YouTube Behind the Scenes: Baby-Led Weaning Channel Turns One!

Fortified Fam Never Feed (1s):

Which foods are not safe for your baby to eat? You guys know I'm usually all about all the foods your baby can safely eat, but there are definitely some foods that we steer clear of when starting Solid Foods. I have a free feeding guide called 15 Foods Never to Feed That will help you recognize wish foods are not safe. Now most of the foods inside of this 15 Foods Never to Feed guide. We avoid them because they are choking hazards. And I provide you with tips on how to modify those same foods so that they then become safe for your baby to eat. You can download 15 foods never to Feed by going to https://fortifiedfam.com/neverfeed. That's https://fortifiedfam.com/neverfeed

Katie Ferraro (46s):

If you are looking for a new podcast recommendation. I am currently really into the Meditation for Moms podcast from the Women's Meditation Network. I met Katie who runs the Women's Meditation Network last year. I've been hooked on her shows ever since. So she has podcasts like Meditation for Moms and there's a different one called Sleep Meditations and Meditations for Anxiety, which can be particularly helpful if you're feeling like really spun up about starting solid foods with your baby. The Women's Meditation Network Meditation episodes that are short, they're succinct, they're to the point, Katie and her hosts, they get in, they chill you out, they let you get on with your day. Last night I listened to a Meditation called Go Easy on Yourself, which I definitely needed after a kind of crazy day, things did not go as planned with our evening routine, like my husband told me totally last minute his business trip got extended.

Katie Ferraro (1m 33s):

I was counting on him, everything just went to you know what I was doing. My dishes after the dishes, I'm like, I'm gonna chill. And I listened to this quick Meditation help me reframe and reset so I didn't go to bed upset. I think you guys are gonna love this podcast too. You can find all of the Women's Meditation Network shows at women's Meditation network.com or search Women's Meditation Network wherever you listen to podcasts. And one thing I learned the hard way with YouTube is that 4K video is brutal. So I was making this video about cooking a whole chicken using your Instant pot, how your baby can eat it. And I'm like carving the chicken towards the videographer who doesn't say like, oh hey Katie, the chicken looks raw, but it's definitely raw. And so then in the post-production, I had spent all this time trying to like hide the raw chicken cuz I couldn't have the videographer back to reshoot the whole thing.

Katie Ferraro (2m 19s):

And it just ended up being a total disaster. So we also included a piece about you know how to know the internal cook temp and never serve your baby raw chicken, but just try not to make raw chicken for your videos anymore too. Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, Registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby-ledweaning here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with a confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning. Let's say you're trying to learn something about a topic that you've never known anything about before.

Katie Ferraro (3m 3s):

I feel like there are two types of people, those that go immediately to YouTube and those that don't. I am definitely in the latter category. I've just never been a YouTube person, partially because I'm scared of like how much time I could waste on YouTube if I ever let myself go there. But over the last few years it had become increasingly obvious that we needed to have a baby-led weaning YouTube channel. So last June, June 22, we launched our baby-led weaning YouTube channel and I wanted to share a little bit about what we've learned in a year of YouTube by taking you guys behind the Scenes of our baby-led weaning YouTube channel. Now I'm fully aware that you are on a podcast and you are listening to information about starting solid foods, which I'm a big podcast person.

Katie Ferraro (3m 47s):

I mean we are like almost 350 episodes into this sucker. It took about six years to convince me to do YouTube, but there's a couple of reasons why. And I just want to share what has been actually a way more rewarding and fun experience than I thought it would've been. I was like, oh, a year into it like if it doesn't work out we can quit. And now I like love it and it's probably my favorite platform. So why did we end up doing a YouTube channel? Well, one of the things, I love social media. Historically I loved social media, but as you've probably noticed, things have changed a lot on especially Instagram. And while I started teaching about baby led weaning primarily from my Instagram channel and over the years I've definitely had to diversify, right?

