Since you clicked on the link for this page, you probably want to know a little bit about me.
OK, I’ll share, but not so much that you get bored, I hope. Though I do have to warn you I tend to ramble a bit.
My hometown is Ferriday, Louisiana, although I was born in a hospital across the Mississippi River in Natchez, Mississippi. Ferriday is the town that brought us Jerry Lee Lewis, his cousin Jimmy Swaggart, and his other cousin Mickey Gilley.
My mother was from Mexico, my father from North Mississippi. They separated when I was 3 or 4 and my mom remarried when I was 5. I lived with my mom and stepfather in Natchez for about a year. Then, the day before first grade I (was) moved from Natchez to Baton Rouge and my father, my brother, my grandmother, and I moved into my father’s “new” house. A two and a half bedroom, one bath Bungalow, Craftsman style house built in 1935.
Childhood was pretty great from that point on, although for me it was never too bad.
Eventually, I made it through high school but, I wasn’t too sure about college. But I did go, then stopped for a while, then went back but at a different university, then took a break for a while. And so on. During all this, I worked a very wide variety of jobs. I worked at a convenience store, as a security guard, and as a cable box installer, door to door cutlery salesman, and night attendant at a funeral home to name some of the jobs I’ve had.
At one point I worked as a private investigator, but not freelance. None of that Sam Spade or Rockford stuff for me. I worked for a firm that mostly handled workman’s comp insurance-related cases. The managers negotiated contracts with businesses that had pending worker’s comp type claims against them, then assigned investigators as needed to gather all the facts about the case. We covered the whole state of Louisiana and I spent a lot of time on the road. And a lot of time sitting in my car with a pair of binoculars, a camera with a huge telephoto lens, a soda and a bag of fast food.
I did eventually finish college and near the end of my college career I took up acting. After graduating I made a meager living as a theater actor in the Southeastern US. Then got into film, where I continued to make a meager living. I had parts in some successful movies like Blue Sky, Under Siege, Blown Away, Cobb, Batman Forever, the Fugitive, and A Time To Kill. Unfortunately, they were all small parts that were mostly cut out during editing.
I used to tell people that if they wanted to catch me, do not get popcorn. You could miss me while you grab another bite.
My name made it to the credits though, so I have continued to receive residual checks for that work. Unfortunately, the amounts of those checks have gone down over the years. The check amounts were never very big. Now that they’ve gone down for so long, these days sometimes it seems like it’s hardly worth the cost of postage to mail me the check.
By the time I had been an actor for 10 years I was in a lot of debt and tired of struggling. I had a lot of trouble getting out of acting even though I’d had enough and was ready for some stability and a reliable income. And it had long since become obvious that I was never going to have a successful acting career. But I couldn’t get a regular full-time job in the South East because I had done so much film work. So I moved to L.A. to get out of film work. I figured – at least there they are accustomed to people quitting the movie industry.
When I got to L.A. I met my future wife and she helped me get set up with several temp agencies. So I started temping. Oh, and I worked on two more movie. But mainly I spent the first couple of years studying computers and getting certified as a PC technician.
In addition to that, I taught myself HTML and CSS. I used to do some freelance work building websites for people and businesses.
Then I discovered the Make Money Online Internet Marketing industry.
These days I mainly use my web skills to set up marketing sites and to customize the sales pages that come with resell products.
I didn’t mention it earlier, but I’ve also always had an entrepreneurial side. I’ve started a couple of businesses in my time. I enjoyed web design and thought it might be a good way to freelance full time. But, then I started thinking about trading hours for dollars and constantly looking for the next client. I was drawn more and more to Internet Marketing.
I must have been spoiled by those movie residual checks. You see, with Internet or Web Marketing you can create residual income streams where you do the work once and get paid over and over. That sounds a lot better than rushing through contract jobs as fast as possible, hoping to get through enough projects to make the rent by the first.
There are a lot of other things that attracted me to internet marketing. The opportunity to be creative in graphic design, web site design, and composing content for websites and ads.
We’ll talk more about these and a lot of the other great benefits of having an internet business in the blog.
Till then,
Dave Hodges
P.S. – Once in a while someone will ask me about the name of my websites and where the DUH comes from or what does it mean. Well, believe it or not, those are my initials.