About Me

What is DennisKnows.com All About

1. Now about me!

My About me section is a bit different from others I’ve read in the past. I didn’t want it to seem like someone else wrote about me. I wrote it and it’s about me, the creator of DennisKnows.com. What better way to do that than to tell you about me in my own words? Also, I’m really telling you about me. If you want to just read how I got to where I’m at, skip to number 10.

In case you don’t know, that’s me to the left. My name is Dennis Marshall or as my friends call me Mr. Dennis Knows. I grew up with dreams of becoming…. Well I don’t even know. I just wanted to be successful. I actually wrote the book on it.

I grew up the only child so as you can imagine, my imagination was beyond amazing (along with a side of selfishness).

Being the only child always gave me an excuse when I didn’t share. I would just say I never had to growing up. LOL.

Truth be told, I never said this while my mom was around because I knew better. She raised me better than that.

2. The Early Years

I grew up in a single parent home; just me, my mom and an occasional hamster, goldfish or parrot throughout the years. I didn’t grow up with the best of everything like I wanted but I had everything I needed.

Elementary and middle-school were easy rolling for me. As you probably know, 90% of kids get honor-roll in those grades. For some reason, they thought I was “Gifted” so they put me in advanced classes.

From 1^st grade to 6^th grade, I only missed getting the honor-roll once. That teacher had it in for me. When I got to 7^th grade, they shoved me into advanced classes.

I soon realized that I was a regular kid after getting my first D in Mr. Goldberg’s algebra class. I’ve always remembered his name because I wondered was he the father of the pro-wrestler named Goldberg.

3. Growing Up and Moving More Than U-Haul Trucks

I moved around quite a bit due to my mom just liking to see new places. I really don’t know why she moved so much. We would settle down for a few years then we’re on the move. Don’t think my mom was a fugitive ok. LOL.. My mom was a devout Christian and I know for a fact that she had my best interest at heart. Look how I turned out.

All the moving kept me from keeping childhood friends. Today, I only have 2 friends I still talk to from my childhood.  This is the one thing that has damaged me I believe. I think I cherish friendships too much because I’ve never had those child-hood friends like everyone else.

When I  get a good friend, I try to hang on to them.

4. High School was wild! Reality check..

High-school; the first time for everything. I got my hair braided for the first time; got my drivers license but still scared the crap out of my mom because I pulled to close to cars at the red light. Her words not mines.

I still remember the time she made me get out in the middle of a busy street at the red light. She had enough… That was hilarious you hear me.

The best memory of high-school though was I got my first girl-friend. See my mom was like Bobby Booshay’s mom. If you never saw the movie, she use to always say “girls were the devil” to keep Bobby from getting a girl-friend.

Now my mom didn’t go to that extreme; in fact, nowhere close to it but she made it clear that she didn’t want to having a girl-friend and definitely not having sex.

So after 18 years of just “looking at the grass” on the other side, I finally jumped the fence. I soon realized what moms was telling me about. Women are difficult. Do you agree?

This was also around the time I started partying and hanging out with friends and you know; fall victim to the worst drug ever. PEER PRESSURE.

5. The worse moment of my life

These were my wild times and sadly they came after my mom’s passing. She passed away during my senior year in 2002 after a short battle with kidney failure; just after I turned 18.

I still remember that night like it was yesterday. This is why I always tell kids to obey their parents because I promise them if they’re parents suddenly aren’t there anymore, they’re going to blame themselves.

I was the one that found my mother and that night, I came home like 5 hours too late. Maybe this is why I didn’t cry. It didn’t settle in until a few days after her passing that my mom was gone out of my physical life forever.

6. Who was my mom?

The woman who stuck by my side through thick and thin; never let me down and gave me everything I needed. Showed me by example that raising kids is not about giving them every you never had, but giving them everything they need.

The only friend I knew I would never lose was now gone. I’m actually holding back tears as I write this but I always remember what my mom asked for; to be able to see her little boy grow to be a man. I was officially a man.

If you’re wondering why I would even mention moments in my life that are so emotional, stay tuned; you’ll see.

7. Graduation… Duuuuuh!

I barely graduated high-school after that so I decided not to waste my time with college. My self diagnosed ADHD along with a desire to make money then and not later, lead me to my very first job. Wal-Mart welcomed me with open arms.

