In episode 325, Megan chats with Cari Garcia about why TikTok is the best platform for growing your following right now. Cari explains how the video platform can double your social media reach and how this will generate more page views for your blog.

We cover information on why you should find your niche for the platform and stick to it, audio is as important as visuals, know that polished is not for TikTok and how you’ll gain a younger audience and so you need to post more frequently going forward.

Listen on the player below or on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.

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Guest Details

Connect with Fat Girl Hedonist
Website | Facebook | Instagram

Bio Cari Garcia is a healthcare worker turned full time content creator. She began blogging in 2010 as a hobby for a hectic 9-5 in inpatient mental health. It started as just checking out local restaurants and in the last 5 years shifted to sharing latin inspired recipes. Cari focused on social media and gained a great following. Since COVID, working in a hospital has burnt her out so Cari took the plunge to turn a fulfilling hobby into a full time job.

Takeaways

  • Instagram is about the aesthetic but the opposite is true about TikTok.
  • Your growth will happen much faster on TikTok than IG or your blog followers.
  • The less polished the better for TikTok content.
  • Viral videos on TikTok are not what you’d expect to go viral.
  • Gen Z and younger are busy on TikTok.
  • The audio on TikTok is sometimes the most important part. Your voice? Funny, quarky audio that is trending? Podcast audios?
  • Post more frequently when you start, but pick a schedule and stay consistent when sharing on TikTok.
  • Once you determine your niche on TikTok (style you share your content), you should stay with it because the followers and algorithm will want you to stay put.
  • Be wary of incentive programs on IG and TikTok for creators. Decide what your goal is on the platform.
  • Using your phone is the main tool to create content.

Resources Mentioned

InShot app – editing

Transcript

Click for full text.

EBT325_Cari Garcia Episode

Cari Garcia: Hi, this is Cari Garcia from Fat Girl Hedonist and today we’re gonna be talking about everything TikTok. You’re listening to us on the Eat Blog Talk podcast. 

Sponsor: Clariti is a powerful tool that allows you to organize, optimize, and update your blog content for maximum growth. My food blog, Pip and Ebby has nearly 1000 posts. I have learned so much about constructing an incredible valuable blog post since I began my blog in 2010. It should go without saying that my older blog posts are not quite as solid as my current blog posts. Some of my older content is missing nutrition information, alt text, internal links, no follow links, video, and some are missing all of the above. Clariti allows me to easily identify those posts that need those elements, create projects to make sure that the updates are made and track how those updates impact my traffic. I already have great recipes. Clariti helps me add the frosting that takes those posts from great to outstanding. If you are interested in checking out Clariti, head to C L a R I T i.com/eatblogtalk to sign up for the wait list and take advantage of their $25 a month forever plan. Go to clariti.com/eatblogtalk or check out the resources page on eatblogtalk.com/resources. 

Megan Porta: Hey food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, the podcast for food bloggers looking for the value and confidence that will move the needle forward in their businesses. This episode is sponsored by RankIQ. I am your host, Megan Porta and you are listening to episode number 325. Today I have Cari Garcia with me. SHe is Going to talk to us all about TikTok and why she believes creators need to be on it. Cari Garcia is a healthcare worker turned full-time content creator. She began blogging in 2010 as a hobby for a hectic nine to five inpatient mental health. It started as just checking out local restaurants and in the last five years shifted to sharing Latin inspired recipes. Cari focused on social media and gained a great following. Since COVID working in a hospital has burnt her out so Cari took the plunge to turn a fulfilling hobby into a full-time job. Cari, it is so wonderful to have you here with me today. Thank you so much for joining me. How are you? 

Cari Garcia: I’m good. I’m so excited to be here. 

Megan Porta: Me too. I’m excited for our chat, but a little hesitant because I shared with you I’ve been hesitant about TikTok, but I think you’re gonna maybe push me over the edge today. So we’ll see how it goes. 

Cari Garcia: Yes. I’m hoping I get to push you over that ledge. 

Megan Porta: Okay. We’ll see. We’ll reconvene at the end of the episode and assess. But first, do you have a fun fact to share with us? 

