Dennis J. Smith

Grow Your MailChimp Mailing List On The Go

November 5, 2013

Do you find yourself looking for ways to grow your mailing list? Nathan Barry puts out some great content on how to do that and be successful. Recently a client of mine sent me an email with some information from MailChimp. If you’re not familiar, MailChimp is a website that I use to keep track of my mailing list subscribers and send them newsletters each month or bi-weekly. They have this simple app called Chimpadeedoo for your iPad and Android tablet. The app is free and can be customized (see screenshot below) according to your your type of business. It makes it easy to sign up new subscribers when attending in-person events. Thanks to @MailChimp and a well-placed iPad w/ Chimpadeedoo, have a client that’s gone from 250 subscribers to 10,000 in one year.Love it. — Armin Ghazi (@ask_armin) February 6, 2012 You can decide how much information you want to collect from subscribers. However I recommend that you keep it to something like first name and e-mail address. Studies show that the less information you ask for the better chances you have that someone will subscribe to your list. Do you have a mailing list for your business? Are you using MailChimp or another service? Leave me a comment below and lets chat. Setting up Chimpadeedoo Check out this Chimpadeedoo success stories I found on the MailChimp blog. [hcshort id=”5″]

How Do You Like To Learn?

October 27, 2013

I wrote my first book “Promote Your Business or Cause Using Social – A Beginner’s Handbook” over 3 years ago and released the 2013 edition earlier this year. In that time I have sold over 800 copies on Kindle and Paperback and over 9,000 have downloaded the Kindle version during various freebie promotions. The royalties aren’t much but it’s nice to have some money deposited into my checking at the end of each month. Recently I read the eBook “Authority” by Nathan Barry and now have new focus on what I want to do. My passion has always been to help others succeed at that they do best and had been hosting webinars to teach others how to use social media and WordPress to grow their businesses online. I have also taught workshops in Boise attended by several and recently presented for 2 hours in the Seattle area on the topic of “Tools for Online Marketing" which I received some great feedback from attendees. I am currently working on my latest project which the video edition of my book and will included more information than ever on Social Media, WordPress and marketing tools to grow your business online. However this will be more than a book and include how-to videos to walk you through the steps of setting up your social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more. Plus I’ll show you the tools needed to maintain your social media and how you can set-up an affordable website using WordPress and connect it to your social media networks. What’s in it for you? If you are like me you like learning many different ways including reading, watching videos and putting what you have learned to work. The Whole Shebang includes the all new eBook updated with the latest information on Social Media, WordPress and using tools like MailChimp to market your business online. Then enjoy over 15 videos that will walk you through the steps needed to setup your networks so that you can be effective online. Look for presells to begin late-Summer 2014

Did I Just Move To Seattle? – Part 3

October 16, 2013

I’m starting my 3rd month of living in Seattle again and enjoying living here. Yes, I actually like the rain but the weather has been rather nice lately. Though I do miss my friends, family and networking groups back in Idaho. The job search continues and it has taken me awhile to write this installment. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 of “Did I Just Move To Seattle?” if you haven’t already. Did I tell you that I suffer from procrastination and staying focused sometimes? What holds you back from success? I’ve been trying apps on my smartphone like Wunderlist to help me keep my eye on the prize and get things done. I have also installed several goal tracking apps on my tablet so help me meet my goals. What apps do you use? Well I have talked about how I lived in Seattle once before while in my 20’s for about 10 years before having to move back to Idaho. While in Idaho the last 10 years I struggled with keeping a job but think that I have finally found something that makes me happy. I love social media and WordPress and love sharing my knowledge with others. But if I want to never go back to the corporate world I need to find out how I can turn my passion into a lucrative living. Are you in the same boat? I have been networking so I can meet other like minded people and connect with possible clients. It’s a slow process but I have been meeting some good people and some that only have their best interest in mind. I try to steer clear of those types because I believe you receive more by helping others and putting them first. I’m still not sure if Seattle is the final place I want to be but I continue to look for employment so that I can continue networking with others. I find that networking helps because I meet people with the same struggles that I have. They too are working to control their own destiny by having their own business. But I have realized that if I want to stay here I have to find a job so I have a stable income. That doesn’t mean that I’ll get stuck in the corporate grind again, it just might take some time to get to where I want to be in life. I was on Facebook the other day and there was a post asking what one word comes to mind when it comes to Entrepreneurs. I commented and the word that I picked was “Persistence” because you should never give up on your dreams. Having a job would give me a stable income, allow me to stay in Seattle and continue to network so I can realize that dream. If you have the same struggles please feel free to comment below or just say hello. Update: I moved back to Idaho last fall to take care of my parents home and the family dog who went blind while I was in Seattle. I’m currently working on writing an update to my book, creating new products, consulting and offering training to small business. My latest project is showing others how to grow their business with MailChimp. [divider] [hcshort id=”13″]