Didn’t last long because I just have this thing against working the night shift; I’m not a freakin’ vampire. I needed to get some real sleep.

I eventually moved to Tampa where I hooked up with my father. My dad really surprised me because I didn’t know I had a twin walking the earth. Me and my father are so much alike. People say I look like him but I don’t see it. Do you?

8. We had our struggles but we made it

Staying with my father as a hot-headed 18 year-old going on 30 know it all, was something. Me and him would always get into over insignificant things.

I remember one time, we got into an argument at a store over a model car engine because he said it was a Ford and I knew it was a Chevy. I still to this day know I was right.

Another battle we had was dealing with his alcoholism which I am proud to say he was able to finally put aside. Nothing made me prouder than the day my father said he was going to rehab.

See he use to always tell me he was going to quit but never followed through. Rehab was a huge step for him. He beat the hardest part of an addiction which I believe is fighting through the denial.

Pops came out clean as a whistle. Made me the happiest son on the planet that day. It’s nothing like having a real conversation with your father after not having one for as long as I could remember.

Eventually, we parted ways because I was becoming a man and felt I needed to make some big moves.

9. Reality and checks

In what we know as reality, working for the man and getting checks SUCKS. In my whole life, I’ve only had like 4 real jobs. After leaving Wally World (Wal-Mart) and moving to Tampa, I started building in-ground swimming pools.

This is by far the most grueling job I’ve ever had. The sun was not my friend at all as you can see in the pic to the left. It gave me a pretty bad tan.

I built pools for a little over a year bringing home like 400 bucks a week. Now I don’t have an IQ of 1000 but what happens when we there are no more new subdivisions going up?

I’m knowing we would eventually run out of space would be left blowing in the wind.

Guess what?

Real estate market crashed, builders stopped building and a huge percentage of the companies that flourished off of building in-ground swimming pools went under.

I next started working at a place cutting cable but guess what? I started thinking again..  What happens when all the companies we cut cable for don’t need cable anymore?

Guess what?

That company is going through a bankruptcy and laid off more than half of their employees. Who’s the genius now? Plus they only have like 5 followers on Twitter and 14 fans on Facebook… Not good for business in an age when social media rules.

Luckily for me, I was at my “secure hospital job” by then. Everything was smooth there and then I started getting light bulbs flashing in my head like never before.

Why the **** (I did curse then) am I working here?

They treated me like crap and then towards the end of my days there, I was blackballed so I couldn’t get a job anywhere in the hospital.

I was eventually outed but while they were thinking they were ruining my life, they made me the happiest guy on the planet. I was finally liberated.

10. Here’s where the best change of my life came

Hop in my DeLorean (car from Back To The Future) and fast-forward to 2010; the year my life changed. I was finally fed up with dealing with the same problem from job to job.  Employers asking me to do things that they couldn’t do themselves. I decided I had enough.

I started my own company and got into real estate investing, blogging and studying ways to make money online. I started DennisKnows.com, which was my first blog, on some hip hop stories and made my first $0.05 from 1 click. I broke into tears thinking I had climbed Mt. Everest.

Didn’t know I hadn’t even started the climb yet.

I eventually started closing real estate deals and making money online from email marketing and would get a few sales from my blog here and there. I was always left thinking “what am I missing?”

11. I found out what I was missing

When I tell you I’ve tried everything trying to make money online, I mean it with every taste bud of my tongue. Most of my tries failed miserably but you know something I realized?

No matter how many times I failed, whenever a new idea would come to mind, I had the same fire in my eyes as the last idea. I knew it would work.

When it didn’t, I didn’t sit around pouting; that’s for losers. I would chalk it up as a loss and on to the next.

This type of thinking & the “fake it til’ you make it” mentality eventually led me to purchase iBlog4Dollars.com. At the time, I had no knowledge whatsoever of how to really make money online. I was making money but it was only like a hundred bucks a month; if that.

My Adsense account hadn’t even gone over $50 yet.

I figured out from all this that my passion was internet marketing. I became a full-time internet marketer, dabbled in real estate investing and never looked back.

12. My inspiration to keep going

Even though I wasn’t making that much money, I still knew I had a place in the world of internet marketing. I mentioned my first unofficial mentor name Lisa from 2CreateAwebsite.com.

She was number 1 on my top 10 successful internet entrepreneurs.