Katie Ferraro (4m 30s):

We teach about baby-led weaning, I speak nationally, I teach college level nutrition courses, we teach healthcare professionals. I sell programs to parents. We have tons of free content where we teach about baby led weaning on Instagram and through our email marketing list into all of the people in our community. And now we wanted to add YouTube because seeing really is believing when it comes to starting solid foods, being able to show parents exactly how you cut the food or what it looks like when you're practicing the open cup or what you could visually anticipate your baby will do or not do when they gag. I'm a huge fan as you know of teaching on the podcast and I love the podcast because I'm literally wearing my pajamas right now and I have, my hair isn't done and I don't have to do any makeup and it's a totally different world on YouTube, but I know the power of video and while I certainly understand that Instagram has decided to prioritize video recently, social content is essentially dead on arrival.

Katie Ferraro (5m 25s):

Like it is almost dead before it's even live. And I want the content that I am putting serious time and resources and effort into making to continually serve my audience because my audience consists primarily of parents and caregivers as well as healthcare providers treating babies in the six to 12 month range. And if Mark Zuckerberg decides that such and such is a trend, the way that I teach babies to safely make beef brisket doesn't change. And so when I make a video about how to make beef brisket safe for babies on Instagram, I have to make it 5 million different ways till Tuesday and nobody sees it. But on YouTube those videos continually come back to serve our audience.

Katie Ferraro (6m 5s):

So the original intent was to make content that parents can find years from now instead of being a cog in the Instagram wheel literally on Mark Zuckerberg's hamster wheel, which some days I feel like I am. So things change in different landscapes and I want to continue to be able to share content in a way that is conducive to parents and meet them where they're at. Some people like to learn on the podcast, lots of dads were realizing use YouTube. And so we've had such an uptick in the number of males interested in our content and following because of YouTube. And there's moms out there too. But I'm really surprised how many dads come off of YouTube, which is cool. So how did we do our launch? I mentioned that we started in June of 2022. So we started planning for the launch at the end of 2021.

Katie Ferraro (6m 50s):

The pre-launch work we all did in the first part of 2022. I think our goal was to launch in July and we were actually ready, which this is surprising for our team, we did something early, but our marketing strategist Lauren, who's like big on the metrics, was all over us getting this off the ground with a very strategic launch. So we are a small team so we have to batch all of our work. And one mistake that we made early on with YouTube, it was like, well I'm gonna batch if I'm ringing my videographer down from LA, I live in San Diego, he's very wonderful but also very expensive. I'm like, we're gonna shoot like 20 videos. And so at the beginning we were having these insanely large video shoots to do lots of videos with the original intent to publish twice a week. So I do that with the podcast.

Katie Ferraro (7m 31s):

The Monday episode is a mini training episode and then the Thursday episode is a longer interview with a credentialed feeding expert. We didn't really know what like the flow was gonna be like, what the topics were gonna be, what the pillars were, but we kind of worked it all out in our pre-launch strategy and filmed way too many videos. And we had worked with a consultant who helped us kind of get our strategy nailed out and she kept telling us, YouTube is a long game. YouTube is a marathon. You're coming off of Instagram where you're big fish in a big pond, you are going into YouTube where you are like a guppy in a massive, massive ocean. You need to know that your growth will not be the same. And I was like, yeah, I know YouTube is a long game, we're here for it. I have to say I didn't realize how long of a long game it was and how slow growth on the platform is, but I'm so glad that we stuck with it.

Katie Ferraro (8m 16s):

Not that we have definitely cracked the code, but we are seeing now finally consistent growth with our YouTube channel. And it's been such a fun way to educate parents, showing them visually all of the little things that they ask about starting solid foods with their baby. So at the beginning we were publishing two videos a week and then what we got into is what again our strategist told us not to do. Don't make videos that you want. You need to make the videos that your audience wants. And I'm like, I know my audience inside and out. I'm, I'm talking to them every day. I'm interacting with them here and there. I'm in my live baby-led weaning office hours with the parents in my group. But as far as the YouTube videos that they want, what I thought people wanted versus what they actually want and react to and engage with was two totally different things.

