the replays on YouTube!

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