Who’s Talking About Social Media Specialist Dennis J. Smith?

October 2, 2013

Being a Real Estate Broker for 25 years, I figured I should get on board with the rest of the world when it came to Social Media Networking. That’s where my younger clients are seeking information. I want them to find me when looking for an agent. Dennis J. Smith had been recommended to me for his expertise in this area. When he offered to teach a class on Social Media Networking I jumped at the chance to become informed, however skeptical I could grasp this concept. During this class I was introduced to many opportunities in various social media networking sites, blogging, Twitter, Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn, WordPress, as well as doing your own Webinars and Webpages. Because of his easy way and thorough explanation I left the class feeling inspired and thinking I was capable of doing this! Since that day he has continued being my mentor through his availability to ask questions and his various Webinars on the above topics. Also, his book, “Promote Your Business or Cause Using Social Media – A Beginner’s Handbook”, has proven an easy read and easy to understand. So, this recommendation for Dennis J. Smith was supposed to be “brief” but when someone like Dennis has offered so very much more I just can not say enough. Thank you Dennis! Carol Cunningham Carol Cunningham Real Estate Real Estate Agent Boise, ID [divider] Dennis Smith’s book “Promote Your Business or Cause Using Social Media – A Beginner’s Handbook” was included with his social media workshop I attended a few weeks back! As you can see by my abundance of post its that it is VERY HELPFUL! He wrote it in a tone as if he were sitting across from you which is nice and makes it very easy to read! It is loaded with options, because in social media often you find a multitude of tools to do the same thing! To top it off 95% of the tools he explains are FREE!! If you have not read this book: go to his page www.facebook.com/socialmediabook and order it! Emily Erin Santilli Marketing By Em [divider] Dennis is truly an expert in his field! Dennis offers a simplistic approach to gaining more likes through his workshop, 15 Ways to Get More “Like” For Your Facebook Fan Page, providing clear and distinctive ways to make your page standout and get “liked” amongst the crowd. Dennis continues to be a wonderful resource for both Social Media and WordPress. April Smith Admin Superwomen [divider] Dennis was professional and helpful. He helped me set up my MailChimp account and transfer a domain name to a website already in use. Dennis also taught a class on social media which I really enjoyed! Liz Alexander Most Wanted Realtor with John L. Scott Real Estate [divider] Dennis J. Smith truly understands the dynamics of social media. He is a wealth of information and provides prompt and clear instruction via his book or many social sites and groups he is involved in. Sue Vest Account Manager, CMO at Group Travel Specialist Dennis did a great job for our company on a Facebook contest we were doing. He set it all up and it went fantastic! Thanks Dennis. Casey Eells Summit Auto Glass, Managing Member [divider] I picked up a copy of ‘Promote Your Business or Cause Using Social Media’ and devoured it. Within the book were so many ideas on how to get the word out about my content writing business, that I couldn’t help but start in that next morning putting them into action. I got immediate responses; Dennis Smith’s ideas really work. The language is also more comprehensive, technologically-speaking, than I was expecting. Combining humor and know-how, Dennis Smith really knows his social media stuff Amy Larson Writer / Editor / Ghostwriter / Published Photographer/ Freakishly Creative Type

Is your business on Instagram?