Katie Ferraro (8m 58s):

And it has definitely taken me a year to kind of figure that out. So we kind of shifted gears about halfway, well towards the end of 2022 we, as Lauren said, we had to slow down to speed up. So in the lifespan of some content platforms If, you kill them with content, your numbers will spike. And we learned that in the heyday of Instagram. We had it a little bit with TikTok at the beginning, but with YouTube just throwing a bunch of videos out there that are, as another consultant told me, your pile of poop videos, just because you make a lot of them, it's just a lot of poop. I was like, okay, he wasn't actually calling my videos poop. Although if I look back at some of the earliest videos I am like, oh my gosh, these were so poopy. But again, we were learning by putting a lot of content out and then we realized putting more is not better and we need to spend more time making videos like the length that they need to be to get the idea across, but also the length that they need to be so that YouTube continues to serve our content to people who are looking for this.

Katie Ferraro (9m 52s):

Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

Hatch (9m 60s):

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Katie Ferraro (11m 3s):

So another thing we learned, YouTube shorts. I don't know how much If you guys spend time on YouTube shorts. I literally didn't even know what it was until we started. It's basically the vertical video platform, totally different app very slowly. We have shorts going every day, but we're down to doing one long form video. We were doing one long form video a week and we actually slowed down even more to doing one long form video every other week. And that kind of seems to be the sweet spot for us where we can make really high quality videos for you guys that teach you what you need to know in the amount of time that YouTube likes so that people actually get to see it. So it's all about kind of, I think appeasing your audience but also doing the thing that the platform wants you to so that you can get your content out there.

Katie Ferraro (11m 44s):

So we went through with shorts where you're kind of doing multiple ones a day and you, we've obviously everyone said it, but you can't just repurpose your Instagram and your TikTok so are slightly tweaking some content. And our content director Caitlin, who's also a dietitian, she is like in a groove with the shorts and very slowly I think we're seeing like the two highways of the YouTube long videos and the YouTube shorts, they're kind of starting to feed each other, but they still, it definitely feels like creating video content for two additional platforms. But again, people are there watching and interacting and then subscribing to the real channel from the short. So we keep doing it. We switched gears a little bit, we learned a lot about video editing, which is very different from podcast editing. Emmanuel who's our podcast editor, does a fabulous job. We've worked with him since the beginning.

Katie Ferraro (12m 26s):

We never changed with our YouTube editor. We learned pretty quickly that our initial editor was not really vibing with us. Like we just weren't clicking with this editor early on. So we switched gears, we put out a call for a new editor, we went through this very rigorous process to kind of narrow it down and we ended up with a male editor and we work on a primarily female team. Our podcast editor is male though I should say that our videographer is male and now our video editor is male. And that's kind of about it as far as males in our world go. But our current editor is so amazing because when he went through the application process, his application video, he did like a mockup of his whole own daughter's baby led weaning experience.

Katie Ferraro (13m 7s):

So he's based in the Philippines and he shared how baby-led weaning is not mainstream or very popular, but he had known about it and he shared like a lot of her eating foods and we just thought that was so cool. Like he really connected with our content and I love that he's a dad, he, he works different hours than us and he sometimes have to wait. He's like, I gotta drop my kids off at school. I'm like, I have to go pick my kids up from school. But we work really well back and forth and I thought I was going to hate YouTube because I thought the comments were mean on YouTube. Like as a rule, I have like a weird YouTube side story. When I was pregnant with my quadruplets, our local hospital system, sharp in San Diego followed our family towards the end of the pregnancy and they documented the pregnancy. There was like 30 people in the room for the birth, including a video crew.

Katie Ferraro (13m 50s):

It's not like gnarly graphic stuff, but they made a documentary about our family and then it's online and it has like so many millions of views and obviously you're gonna get some negative comments and I learned very early like don't read your own YouTube comments cuz you'll just feel terrible about yourself. So I thought everyone was, and most people are very complimentary, but there's definitely people like why did that lady need to have four kids? And whatever If you search sharp experience, quadruplet Katie, you can see the video, it makes me cry every time and I love it and it's very largely positive, but it did scare me a little bit. Like I don't think I wanna have millions of views on YouTube videos if people are meaning the comments. Well, when you only have like hundreds of views on your videos and they're all from people that you begged to go watch your videos, the comments are very different. And so at the beginning of Our channel, we would just be like so happy if we got a comment and they've all been largely positive like, thank you for this, I didn't know that this is really cool.