After seeing her talk about how she was making a living online, I knew what I was going to spend my time doing; BLOGGING.

Now one thing about me is I don’t like being fake. That “fake it til’ you make it” is really hard for me. I ignored that little voice in my head telling me not to do it and opened up iBlog4Dollars.com.

I wasn’t making any money but I was blogging for dollars? Yea I don’t know about you but I see something very wrong with that.

I soon came up with another clever idea. Just read other people’s articles and create your own content after reading their’s. I thought I had come up with a million dollar idea.

13. The blogger that changed my whole way of thinking

While trying to setup ways to make money online, I signed up as an affiliate of top blogger, Yaro Starack. This guy is a very big deal in the blogging and internet marketing community. Just happened to be the biggest blogger I had my attention on.

Yaro had an article as part of his affiliate program that he gave us full permission to post on our site. I chose Reporter vs Expert: Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting. I put it on my site as content without reading but one day, while wondering what I was doing wrong, I decided to check out this article.

Showed me my mistake. I decided to halt all production on iBlog4Dollars.com and focus on DennisKnows.com. At least start really making money online first.

14. Fast-forward a year later

It took me almost a year finally get started on iBlog4Dollars.com but after much trial and error and laughs about stupid ventures I can’t believe I fell for, I’m finally here.

I now live off my income from online and this is honestly the beginning for me. As you read in the first paragraph, I have some big things planned for DennisKnows.com & everything attached to it. It took some time but I’ve made so much progress.

Everything I’ve been through in my life prepared me for this point. My mom not giving me everything I wanted prepared for a world that forces this on you.

15. What does it take?

One thing I’ve learned is it takes a good loss of short-term memory. When something doesn’t go the way you want it to, figure out why, never make the mistake again, forget about it and on to the next.

I’ve come from a near high-school drop-out that decided college wasn’t for him, to an online business owner that’s loving every single minute of it.

The year when I started making a good amount of money online, I experienced more freedom than ever before; and I haven’t done anything yet.

I went to San Diego, CA which ended up being my very first time on a plane. It was great. I had a nice looking young lady next to me that had a great sense of humor; mainly because she laughed at everything I said.

You know something though? My mom use to always say she wanted to see Cali more than any other place. I don’t know what it was about Cali but she really wanted to see it.

I would always say in my cute little kid voice “what about the earthquakes” and she would laugh. She wasn’t worried about any earthquakes. Definitely the last thing on her mind.

Being that I’m my mother’s child and she lives through me, I feel that she finally got to see Cali. I still don’t know what propelled me to want to go to Cali but I did and loved it so much that I want to move there.

My next trip was to Chicago to see the United Center where Michael Jordan played for the Bulls.

I’m not telling you this stuff to brag because compared to others, this is nothing but I’m HAPPY. God has truly blessed me to be able to control my time to where I can up and do these things without worrying about “the man”.

A great feeling it is!

I guess now I can say I’ve begun to climb Mt. Everest (you have to read the whole page to understand).

The freedom of being an internet entrepreneur is, in my opinion, like no other. I can wake up when I want to, work from any Starbucks in the country and you get to meet some awesome people.

The best part of all is the walks to the mailbox. This is when your check-to-bill ratio goes up; meaning you get more checks in the mail than bills. That feeling is unexplainable. Just wait until you experience it.

All the tough times of trying this and it not working are totally worth it. I was just shoveling all the fluff out of the way headed to my ultimate goal.

Want to know what S.U.C.C.E.S.S. is?

See your goal

Understand the obstacles

Create a positive mental picture

Clear your mind of self-doubt

Embrace the challenge

Stay on track

Show the world you can do it.

As you can see, GQ wanted me to do a cover for them on my success with my business.

Ok just in case you don’t know, I made this in Photoshop. I saw myself being successful so bad, I put me on the cover of GQ cover. Now that’s creating a mental picture.

I took that right after being fired from my job; not knowing where I was headed in life but I knew right where I wanted to be.

Here I am; Dennis the Internet Marketing Menace (I change my name to fit the cause); closing real estate deals, creating killer content and taking names (literally on my email list).

I wanted to give you a look into my life and let you know what I’ve been through to get where I’m at. It’s not always easy but boy is it worth it.

I wish you much success and God bless you all

Dedicated to the memory of my mother

Gone but NEVER forgotten