Cari Garcia: So a little fun fact and tying it into our topic today, I grew on TikTok the same following I have on Instagram in only a year and a half. That Instagram following took. 10 years to grow. 

Megan Porta: Oh boy. 

Cari Garcia: 10 years to grow it on Instagram. In a year and a half, I surpassed the following I have on Instagram, on TikTok. So that’s a little fun fact and something to mull over as you think about that ledge.

Megan Porta: Yes. That is so interesting. My Instagram account. So I’ve been food blogging the same amount of time that you have. So I started in 2010. I love my account. I’m proud of it, but it’s really ridiculous how slow it’s grown. Every time I look at my page, I can’t even believe how long it took me to get. I have 3000 followers on Instagram and that’s crazy. I know that on TikTok you can grow so much faster. So we’re gonna dive into that today. How and why and all of that. So, I guess we could start there like. How easy is it to grow right now and go viral on TikTok? 

Cari Garcia: That’s the thing. So it’s funny because the videos you put the most work into and you think, okay, this one’s gonna go just mega viral because it’s so great and so beautiful. Those are the ones that tank. The ones that do well and the ones that I’ve seen have gone viral for me are the ones that are just not really thought out. Like it’s just, just a very quick little thing and you just throw it out just to throw it out because it looked funny or it was a funny audio. Then those will be the ones that go viral. What I’ve seen for TikTok is, you know how Instagram it’s all about the aesthetic and the pictures have to be beautiful and your feed has to be fully curated. The complete opposite is true on TikTok. 

Megan Porta: I like hearing that. 

Cari Garcia: Yeah. TikTok is, they want accessibility. The less polished the better. It’s funny because like I’ve gotten to a point where a lot of the content on my TikTok will never see the light of day on Instagram. Because it’s not polished enough and a lot of the videos that have gone viral for me on TikTok will also never see the light of day on my Instagram. So it’s really interesting. It’s a completely different platform and also a very different audience. You’re dealing with more Gen Z on TikTok. It’s a younger crowd. Sometimes I have a lot of teenagers commenting on my stuff, but it is a very different crowd with different wants and needs. So it’s something to take into account. 

Megan Porta: What is the key? You talked about not having polished content, which I think is great. That’s music to my ears, because that is a hangup for me on Instagram. I don’t want to be polished. I don’t wanna take the time to make sure everything looks quite perfect. So aside from that, what is the key to growing on TikTok? 

Cari Garcia: First, I would start by figuring out what kind of niche you want to be. When I say niche, not just the type of content, but the audio in TikTok is also very important. Which I’m sure is something you’ll be able to appreciate, hosting a podcast. The audio is sometimes the most important part. Whether you wanna do your own voiceover of explaining a meal, or you want to use funny, quirky audios that are trending. What I’ve gotten into lately and it allows me to post longer videos is actually using podcast audios. Because the audio itself will keep the viewer there listening to the story while they watch my recipe. So I can post like a full minute video. They’re listening to a story and watching my food and those will go viral as well. So you wanna first figure out what kind of videos you wanna do, what kind of audios you wanna use? and then give yourself a schedule. To start, if you can, I like to look at TikTok like your Instagram stories. You might post on your feed once or twice, but your stories you’ll post more frequently. Same for TikTok. You wanna post a little bit more frequently, so maybe two or three times a week and get yourself into a schedule. Those have been my key things. So I’ve gotten myself to a point where I’m posting maybe a couple times a week, I’m posting these longer Reddit or podcast audios. So it’ll give me a full minute to share a longer video. Then because of how my blog started, it started with restaurant reviews and then I’ve shifted over to recipes. I do a mix of recipes and restaurants, and that’s where I’m at now. 

Megan Porta: Wow. Your Instagram account. I just looked it up. You have so many followers. That’s crazy. I was like, wait, am I missing? Did I add a four there? But no, there’s so many. Okay. It’s a little side note. So how many followers do you have on TikTok?

Cari Garcia: I have 157,000. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh, Cari. Wow. 

Cari Garcia: A year and a half, honestly. I also do social media management and I have a client that I took her on in January of this year, 2022. When I took her on, she had only 200 followers. That’s it. She has, I think, 73,000 followers as of this morning. 