September 12, 2013

Being visual on social media can be very beneficial to your businesses online marketing plans. People are more engaged with a post that contain images or video rather than a bunch of text. You’ll find that more people will like, comment on or share your post that have images or video. Most smartphone have cameras and you’ll find the free Instagram app available for iOS and Android devices. With Instagram you can take photos and video and apply one of many filters. I take photos all the time and the photos aren’t always about my business. I like showing others what I am up to for the day or where I’m at for the day. It might be a photo of the sunset here in Seattle or documenting a road trip. I will sometimes take a photo of my book or when I attend a workshop. This puts a more personal touch on the post rather than being just about business. However don’t let this stop you from adding photos of your products, new arrivals, employees, customers or anything else related to your business. Be creative and have fun. Don’t forget to use #hashtags that are relevant to your post to take advantage of Facebook’s new Graph Search feature. This make it easier for others to find your business when doing a search on Facebook. Do you use Instagram or do you use another photo app like Vine? Snap a Instagram photo of your home office and add it to the comments to this post on Facebook. Leave a comment below on how you use photos and video to market your business. [divider] [hcshort id=”13″]

Did I just move to Seattle? – Part 2

September 4, 2013

I moved back to Idaho and in with my folks in the Winter of 2002 after being on unemployment for about a year. It was hard finding a job because everyone else in my industry was in the same boat. The economy wasn’t that much better in Idaho at the time and I had a hard time swallowing that I was going to a $55,000 a year job in the city I loved to $10 a hour jobs where I spent my childhood. It felt like Boise had nothing to offer except call center jobs if you didn’t have a college degree and the high-tech industry wasn’t that large even though HP and Micron have a large presence in the area. The first job I landed happened a few months after I returned to Idaho was with a temp agency testing HP printers overnight for 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday. It paid about $10 an hour if I remember right and was to involve loading paper and ink cartridges in printers to test the reliability of the product. However on the way to my first night I called the temp agency and told them I wouldn’t be in. I instead spent the weekend at a friends place in Boise and drank beer. It was still hard from me going to a job that paid almost $30 an hour to $10 an hour and working overnight on weekends. I kept searching but it wasn’t easy to find a job as a web developer in Boise without a college degree. Plus companies there were just starting a web presence or didn’t have one at all. I found a job at the DirecTV call center which was the largest call center in the valley and one of the largest employers. I thought it would be easy since I already had several years of customer service under my belt. But I soon found that to be different as customers over the phone are some of the most difficult people on the planet. I found myself driving home in tears sometimes, missing Seattle, the lifestyle I once had and wondering what the heck I was going to do. That job didn’t last long and just 3 months in I was given the option to leave on my own accord or be terminated for missing just 3 days. Even though I had some of the best stats and offered great customer service. I chose to leave and was happy again the moment I walked out that door. I knew why they had a revolving door because practically everyone in that valley has worked there and left for some reason. That’s when I knew that I had to do something to change the course of my life. The struggle to find the perfect job continued as I bounced from call center job to call center job. Yes, Boise was and still is the mecca of call center jobs with low wages to boot. I’ve had so many jobs I’m getting to that age where I’m starting to forget all the places that I worked. I went from DirecTV to Alaska Airlines, the Carlson Leisure Travel and next to T-Mobile where again I missed a few days and was terminated. I remember one day that over 150 agents were out due to an illness going around the call center. That’s what happens when you have to share a desk with someone else who gets sick and spreads their germs all over the same workspace you share. I went to HP to sell computers and the same thing happened there. I would sell more than most healthy agents but was given the option to leave or be terminated. I decided that maybe it was time to work more on my education and hope to find a stable good paying job. To Be Continued Part I – Did I Just Move To Seattle? Final Post – Did I Just Move To Seattle?

Did I just move to Seattle?

