We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sherry Bonelli a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sherry thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I moved to Tennessee in the early 1990s and was a court reporter there for two years. The first time I went to Nashville, I fell in LOVE with the city! I love country music, cowboy hats and cowboy boots — and Nashville felt like “home” to me. When I later moved to California and then back to my home state of Iowa, I never forgot my love for Nashville.

Now I own a digital marketing agency where I help small businesses get more exposure on the internet — so websites and social media are part of my wheelhouse. One day I had a thought: “Wouldn’t it be fun to start Facebook and Instagram pages featuring local Nashville businesses so that people visiting Nashville would know about all the great places to go while they’re visiting?” And Nashville Tourist Guide was born!

Currently, we have an Instagram and Facebook page, but we’ll be launching an official website soon where we will feature more detailed information on local Nashville businesses that appeal to tourists visiting Nashville. (Look for the website to be populated with cool, fun and must-see businesses later this year!)

We are starting to do outreach to local businesses in Nashville. If any businesses want to have us feature posts about their companies on the Nashville Tourist Guide Instagram or Facebook Pages, all they have to do is contact me. There’s absolutely no cost! We just want to promote the great companies that make up this wonderful city!

Sherry, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I own early bird digital marketing, a digital marketing agency that helps local businesses get found online through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google Business Profile, content marketing and other digital marketing strategies. (earlybirddigitalmarketing.com) Since I live and breathe “digital marketing” every day, when I came up with the idea for Nashville Tourist Guide, it just made sense!

Setting up our Nashville Tourist Guide Instagram and Facebook pages so that Nashville business owners can send us their company’s posts for us to include on our Instagram and Facebook pages — for FREE — seemed like such a no-brainer! It is a great way for the business to get exposure and a wonderful way for us to provide information on cool businesses in Nashville for people planning a trip to this amazing city!

We have just started doing outreach to local business owners and are seeing great results!

Also, we have begun to work on the Nashville Tourist Guide website, which should be officially released later this year! This will have free and premium paid-for spots for local businesses.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Building an audience on social media involves engaging with others on the platforms. You can’t just wait around to get followers/an audience — you have to work at it! That means proactively looking for your ideal audience and reaching out to them to let them know about your business/page and inviting them to take a look at it. That is the best way to get engagement!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

In 1998 I launched an e-commerce site selling pregnancy and baby products. Like most businesses, it started slow, but by 2005 it was one of the most popular online pregnancy sites. Unfortunately, our company was selling an exclusive product and the owner of that product got into some trouble. Because we were the product’s exclusive distributor, we got caught up in a class-action lawsuit. (None of which was our fault.)

We pretty much lost everything. The attorney fees were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we had to file for bankruptcy and sell the business. It literally broke up my marriage as well as my business. It was devastating! The next few years were very rough emotionally and financially for my kids and I.

But I knew everything I had learned from running my business would be useful. So I used my digital marketing skills and started my digital marketing agency to help other business owners rank higher on Google, improve their website (or create a new one), wrote content, helped them get more reviews and other digital marketing strategies. I’m now a recognized writer and speaker in the digital marketing industry.

And with that knowledge, I started Nashville Tourist Guide!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @nashvilletouristguide
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nashvilletouristguide