Megan Porta: Wow.

Cari Garcia: She probably has more, because she has a couple videos that are viral. That’s just doing the same thing. We figured out her niche. She wants to do cooking videos. We’re gonna do just a quick intro to the dish and then just music. Then we have a schedule of three posts a week. That’s what’s been working for her. She’s up to 73,000 followers right now. In just a matter of four or five months. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh. That’s amazing. So it can work. It does work. Then I have a question about your, you mentioned you put podcast audio on, is that from podcasts that you go on and then you have the audio for it?

Cari Garcia: No. So now on TikTok, you can post up to 10 minute videos. So there are people that record their podcast and then they post it to TikTok. So you can use the audio on other people’s posts as the audio for your video.

Megan Porta: Oh, so you take something that inspires you from somewhere else and then you post it in your account. 

Cari Garcia: I’ll use it as the audio on my video. But it’s from an already existing post on TikTok. So there’s one podcast called Two Hot Takes. The key is also, you wanna use podcast videos that are viral because it’ll help funnel viewers to your page. If the audio’s already trending, it’ll help you pick up some of their viewers, if that makes any sense. 

Megan Porta: Okay. I’m trying to strategize with growing my account through Eat Blog Talk versus my food blog. So that would probably make sense for me to do something like that. I have so much audio of my own that I could really take the top, most popular content that I have and repurpose it on TikTok.

Cari Garcia: For sure. Yeah. 

Megan Porta: There’s probably so many creative ways I could go about that. I just would have no idea where to start, but I guess maybe start with just looking at what other podcasters are doing, right? 

Cari Garcia: Yeah. Yeah, that would be one idea, is to just go on there, look up podcasts. So they record their podcasts and they record it, not live, but they also do like the video portion. So they upload the video component of the podcast to their page. Then you can find their podcast everywhere else. Then the actual video of the podcast on TikTok goes viral. Something to think about. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, no, this is step one for me, getting in the door. But that sounds really appealing to me because I’m just absolutely loving this part of my business right now. I don’t know, like I’ve been blogging for so long. It’s not like it bores me, but I just did food for 12 years. Now I’m like, okay, podcast content. This is exciting. This is new. This is fun. This is learning and growth. So I can see myself getting into this avenue or this platform through this avenue now.

Cari Garcia: Yeah. So something I also do is, so I’ll use a third party app for the video and that way if I decide I can repurpose the video on TikTok and use it for an Instagram Reel and even a YouTube short. So that way, you don’t have to do triple double work. You use that same video and you can use it on different platforms. 

Megan Porta: Very interesting. Okay. So for food content creators, I feel like there’s so much opportunity to be creative because food is something that everyone loves, not just looking at, but they love hearing about, that’s why I’m so into audio and trying to get food bloggers to dig into audio. Because we love hearing about food and talking about it. So TikTok allows you to both see it and hear about it. It’s so creative. So there’s so many ways to dig into that. Food content creators are killing it on TikTok, correct? 

Cari Garcia: Yeah. It’s one of the biggest growing niches on TikTok and you have anything from recipes to checking out local places to food hacks, you name it. There’s so many avenues to go into. There’s even behind the scenes food photography tutorial pages. There’s so much that you can go into and explore and figure out your niche. What I will say, once you pick a niche and you have a few posts that do well, you’re gonna wanna stick with that niche. That’s kind of the only downside. Unless you’re okay, if you do a post where it’s completely off topic, off brand, as they say, be prepared for that post not to do well. Because once your followers and the algorithm of TikTok knows you for X, Y, Z, if you try to deviate from that post, it will not do well.

Megan Porta: So experiment a lot, figure out what TikTok likes you for, and then just keep doing more of that. 

Cari Garcia: Basically. 

Megan Porta: Then, this is a key point for everything, no matter what you’re doing, but just that consistency. So you talked earlier about figuring out a schedule. So find your niche within TikTok, figure out a schedule and then just keep doing that.

Cari Garcia: Yeah. Yeah. I would definitely suggest maybe posting two to three times if you can a week, because again, TikTok, we’re looking at short form videos. People are just swiping. If you post once a month, you’ll be forgotten by the algorithm and by your followers. You wanna be constantly in front of their face so one, they know how to interact with your content and you are able to grow faster. The less you post, the longer it’ll take for you to grow. 