August 18, 2013

I have been living in Idaho for about the past 12 years after living in Seattle while in my 20’s and early 30’s. I have always had a love for the city, its business environment, the culture and yes even the rain which we don’t see much in Idaho. During my early 20’s I was working in a mall in Boise, Idaho for a retail chain that isn’t around anymore due to Walmart, Redbox and Netflix. We sold VHS videos, laserdisc, movie memorabilia and DVD’s weren’t even around. I was offered an opportunity to move to the Seattle area in the fall of 1991 and manage a store in Tacoma. After a year I was managing a new store in Westlake Center which was in the heart of the retail core of Seattle. After 7 years I left retail management and started to work for a company selling software updates. Just a few months into the job I started designing web pages as a hobby and did a few mock-up designs of what I thought the company’s website for our product should look like. Most websites at the time lacked any type of design and were pretty basic compared to todays sites. Soon I was promoted to work out of the Bellevue office with the web team in Cupertino, CA. I found it hard to focus considering I had no one overseeing me and a lack of communication from the team in California. But that changed after half of the company was laid off due to competition from Microsoft. I was unemployed for the first time in my life but saw it as an opportunity for change. It didn’t take long to find a new job and I was soon working for wireless communications company doing customer care for their new company VoiceStream Wireless. During training I created a mockup of the online tool the customer care reps were using to find information to assist customers. I asked my trainer if she had seen the new company intranet and showed her what I had created. She actually thought it was a real website but I had explained I did it myself the night before. She ended up showing it to the intranet team and after being a call center agent for a few months I was promoted to assist the team. I liked my job but I didn’t think that I was being compensated well enough for the work I was doing. After all the team was designing a new look for the intranet because of the design I showed my trainer several months prior. The intranet site probably would have had the same boring look at feel of most website at the time. This all was happening around the time I was meeting others in the tech industry who worked for Microsoft. I soon found out they were being compensated way more for the same kind of work I was doing. One of my friends who I am still in contact with told me about a wireless phone company she was working for. She was a salesperson who was activating phones for this retailer but found it hard to find information or keep track of her sales to get paid correct commissions. I was soon introduced to one of the owners of the company and told him what I could do to help keep track of activations and provide reps with the information they needed. I named my salary and left the other company to build an internet and intranet site for this company. While there learned a lot about business, the behavior of others in the business world and built a great site along with a few others I brought into the project. But after a year I was again out of a job and headed back to the unemployment office. The tech industry was again on the upswing in the Seattle area and after a 2-week search on Monster.com I landed a job that paid $55,000 a year and I didn’t have a college degree. Here I was a self-taught web developer for a company that processed film, sent the prints in the mail and then uploaded customer photos to a website. I felt a little strange at first because I never had made that much money in my life and I wasn’t working my ass off like I had at past jobs. I still had a lot to learn but not that many schools were teaching web development at that time. It was fall of 2000 and right after the presidential election and the dot-com crash was just starting to happen. I came back from Thanksgiving in Idaho and was asked to speak with someone in HR. The news wasn’t good and I was let go that day along with 50 other company employees who were given boxes and had an hour to pack up, turn in their security badges and leave the building. Now I had already been through this a few times before with a few other high-tech company in the Seattle area. But this time it was different because soon lots of companies in Seattle were doing the same thing. Some weren’t even giving their employees a warning and they would arrive at work to find their security badges didn’t work. Probably why I was always nervous when my badge didn’t work but only because of my own doing. I came back home to live with my folks after losing a job that paid well considering I didn’t have a college degree. I was on unemployment for about a year and couldn’t find work because hundreds of others in the same industry were doing the same. That’s when I decided to pack up and move back to Idaho where I grew up and have spent most of my life and live with my folks. Read Part 2

15 Ways to Get More Facebook Fan Page Engagement – Free Webinar

August 2, 2013

Here’s some of what you’ll learn… Learn how to get more likes on your post Learn how to get more likes on your fan page Learn techniques to get more comments How to get others to share your content Posting Tips Register to reserve your space today! [divider] [hcshort id=”13″]

Author: Dennis J. Smith