Today on Instagram, I encouraged y’all to start your own safe spaces for cloth diapering and to reach out if you needed support on what to do or how to do it. This is my series on how to do that.
I don’t believe we are in competition, but rather part of invaluable system to provide a variety of perspectives to encourage people from all walks of life to consider cloth diaper and join the community. I would love it if you started your own podcast, blog, book, or group to support and empower parents to cloth diaper. We need more spaces that are safe, inclusive, and encouraging of growth and compassion.
Where On The Internet?
A few of you asked, “But, Bailey do I start a YouTube Channel, a Facebook Group, an Instagram or something else?” These are all great spaces to create, share and refer people to consider cloth diapering.
Here’s a few of my thoughts about these spaces and other educators who create great content to learn more (I’ve never paid or bought a course from anyone, I just consume as much free content as possible and sometimes go to conferences). My day job is in Public Relations where do I social media support for brands and businesses through my business SimplyBaileySocial. I would love to one day coach people on this stuff, but I don’t think I’m there yet, and keep learning while I got my babies.
I also want you to know that you don’t have to be particularly good or skilled. When I started my YouTube channel I had never recorded a video before or even edited one. I just started with the camera/phone and edited with iMovie (available on MacBook). Starting is the hardest part, but I know you can do it.
What is your goal of having a social space? Do you want to build a community? Share other great content? Have a space to refer friends? And PS, Cloth diapering isn’t a financially lucrative niche.
Facebook Group
A Facebook group can be a great space to learn and support parents in their cloth diapering journey. I’m active member of a few Facebook groups, but I don’t have my own Facebook group.
Why do I have my own Facebook group? Because I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the potential drama and the cliques that sometimes form. I do admin niche’d Facebook groups for cloth diapering (local, provincial, and the Flats Challenge)- a niche is a specific topic in something – and I think that Niche’d Facebook groups is a great way to encourage the conversation that you want while not getting so big and carried away.
Some great examples of Niche’d Facebook Groups you could start:
- Your local area/region/province/country (depending on the scope – Cloth Diaper Parents of RANDOM COUNTY)
- Birth Year – 2019 Cloth Diaper Parents
- Just you and your other cloth diaper friends – Cloth Diaper Parents Who Eat Granola for Breakfast (random example)
Important Things to Do with A Group
- Security Questions
- Public – Private – Secret – public means everyone can see whats posted, private is just the users, and secret means it can’t be searched you have to be invited to join.
- Group Rules & Description are clear and concise.
- You don’t have to let everyone in.
- Use Units & Hashtags to sort and organize resources.
- Keeping the conversation going can be the hardest part to ensure the space is always available.
Facebook Page
A Facebook Page is a great place to share other content. Facebook can be a challenging platform to work with as it’s controlled by the algorithm and money.
Facebook Pages are great addition to another sort of platform like a website or YouTube channel or group. They can
Important Things about Facebook Pages
- Engaging Content that is shareable, encourages comments, and participations
- Upload your own content directly (Re: consider uploading your video into the native content instead of a youtube link)
- Share and tag content from other brands, creators and projects.
People to learn from: Moolah Marketer
Instagram Account
An Instagram account is a great place to share content to learn and teach others, as well as participate in the community. An example of a great IG account that popped up last year is Honesttocloth. I love her approach to information sharing and this kind of model would be a great way to connect with a specific niche of cloth diaper parents.
This is often considered Micro-Blogging.
Important Things To Note
- If you page isn’t public, only friends can see. That’s okay.
- Good clear visuals can help make finding and learning about content easy.
- I use Facebook Creator Studio to schedule out content ahead of time.
- Hashtag Research – you don’t always need hashtags, but finding simple hashtags to target the audience you want to target. This could really vary depending on your goals.
- IGTV is a great way to share video content on this platform.
- Growing an IG account is hard work.
- I personally feel that giveaway loops and other tactics are spammy and build inauthentic audiences that hurt your algorithm and reach.
- You need 10K to get links in your stories.
- If you’re start an IG just get to free cloth diapers, your doing it for the wrong reasons and will never be compensated enough for your time.
People I like to learn from: @JasmineStar
Pinterest Board
Didn’t see this one coming? If you don’t want to actually create your own content, you could just create a Pinterest board with sections of all your favourite resources and share that link with your friends and family who ask.