Megan Porta: I recently went to an entrepreneurial style conference and Gary Vaynerchuck was speaking. If you’re on TikTok, I feel like you probably know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. But he was saying he would post two to three times a day on TikTok. I was like, wait, what? But, yeah, that was his recommendation. For people who are just really wanting to crush it, he recommended multiple times a day. So when you said two to three times a week, I was like, okay, that sounds way better than two to three times a day.

Cari Garcia: Yeah. So again, you wanna look at TikTok as the Instagram stories. I know I post on my Instagram stories maybe 10 times a day. It’ll be pictures. There’ll be random stuff. But if you’re beginning and you’re just dipping your toe into it, I would say two to three times a week. If you’ve got the time to dedicate multiple posts a day, great. I don’t have that kind of time. That’s also why I try to repurpose the content and use it for a YouTube short or an Instagram Reel, because again, I don’t have that kind of time. But if you’re just starting out, posting two to three times a week is a good place to start. If you can post more, great. But most people I know, unless you are only doing TikTok, you don’t have that kind of time. So while I do agree with his suggestion, I don’t think it’s realistic for someone who has a full life and other things going on, and a family. Two to three times a day, if you’re like 19 with no family and no job and just in college, then yeah, of course. But for a working mom like me, I don’t have that kind of time. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. That would stretch me for sure. Because I feel like this is not something that I could necessarily outsource. You could hire someone to strategize with you. But as far as getting the content up, that’s all on us.

Cari Garcia: Yeah, exactly. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. So you mentioned like behind the scenes shots, which I think is super smart because people love seeing behind the scenes action. Food hacks. What about how on Instagram, just the really short Reels that are like a chocolate drizzle or something saucy or a cheese pull, things like that. Would that go viral on TikTok? 

Cari Garcia: It can. Yeah. So those kinds of videos, usually for better with an audio that is either talking like there’s one really short audio that comes to mind when you said cheese pull. Like you might be popular, but you’ll never be as popular as cheese. Then with the cheese pull as that audio is going, that would be something that would do really well. So again, the importance of audio on TikTok, those kinds of short videos do great. But you have to strategize and pick the right audio. 

Megan Porta: Oh yeah. That’s another question. So if you are doing a voiceover, you don’t need to worry about music, but how do we know what music is good to use? I always struggle with this.

Cari Garcia: Yeah. So for the client that I’m working with, we’ve grown her page to 70 something thousand. She does a lot of Hispanic food and classical Hispanic foods. So she’ll do a quick intro of what the dish is. Today we’re making Cuba picadillo for example. Then we’ll start with Celia Cruz, who’s a famous Cuban singer and one of her salsa songs. So with her, we like to stick to just like Hispanic, Caribbean, upbeat salsa, merengue kind of music. It depends on what you want. If you wanna do those like moody elevator style music where it’s just very kind of airy and soft, you can do that. I think it’s more about what you want and not to worry so much about, what to do to fit in. I’ve always been the type to not fit in. I just do my own thing. So I would definitely recommend just figuring out what you wanna do and what you want your page to be, and not worry so much about the music. If you wanna do airy, soft music, go for it. If you wanna do upbeat, merengue, salsa, Caribbean, go for that too. If you wanna do trending songs, those I would be careful with only because and not careful, but you wanna stick to songs that don’t have millions of uses. It’ll tell you how many times an audio has been used. If you see an audio has been used over a million times, that audio will probably not do very well for you. You wanna use audio that hasn’t been used that much because then it’s overkill. It won’t push you out into the algorithm as much because so many people are using that same audio that they don’t wanna inundate viewers with the same audio over and over. If that makes any sense.

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Megan Porta: So really we shouldn’t be overthinking this. Just pick something that you like. I know one of the hangups is that we’re talking about food and we try to find music that relates to food, but there’s only so many options and it doesn’t have to, right? You can pick a song that has nothing to do with food.

