I started a blog, and it started a job

A now-lost, much-missed East Nashville mural that served as a banner photo for East Nashville, With Love. Photo: Nicole Keiper.

In 2011, as I was transitioning from seven years of newsroom life into freelancing, I started a blog about my neighborhood of East Nashville. I called it East Nashville, With Love — a little corny, but I liked the turn of phrase — and filled it with news about restaurant openings and shop closings, food reviews, music previews. It was a passion project, and something I started because I wanted to write about something I loved, and, kind of unexpectedly, as a way of retuning my approach to writing and editing and being a journalist.

I was surprised when the little blog quickly gained an audience. I was doubly surprised when I met strangers who called themselves fans of it. I had no marketing budget, no Graffiti ads — anything that had been trickling out about East Nashville, With Love was based on my own social media shouts and what I thought was a little word of mouth. But there it was: People in Nashville were finding out about my little passion project, and reading it.

The web vertical I wrangled at my newspaper job brought in relatively impressive traffic numbers, at the time — between 1 and 2 million pageviews a month, usually. I expected to maybe pull in a few hundred pageviews a month, with a little news blog, focused on a small part of a midsize city. If I got a lucky scoop that caught some traction, maybe I’d crest a thousand. But a few months in, East Nashville, With Love pages were being eyeballed in the tens of thousands, and I was spending hours excitedly feeding it each day, watching my social media counts and web traffic rise, feeling like a proud parent with a kid who was acing a spelling bee.

Those kinds of numbers aren’t going to pull in ad revenue that’ll sustain you — and ultimately, that was the death of East Nashville, With Love, since I had to sustain myself, and needed to do so more quickly than the blog was growing. (It lives on, in a sense, as a stubbornly popular Instagram location, oft maligned by hipster haters.) But the experience was revelatory. I could build a brand out of dust, and then build an audience for that brand, with very little money, but a lot of research, creativity and tenacity.

A blog, to a business

East Nashville, With Love eventually led me to a crop of clients — folks who liked what I did for the blog, and felt inclined to hire me to do something similar for them. And that started my freelance business: building content, and wrangling social media for a mix of brands.

Over seven years, I’ve expanded on what I did for myself (and sharpened how I do it), across a wide range of industries — real estate and insurance agents, a makers market, a finance magazine, dentists, chimney sweeps, bluetooth trackers, an entrepreneurship education program for veterans, a company that finds and leases office space for small businesses, and on, and on, and on. I’ve stayed busy, and kept learning, and I’ve felt inspired and thankful.

As it happened, I stayed busy enough that I kept putting off personally applying the advice I gave to dozens of small businesses. And so here, as 2019 is starting up, I’m finally resolving to put my own web presence out there again, and to keep it alive.

This’ll be a little different from East Nashville, With Love. Most of my site is something of an online portfolio, but in this blog space, I figure I’ll be sharing thoughts related to what I’ve been doing for almost a decade now: cultivating content and developing a social media presence, to build or build up a brand, as an entrepreneur. It’s something I’m passionate about, and something I think I’m good at. And I hope I’ll have some thoughts to share that’ll be entertaining to read.

For now, this is the start. Hope I’ll nod back to this in another decade, as the start of another step forward.