Katie Ferraro (14m 37s):

And then we're like, oh my gosh, these are positive comments. And so one thing I do appreciate about the very slow growth of YouTube, I mean we're like a year into this and I think we just have 10,000 subscribers and that was our goal for the first year. If we can get 10,000 subscribers, the quality of those subscribers has been so amazing. Like everyone who listens to the podcast episode, you guys wanna listen to it like you clicked play, you're interested in this If, you're still listening, you're interested in this content with the other platforms, like it's such a game to get in front of your eyeballs, but you gotta get in front of the right people's eyeballs. But with you two, we really kind of seem to be like finding our parents are finding us at the time when they need us, when they want to learn about baby-led weaning in a straightforward way. Like this is exactly how you do the thing.

Katie Ferraro (15m 20s):

So I have enjoyed the comments and we have a community section going now that Kaitlyn helped us get off the ground. So for me it's really fun. I love like the best work for me is when I, if my husband, he travels a lot, If you, I put the kids down, I get a glass of wine and I know our video editors back online and we hop into Dropbox replays this like you all know what Dropbox is, but I didn't know there was like a video editing side of it. And we do real time edits together, the editor and myself and it's kind of mindless work, but like it's so relaxing to me and I love making YouTube videos. I mean I don't actually make them, someone else shoots them, I just talk. But I do like with YouTube, like your personality can shine through. Whereas like you know in TikTok you have like three seconds and it's, it's hard to teach something concrete in three seconds.

Katie Ferraro (16m 0s):

I'm sorry. So another thing that I learned is that 4K video is brutal, especially If, you're dealing with raw meat. So we, one of my favorite videos was just how to cook a whole chicken for baby-led weaning. Like it's literally one of my favorite things to do and it's so easy and it's so Cheever and we were showing it but I, the chicken was bigger than I thought and then I didn't pressure cook it for long enough. So then we took it out and started cutting it and I'm cutting it towards the camera, like the videographer just filming like he's supposed to and he doesn't say like, oh hey Katie, the chicken looks raw so you shoot the whole thing. And then when I go to editing I'm like dude, I can't show this. This is like straight up raw chicken. But we already shot the whole thing and I couldn't have him come back. So then I just spent all this time editing out raw chicken, which was like definitely not worth it.

Katie Ferraro (16m 41s):

I should have just precooked the chicken. and then we put in a part about what the internal cook temperature of chicken should be. So I've learned to be very careful with meat and cook it till it's internal temperature because it's really hard to edit out undercooked chicken. Okay, what do I like about YouTube? I do love getting to connect with my audience. I love that your personality comes back. I like that you don't have to like hop on every single trend like you do on the other platforms in order to stay relevant. Another thing I love about YouTube, and we've learned this like we're big data people, right? We're a small team, we're trying to run a small business. Data is important and in YouTube the backend analytics, like the metrics that you get, Lauren's our numbers geek on our team and she just like geeks out. Like our weekly YouTube meetings are just like the amount of data that they show you it can be overwhelming but she's kind of streamlined it into these are where people are coming from, this is the video that they liked, they didn't like it at this point and they dropped off.

Katie Ferraro (17m 30s):

Let's study what happened there. Another thing I really like about YouTube is that you can change your thumbnail and your title after you publish. Like if I could do that on reels, you guys like it would be amazing, but I can't so that's fine. You can't change the video. So when we make mistakes or I say something wrong, I just address it in the comments or address it in the description. But changing the title and the thumbnail to make sure, cuz when you make a good video video, like I made this one about taking a baby to a restaurant, I took my friend Ashley's baby braid into a restaurant when she was eight months old and we're talking all about how to order off the menu. We're like at the restaurant and I'm there with my girls. I'm like doing it on my phone, which I normally don't do. Like usually we have someone shoot it for us, but trying to do more vlog style stuff and like I made this great video and then nobody freaking watched it. But as we tweak the title and we tweak the thumbnail, like you can actually see the views pick up and you're like, yes, I'm glad I made that video because now parents going to a restaurant have these five tips that they can take with them.

Katie Ferraro (18m 18s):

Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

Katie Ferraro (19m 27s):

Sometimes we change the thumbnail in the video title so much that I can't even remember what the actual video is about, but that's a different story. So I, I'm liking video, I liking YouTube, what do I not like about it? It's making a video that you really like and realizing that oh, you're the only one that like that and other people don't like it. So what we've actually been doing is going back to some of our earlier videos when we were working with the editor that we didn't really jive with. We were doing way too many sound effects like I thought you had to be so like sound effect heavy and like keep people moving and their retention spans are so short because that's true on the other platforms. But on YouTube people would be like, thank you for the video, but these sound effects are so annoying. And now I watch some of our earlier videos and I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't even watch this.