Cari Garcia: Exactly. Pick whatever you like. I would say, yeah. If you are gonna do the music route, pick a genre that you’re comfortable sticking to. So I know there’s a couple people that their entire feed is just coffee and they do the very light moody elevator style beter style music, and those posts always go viral. So it’s just a matter of again, picking your niche when it comes to the content style and the audio goes hand in hand. Just being comfortable with sticking in that little bubble of audio. If that makes any sense. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that’s helpful. You mentioned the fact that you don’t necessarily like going the same route that other people are going, which really aligns with me as well. I try to go the other way, just because I think I’ve just never liked people saying we’re going this way. So you come too. I’m like, no, why do I have to do that? It’s more of a stubborn thing. Yeah. But I don’t know if everyone’s going a certain way, I’m not going to be able to stand out. So just doing something different, that’s going to help you stand out. Does that make sense? 

Cari Garcia: Of course. For me, I started off as just a restaurant blog down here in south Florida. I remember people would like, oh, we’re all going. There’s a few other restaurant bloggers down here. They would be like, oh, we’re all going to the same restaurant. We’re gonna write about the same restaurant, the same exact menu.

Megan Porta: Wait a second.

Cari Garcia: I’m not gonna go there. So now I’m like, okay, mental note. That’s where not to go. So that’s what I’ve always done. If most people are going right, I’m going left. Then when I made the jump to recipes, by then I had a sizable following on Instagram, maybe like 80,000 followers. So I had built the bulk of my following on restaurant reviews. So now if you look at my social media, it’s 50, 50. Oh, wow. But the blog itself is only recipes. I no-indexed all my restaurant posts. So in that regard, I’m different. Whereas you, the restaurant, like influencers, they only do restaurants. Then the recipe influencers, they only do recipes. Where I’m a mishmash of everything. So I’ve always just done my own thing and so far it’s worked. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. I can see where TikTok would be an opportunity to start fresh with some things that you want to do, like separating yourself from Instagram, basically. Whatever you’ve portrayed so far on Instagram, you can start fresh on TikTok and do something entirely different, if you want. Or maybe take what you’ve done on Instagram and just give it a twist or something along those lines.

Cari Garcia: Yeah. So on TikTok, I do the AMA, Reddit, the podcast audios. You’ll never see any of that on my Instagram. A lot of just like regular homey stuff that I’m just cooking in the kitchen. Again it’s very different from my Instagram. I think it shows a different side of me compared to Instagram. It is more polished. I’m dipping my toes on Instagram with the funniest things like audios and stuff, but it’s still very different. But one thing I will say, growing on Instagram, the one client I’m working with that she blew up on Instagram in a couple months. As a result, her Instagram has gained like 10,000 followers. In the, I wanna say in the last few months, because that was another little strategy we did for her. You do the full recipe, but you can’t write out the recipe in the caption. You only get 150 characters in the caption on TikTok. So we would say for the full recipe, check out our Instagram. She has a blog, but she’s not really focused on that right now. She’s just trying to grow her social media. As a result of having directed people over to her Instagram, she’s gained 10,000 followers. 

Megan Porta: Wow. A fun little byproduct. 

Cari Garcia: Yeah. Which is really interesting because it’s helped grow all of her platforms. I’m seeing that with other creators. These creators have blown up on TikTok and then all of a sudden their Instagram goes from 200 followers to like 20,000.

Megan Porta: So it’s also like you kind of get to grow your other outlets as well by default, just because you’re focusing on. Yeah, that makes sense. I love that. And that’s not something we would typically think about, like we’re growing TikTok, we’re growing TikTok, but you’re actually growing other parts of your business too.

Cari Garcia: Yeah. Even my blog right now, TikTok is my third largest referral source for my blog. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So that’s so cool. . Wow. So you get a lot of traffic from it. Do you make money from TikTok? I know indirectly from your traffic, obviously, but are there other ways that you make money through TikTok?

Cari Garcia: So outside of sponsored posts, no. TikTok does offer the creator fund. It’s very similar to the Reels bonus on Instagram. Both of them, my experience has been that they’re both garbage. Because they woo you in with this, oh, you can make money, but then they hinder your views. If you are on the creator fund, I tried it out on TikTok and I was going from maybe 15 to 20,000 views per video to 300, 400 views. Nobody was seeing my content. Then the minute I got out of the creator fund, I had three posts go viral back to back. So for me, my experience was that TikTok was hindering your view. So I opted to not make money in order to grow. The same has happened with Instagram.

