From accidental Local Guide to digital media entrepreneur

When it comes the time to decide your grown up life (i’m 36 years old), there are bunch of ideas, moments, fears, joys and uncertainty in our minds… But there is always a major goal to lead you to a final (but not unchangeable) decision. In my case, i had already decided to improve my life quality and my family time a couple of years ago, and become an independent entrepreneur (as my father did when he had like ten years more than I do now). In that pad, visiting new places every week was part of it, according to my “more family time, less work time” plan. The funny thing, I’ve always liked taking some pictures (moderated level) and leave my opinion (no matter of what), so I joined Google Local Guide project the first time some email or notification appeared to me (I really don’t remember)… But I don’t know how I became an 8 stars Local Guide!

Some “special” day I had a 6 star pin in my Google Maps app when I was reviewing a restaurant :thinking: , and I realized what it really meant a few months later, when I updated a closed restaurante information and it got updated almost instantly (I think that was the “APPROVED” contribution in bottom of the list below).

Then I saw my pictures had A LOT of views (I still don’t believe about more than 1.2M views :open_mouth: )

Later, I started to win batches, and my reviews where most of the time in first position, even when they were old… Everything was so cool! Then, I started to do my homework to “deserve” that position, and I realized I really liked it. So I started to get involve a lot more in local directories, social media, maps platforms, website development, SEO, SEM… And when the time comes last year, and I had to decide what to do as independent, I finally started my own Digital Platforms Management Agency for small business and NFP organizations. The truth is, and I have to be honest, it has not been easy, but my clients and my family always let me know I’ve taken the right decision :grin: . Finance balance should come later :roll_eyes: .

So… what can i say? THANK YOU Google Local Guides program for showing me the pad! And THANKS to every single person who saw, liked or post any of my pictures, reviews or recommendations.

That’s what Local Guides means to me!!! :sunglasses:

4 Likes

Hi @SebaGuSi

Welcome to Connect. And thanks for sharing. Have you had a chance to take a look at “Your guide at to connect.”? it’s a good starting point for this forum.

By the way, are you applying for Connect Live 2020 with this post? If so, as part of the requirement, you need to write the post under Local Stories topic.

Check out this How to write a great connect live post for more information

You can edit your post/message. Click that three dots and select “Edit Message” as shown in below screenshot.

Once in edit mode, select local stories as Topic. You can only select one topic.

Hi @SebaGuSi ,

You may be new to Connect or writing to share a post for your Connect Live application. If you’re applying to Connect Live 2020 be sure to share a link to a new Connect post responding to this year’s application prompt. You can find everything you need to know about writing a post for Connect Live 2020 here. If you think you are missing some of the points mentioned, you can always edit the post and add them.

P.S. I will relabel your post to Local Stories, where all applications should appear, as @sparekh already mentioned as well.

1 Like

Hello @SebaGuSi it looks like your post was accidentally caught in our spamfilter (which is pretty strict here; it can be triggered even by simply making edits to a recently published post). I have now released it from the spam folder.