Katie Ferraro (20m 7s):

Like the concept is good but the sound effects are killing me. So we're redoing some of those and we'll be putting them back up. That's kind of my summer project. Taking a pause on new videos cuz we're only doing two a month, which I really like. That gives a lot of time to redo some of the earlier videos. So If, you watch some of the earlier videos and they annoyed you, they'll be back as better videos soon. I don't love how slow it is. I kind of mentioned that I think it did take us a year to get to 10 K subscribers, but what's really cool now is that we are actually seeing, you know, we stay in business by selling digital programs primarily to parents and healthcare providers. And we're seeing more sales coming from YouTube at 10,000 subscribers than Instagram with nearly half a million subscribers. And that's pretty amazing that the people who are watching the videos are like, where do I learn more?

Katie Ferraro (20m 51s):

There's a lot of that no like and trust factor. I think when you listen to a podcast, if you've been listening to episodes, like some of you guys go back to episode one, we hear that all the time. I started at the beginning and I've listened to every single episode. People don't do that with YouTube probably because the earlier videos are so annoying. But we wanna get it to a point where it's like If, you land on Our Baby-led Weaning (with Katie Ferraro) channel and that's the channel name.

Katie Ferraro (21m 52s):

It's https://youtube.com/babyledweaning. I want you to be able to learn as much about giving your baby a safe start to solid foods. And then If, you want additional information about how to make all the foods on the hundred first foods list and you want that expert guided support going with you moving forward, that's individualized. Then I have programs you can pay for, but our goal is to continue offering as much free valuable content from a credentialed feeding expert to help parents make this transition to solid food. So I hope wherever you need to learn from, I hope I'm there. I hope the content that we're making is serving you and If. you wanna check it out. If you're interested in seeing a little bit more of the baby led weaning stuff on YouTube If, you go to https://youtube.com/babyledweaning. If you subscribe. I also had like never subscribed to someone's channel, If. you subscribe and then you click the little bell next to it, you will get a notification each time our videos go live, which currently is every other week on Thursdays at 2:00 AM Pacific time. And we love your comments, If, you like it, or tell me what videos you want because again, I've learned not to make videos that I want. I need to make videos that you guys want. So all in all very positive on YouTube gonna stick with it. It's been a long year, we've learned a lot. It cost a lot of time and money to get it off the ground, but now I would say that it is probably my favorite place to make content after the podcast and they would be tied if I didn't have to get dressed.

Katie Ferraro (22m 34s):

And I also realized that I don't have a lot of clothes because we've made so many videos and someone commented like, you wear the same three shirts, did you film all your videos in three days? It's like, no, I actually maybe only have three shirts that are camera ready. So if anyone has suggestions on where you can get bright colored shirts, bright color shirts, do better on the thumbnails, open mouthed when you're smiling, pointing at things on thumbnails. So our thumbnails are so goofy and so insane. My brother is a graphic designer and he was like, your thumbnails are so cringey. And I was like, dude, the cringing is the stuff hits the hardest on YouTube. It's not about being pretty. And I really, really like that. So I hope you guys like our YouTube channel. Thanks for listening to me share a little bit about behind the Scenes of the channel.

Katie Ferraro (23m 15s):

Thank you. If you've ever even left a comment, I read every single comment. I respond to every one of them. I wish you could leave comments on podcasts. People say you can on Spotify, but nobody ever does. So leave comments wherever you want. We see them all. I appreciate you. Thanks for being a part of this amazing community. And thank you to our partners at Air Wave Media. If, you guys like podcasts that feature food and science and using your brain AirWave makes some amazing podcasts. And we're online, this podcast at https://blwpodcast.com. The YouTube channel is https://youtube.com/babyledweaning and I'll be be there making videos and I'll be here making podcasts as long as you guys wanna keep learning Thanks so much for listening.

Katie Ferraro (24m 2s):

I'll see you next time.