Megan Porta: Yeah. Those programs are intriguing. I feel like they make it really attractive to begin with and let few people in and then just shower them with love and favor and all money. Then once they start letting other people in, they tighten it up and change it. Is that right? Is that about right?

Cari Garcia: Yeah. The Instagram creator fund was okay when I started. I got invited in January of this year and I made 500 bucks, which isn’t bad. I was like, okay this isn’t bad. Then in February, I made like 400 bucks. Then actually it was the weekend we were at Tastemakers. You have to re-enroll every month it popped up and I’d by mistake, hit no. I opted out, which I didn’t mean to. But within 24 hours, I had two videos on Instagram that were over a month old, and went viral. Like 5.7 million views. 

Megan Porta: Oh, my.

Cari Garcia: Crazy. I gained a few thousand followers within a few days because of this one reel from a month ago that went viral. Then immediately within that next week, I saw all of my views triple what they were while I was in the fund. So I put two and two together and I’m like, oh, these guys are just like the TikTok fund. Oh. So yeah, my views are just so much better outside of those funds because they wanna reel you in, but then they give you just enough to keep you in, but then they don’t allow your account to grow. So you have to ask yourself what you want. Do you want your audience to grow or are you okay with getting a couple bucks a month?

Megan Porta: It’s like a dysfunctional relationship. Like here, I’m gonna offer you so much. We’re gonna have so much fun together. Then once you’re in, I’m actually not gonna let you leave the house or something like that.

Cari Garcia: Very toxic and abusive relationship. My days of toxic abusive relationships are over. 

Megan Porta: I think a lot of us are way past that and ready to move on to bigger, better things. 

Cari Garcia: Exactly. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that. So you do get some sponsorships from TikTok? Do you do a lot of those?

Cari Garcia: So I’m seeing more and more brands are starting to look at TikTok. So far I’ve had maybe four different sponsored posts where I was approached only for TikTok. They were not interested in my Instagram. They were not interested in anything else. They wanted a post on my TikTok. So I’m definitely seeing brands taking notice of the value of TikTok and the TikTok audience. Especially as Gen Z gets older and they have more of a buying power, brands are just gonna focus more and more on that platform, for sure. 

Megan Porta: Talk about how you create your videos. Do you do it just straight on your phone? Do you use certain apps? What are the things that go into creating your content on TikTok? 

Cari Garcia: OK, it’s all on my phone. I use an iPhone 13 Promax and if it’s a restaurant video, I’m just holding my phone. That’s it. If it’s a recipe video at home, I do use an Akron phone stand. I have a little photo shoot area in my living room that’s where I do my videos. For either restaurant or home recipes, I use InShot, which is an app on iOS. That’s where I edit all my videos. It’s a third party app, so when you download the video, you can use it, you can repurpose for Instagram or for YouTube shorts as well, which is nice. Because then you get three posts out of one video. 

Megan Porta: That’s the smartest way to do this in my opinion. Repurposing is efficient and I’m all about efficiency. So if you can do that, then do it. 

Cari Garcia: Exactly. So I shoot, I edit all my videos on InShot and yeah, that’s pretty much it. I try to keep it as easy as possible. I know people that use professional cameras, but for TikTok, honestly, it’s not that serious. You’ll be just fine with your iPhone. Even for my client, I shoot all of her content on my iPhone as well. 

Megan Porta: Oh, wow. Okay. So that makes it much more approachable because that trend started a few years ago with creating videos for our blogs. A lot of us used high quality, really good cameras and high definition. It was just like this process that everything had to be the best quality. So to hear that we don’t need the best quality to create content that goes viral is really appealing. 

Cari Garcia: Yeah, no, you definitely do not need that kind. I think TikTok is anti and all of those things that we as millennials were taught, you need to be successful on Instagram. TikTok is the antithesis of all of that. 