Pinterest boards can be set up with different sections, you can add comments, and pin anything from almost anywhere onto it. You can use pictures or graphics, add links, and customize it.
People I like to learn from:
YouTube Channel
YouTube is a great easy way to share your story using visuals and words. Anyone can start a YouTube Channel, and the nice thing about this platform is it’s relatively free.
We all learn differently. I’m writing this because I’m more comfortable this way, but for many sharing stories and experiences on camera is easy and effective.
A Few things I learnt
- It took me well over a year to hit 1,000 followers, but I didn’t really use strategies or be cool.
- YouTube is like other platforms in that you want to do things with keywords, solid SEO, and make sure your using the right search words that people find your content.
- Catchy thumbnails are a must
- And make sure you look at the camera and pump some enthusiasm into the conversation. If you’re grumpy, not a good time to film a video.
- Good lighting makes any bad camera look amazing – and a mic is helpful if you have some money to spend.
People I learn from: Sunny Lenarduzzi
Tik Tok
Why not? You can create content anywhere and have a resource for people to fall back on. I love TikTok because it forces me to get to the point in short videos and it’s fun.
People I learn from: Rachel Pedersen
Website or Blog
Last but not least, the website or blog approach. There’s two ways you can do this – you can start a free blog through wordpress or blogspot and just have a space for writing and sharing your stories.
If you wan to have your own domain with hosting, you’ll need more financial resources. It’s an average of $15 for my URL, then $4-10 per month for my hosting service (depending on the package), plus time to learn how to set it up.
Blogging is an entire can of worms, but here’s a few things that are important:
- Keywords – know what you want to talk about and keep it short and sweet.
- Pictures – keep the file size small, but ensure they are clear and use keywords in the file name
- Pinterest is an amazing search engine – use Pinterest to share your content.
- Sort your content into Categories and tags so people can find it.
- Create content people are looking for – feel free to skip the basics and be really specific. When the post gets TOO LONG people zone out. You want to have short and sweet pages that describe topics and encourage people to travel through your blog. This blog post is probably too long, but here I am and I’m okay with that.
- When naming your blog, consider if the terms being used might be censored or banned from other blogs.
- Make sure you submit your website to google to be crawled.
People I learn from: learn to blog hangouts, Facebook Blog Groups (pretty generic, I belong to Influential Mama’s, Mom Blogger Support, for example)
A Podcast
Yes, come join the podcast life. I love that podcasting means I can talk to other people and tell their stories. And there are so many stories to be told.
The hardest thing about podcasting is making the time for and doing the edits needed. I find that this is a time suck. It can take me anywhere from 2-6 hours to get a 30 minute podcast off the ground after consult, record, edit, and promotion.
Podcasting is relatively low cost – I pay for it to be hosted on Podbean (lots of options) and then submit the RSS feed to a variety of different platforms including Apple Podcast. You don’t really need anything else. You can use your phone as a mic, and if you have a mac you can edit using Garage Band.
People I follow to learn about Podcasting:
It all depends on your goals
I am everywhere because social media is my goal. I love learning how to use new platforms and that is what makes it fun for me and my life long goals to be in this space.
I started a podcast because my goal was to tell other stories and connect with parents around the world. I was tired about hearing things from second hand sources and I just wanted cloth diaper brands to show up on the show and tell their story the right way straight from their chair.
I wrote a book because so many people ask me about cloth diapering and I felt overwhelmed recommending them to my website. Now I can so check out my book.
I started YouTube because so many people prefer to learn that way and I thought I could succeed there. But I don’t enjoy the platform, and I don’t do video anymore. YouTube is full of haters in my experience and the negativity got me down.
I started TikTok because I was curious.
I have a Facebook Page because sometimes I want to share other stories in another way.
I have an Instagram as a way to teach the basics, encourage you to listen to my show, and to interact with the community in a space off Facebook.
I pay for a website because that’s part of the brand image and showing up in my authority. I love blogging. I love to write. This is my favourite thing to do and I can’t wait to do more of it. I’ve started blogging for me again on my personal blog and it brings me joy. I do run google ads on my personal blog and it pays for the server fee and fun stuff. I don’t run ads here and this is out of my own pocket. I will be assessing that situation.
If you’d like to have a safe space to talk about cloth diaper content creation, reach out at anytime – bailey@clothdiaperpodcast.com or ask questions below.
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