Overcoming burnout: The importance of North Stars with Amanda Northcutt

The Level Up Creators team - image © welevelupcreators.com

“We all know that creators, by and large, are so unbelievably burnt out on the content creation and dissemination point of things,” starts Amanda Northcutt, founder of Level Up Creators. “So we love to help creators maximize their content distribution opportunities.”

Her business at Level Up Creators is a mirror of the businesses they teach people how to run and they practice what they preach by employing the same techniques for maximizing these distribution opportunities. “We take source content like a longform video or audio, or an ebook, or maybe a 5,000 word article,” she explains. “This is a substantial body of work from which you could get blog posts, email newsletters, lead magnets and dozens of social media posts.

“I'm not saying repeat everything you already said in your YouTube video, but you can take an additive or a reductive approach,” she continues. “You could summarize key points from your 10-minute video in a newsletter or conversely you could write an article and elaborate on one point in particular. You may even have a new piece of source content if you do that.”

Amanda says that this is just one approach for helping creators think more strategically about their burgeoning business. The aim here is to leverage existing content in the best possible way: “Successful people know which levers to pull to get the maximum return. We are helping with the content dissemination and distribution straight out of the gate.” Amanda and her team assist with the tactical mindset and then help with the content. “This is to reduce burnout and overwhelm; this is paramount, so that a creator can have free creative space in their brain.”

The simplified Level Up Creators approach to helping businesses - image © welevelupcreators.com

Level Up Creators also takes administrative tasks off a creator’s plate. “We're handling DMs, email, calendar, gatekeeping, brand deals, and we do talent management as well. And then we get to creating a product roadmap, making awesome stuff, and marketing it!” The team helps creators take care of the “the prerequisites to get you to the point where that conversation can be given the credence that it needs”.

Amanda and her team are there to “have someone unleash their brain to dream big,” she says. “We want to understand where the creator wants to go: lifestyle architecture considerations, and income targets. We help put together a long-term plan – the mission, vision, values, and goals that make up the North Star of a company. That's what everybody looks to when they're trying to make a decision, at least in an ideally run business.”

The creator-operator marketplace

A phenomenon you often see with new industries is the formalization of a marketplace (such as homeowners and people looking to rent accommodation). Level Up Creators has done this with creators and membership business managers or operators.

"Oftentimes we'll find a creator who has one person working on operations," says Amanda. Maybe they have a suite of contractors: this team that helps with tech, this team helps with video editing, this team helps with marketing – and everything's starting to fall apart. It’s hard to not let entropy take place, everything starts to move apart if you're not working against that entropy and making it stay together."

Level Up Creators aims to solve the operator problem: "You've got creators who are subject matter experts and if their expert area is not business or marketing and sales, then you need an operator or administrator – someone who can come in and help you monetize and operate your business successfully and get the flywheel spinning. Those people just do not exist specifically in the creator space yet."

Level Up Creators is here to bring creator and operator together as well as train up new operators. “We connect them with creators to arrange these perfect marriages of, ‘I know this stuff, you can monetize that stuff. Let's put our skills together and make something big!

From mindset into marketing

Once the thought process and freeing up of creative brain power is taken care of, Level Up Creators look at specific products such as memberships or online masterclasses that suit the creator and align with these visions. “For example, we ask ourselves, ‘How will creating a membership product align with our long-term plan?’ – that's the litmus test.”

“We can do collaborations with other creators. We can do brand deals. We can start your own merchandise line. You can do high-ticket, one-on-one coaching or group coaching. We take that solution set and figure out which products we can package that up in and then we help bring those to market.”

Level Up Creators also wants to make sure that their clients are well connected within their ecosystem of: businesses and creators and others who are non-competing, tangentially related businesses or people who have similar audiences.

Amanda believes in audience sharing: “a rising tide lifts all boats and the pie can always be bigger,” she smiles. “It's not like, ‘If I share my audience, they're going to leave and never come back’ – because they're following you for a reason.” As such, affiliate programs and similar are incredibly important and Level Up Creators simply connects it all with their marketing automation.

Amanda wants to help creators build sustainable businesses - image © welevelupcreators.com

This ‘marketing automation’ may sound rather technical but Amanda sells the idea as eloquently as anything else. “It’s the system that lets a creator communicate with their subscribers, at scale. It’s a behind the scenes automated sales machine working for you around the clock, on your subscribers’ terms.

The machine connects every digital touchpoint you have with your customers and prospective customers with a backend tool or two that are carefully configured to take your community on that customer journey that leads to purchase.

“We're big on email lists and we're big on partner marketing,” Amanda adds. “When you do your marketing system correctly, the subscriber is in the driver's seat. They're only seeing content that is relevant to them. It works fantastically. We want to get people into that email ecosystem.

“Then we want to provide value repeatedly, diligently, strategically, and as part of a grander plan,” Amanda concludes. “We want to make sure that we're providing value before we ask people to buy things. But we are going to ask people to buy things because we're only selling things that are making people's lives better, right?!”

More information

Amanda Northcutt is a consultant, coach and six-time exec who has launched and scaled online businesses for D2C, B2C, and B2Bs.

She founded Level Up Creators to help influential creator educators build sustainable businesses. Level Up Creators offers strategies and systems to people who have at least one existing product in fields like wellness, personal finance, travel or sports, and are ready to scale their impact and income. For more information, visit https://welevelupcreators.com.