Megan Porta: I love it. Okay. What are we forgetting, Cari? Is there anything as far as what to do to get started, any little tips you have or reasons why we should get started, encouragement to dive in? Because I feel like that window might be closing. It’s getting pretty saturated. Yeah. Anything you have to kinda wrap up?

Cari Garcia: So I would say start now. Start immediately. For me, when I first started, I started at the beginning of the pandemic and I didn’t really know how to hold my phone for video. I have only done Instagram. All of my social media was just photography. I had no idea how to shoot video. So that was a learning curve for me. So the sooner you start just shooting video and the more you practice shooting video on your phone, if you’re going to go that way, the faster you’ll get the hang of it and get better at it. But definitely start today. Doesn’t have to be anything too complicated. I feel like the complicated videos do the worst. So just keep it light and breezy. Just start. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see growth. It really only takes one video doing well and for the algorithm to get the hang of pushing out this specific type of content for you to start growing. But yeah, I think it’s just, it’s not as complicated as it seems. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. See, I think that’s where we get hung up because it does seem complicated just getting started, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s like anything else. When we get started, when we dig into that project or whatever it is we’re anticipating, it’s actually not as bad as we think. So it’s probably the same thing. Just do it, do a quick and dirty TikTok video today. I’m actually considering doing this. I can’t believe you’ve encouraged me to do this, but I haven’t combed my hair today, but I think I’m going to do but maybe put something together about the next interviews I have. Just like what my days are like when I am recording podcast interviews and doing something along those lines. I don’t comb my hair. It looks so horrible, but I’m willing to show that because I think it would be funny.

Cari Garcia: A day in the life. Yeah. Those do well too. It really doesn’t have to be that complicated. My biggest hurdle was getting the hang of shooting video. I had never shot video. I had always just done photography and so that was my biggest hurdle. Because I know how to shoot on a Canon. I did great there. But when it came to shooting video, just even holding it in my hand and getting the right angles, that was a learning curve for me. But now it’s all I do. Very seldom post just a picture on Instagram even. Yeah, the sooner you start, it’s really not that hard. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So you’ve convinced me, I had a feeling you might, so yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. 

Cari Garcia: No, you’re so welcome. I’m gonna follow you the minute we hang up. 

Megan Porta: So I’m trying to think. I deleted TikTok off my phone. I need to get it back on, but I’m wondering if I put my account as my name or Pip and Ebby, because if I’m gonna be doing podcast content, I would maybe want a different name. So I need to figure that out, but thanks, Cari. Wow. This was super inspiring. Thank you. This was great. 

Cari Garcia: Oh, you are so welcome. So excited. Hopefully there’s other people out there that kind of get inspired too, because it really is like right now, it’s such a great place to grow. I tell everyone, even my clients, the restaurants I’m working with, you guys need to be on TikTok. Everybody needs to be on TikTok. Because especially at least down here in south Florida, there are no restaurants. There are not a lot of people on TikTok down here other than like a few creators. So it’s interesting, but yeah, it’s definitely the place to be right now. 

Megan Porta: All right. We appreciate you and all this knowledge you shared to wrap up. Do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to share with us? 

Cari Garcia: So a favorite quote of mine is, if you’re going through hell, keep going. That’s by Winston Churchill and applying it to today’s conversation. If you’re starting with TikTok and you’re having a hard time, or you’re not getting the hang of it, just keep going. The bad times only last so long. Even with getting the hang of a new social media platform, you will get the hang of it. It’ll be short lived no matter what. So yeah. 

Megan Porta: What great advice. I love that. I love that you chose those words to end on. It wraps up our talk nicely. We’ll put together a show notes page for you, Cari. If anyone wants to read those, you can go to eatblogtalk.com/fatgirlhedonist. Tell everyone where they can find you online on social media. We’ve talked a little bit about it, but why don’t you cover that again? 

Cari Garcia: Sure. So you can find me at fatgirlhedonist.com and Fat Girl Hedonist on TikTok as well as Fat Girl Hedonist on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. I think pretty much everywhere. You can find me as Fat Girl Hedonist. 

Megan Porta: Awesome. Yeah, go check CarI out. Thank you again so much for being here and thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro: We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.


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