How To Choose The Best Mentors

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Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
which delivers cutting edge conversion strategies from the online trenches straight to
your earbuds. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
listbuilidnglifestylesshow.com. I also invite you to grab a free copy of “The Wealthy
List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival and now
once again it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

Jonathan: You are listening to List Building Lifestyle with me is the Prince of List
Building, Mr. Igor Kheifets. What is up, my man?

Igor: I like that. I like the Prince of List Building much better than the Big
Daddio of List Building. Thank you very much.

Jonathan: Yeah, you know I took it down a notch because I wanted to say the King of
List Building and I thought you were going to play that false modesty with me so I
took it down a notch and it worked. Huh?

Igor: Come on my modesty is 100% real.

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: Just like my clicks, man.

Jonathan: Oh man, so Igor what’s up man? What do you have in store for us today?

Igor: Well, Jonathan, today I want to devote this episode to talk a little bit about
ethics and morals because I believe that the ethical lines of our industry are kind
of blurred and this is something that everyone knows but very few people talk about
especially the gurus. Now I do want to remind the List Builders, you got to be
careful about who you work with online. The gurus never reveal the real secret of
how they got rich. That is actually very, very common. Here’s like a quick little
story that really shows how this works. So several years ago I paid about 15 grand
to work with a guru from Newcastle, United Kingdom so at the time I was going
through like a rough patch in my business and I’ve had my traffic business which
was doing a respectful five figures per month and my coaching business which was
doing pretty much about the same. Now the thing about coaching though is that it’s
really time consuming and it drains your emotional and mental capacity really,
really quick every single day because you work with people, you help them solve
their problems, there’s lots of conversations you got to have so it was really
tough on me mentally and emotionally. So at the end of each day, after tons of phone
calls, Facebook chats, emails back and forth like lots and lots of communication, I
was exhausted. I just wanted to get home, throw myself on my bed, and have someone
spoon feed me as I drift away into sleep. So I didn’t even want to move a muscle
and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. You know

Jonathan what happens to your marriage when you stop talking to your wife right?

Jonathan: Oh boy. Trouble.

Igor: Yeah, it kind of falls apart. So you know one time I came back home and my
wife wasn’t there which was weird because she was always home. So I dialed her but
no one picked up. I started calling all my relatives and all my friends and it’s
like the earth swallowed her whole. So I sort of accepted it and thought myself
don’t panic just wait and she’ll turn up. I didn’t want to call the police or
anything just yet. So about an hour later I got a text from her friend, her best
friend who said that she showed up on her doorstep with our kid, with Ericka, our
daughter, crying and she said that she wanted to basically teach me a lesson. She
wanted to see if I noticed that she was missing. She was gone from home.

Jonathan: Wow.

Igor: Because I hadn’t been paying any attention to her for weeks. Now this was a
shock to me because I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing so this is when I
realized that I had to do something different. I had to do something to change my
life. I had to do something to restore my marriage. I had to restore the
relationship with my wife because that’s the most precise relationship I’ve got
in my life. So I turned to this guru because he seemed to be living the kind of life
that I wanted. He was making a lot of money. He worked about three days a week, four
hours per day. He mostly had done coaching calls and a little bit of copywriting. He
was happily married and never seemed to have missed his son’s swimming lessons or
anything like that so I asked him. I said, “What do I do?” to which he said,
“Which business are you more passionate about?” I said, “I was more passionate
about helping people with their coaching than just selling clicks than selling
traffic.” He said, “Okay, then just go ahead and sell your traffic business and
just do coaching instead and this way you’ll eliminate a huge time suck and
you’ll just do what you like.” And I was like, wait a second that doesn’t make
any sense because if I sell coaching on how to build traffic businesses and I
don’t own one myself doesn’t that make me a liar, a hypocrite, a douche bag? To
which he said no it actually does not. It’s not such a big deal at all. I have got
this client who coaches other people how to do EBay marketing, how to start EBay
businesses who doesn’t really own an EBay business in the first place but he makes
a ton of money coaching other people how to do it and that was pretty much the last
coaching call I had with the guy. I didn’t want to talk to him afterwards because
it really shows that the backbone like when someone recommends you do something
like that it really shows their backbone or the lack there of like they don’t really
care that they are not practicing what they are preaching and instead they get rich
doing something which isn’t aligned to their core. In other words, just like many
gurus out there who got rich selling advice but not actually doing whatever that
thing that they were advising about, he was no different he was telling me to do the
same. So eventually though, I made a decision to give up coaching and go into
traffic full-time and just adding the coaching element to the traffic which created
the necessary personal satisfaction for me through the Solo VIP Club but this whole
story illustrates how the ethical lines have been just blurred so much that people
don’t even pay attention anymore.

Jonathan: Man, that’s funny. I thought that I was the only one who had a problem
with that. I’m glad to hear that I’m not. Just tell people what to do, it
doesn’t matter if you’ve done it, it’s all good. [laughter]

Igor: Yeah, it doesn’t matter if you’re fake. It’s not to say that every
single guru out there that you know is a hypocrite not all there is plenty of really
smart, highly ethical, really great people that helped a lot of people however,
about 90% of the so called gurus out there really don’t practice what they preach
which is why you have to be really, really careful about who you work with and you
have to check this person’s history before you give them any money.

Jonathan: Yeah. That’s one of the things I learned a valuable lesson not too long
ago where I got close to a “guru” and I thought that we had similar values only
to find out six months into a year engagement that I really didn’t care for the
fellow and I still had six months left and it was a torturous six months to finish
out my contract but I did it but I definitely learned a lesson about checking and
doing real deeper checking and asking better questions to make sure I was lined up
with the right person.

Igor: Not only that usually you can feel it, you can feel it in your bones when
you’re attempting to work with someone who is unethical. Like a lot of the times,
my gut will tell me who you should or should not work with and every time I go
against my gut, I pay the price.

Jonathan: Hmm.

Igor: So this guy cost me 15 grand, I had another guy from the U.K. which I don’t
seem to have much luck with the U.K. gurus these days, Jonathan.

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: Another guru took me for a ride for about 20 grand. Again another very famous
guy, you probably know him but it happens. So then I had another guy from America,
it was about $12,000 investment now he didn’t really take me for a ride but we
were not aligned. I didn’t even want to fulfill my end of the bargain. I didn’t
want to follow through on the contract. I didn’t want to follow through on what he
taught me. I just left it and wrote it off as a lesson to make better buying
decisions because I remember clearly making an extremely emotional misguided
decision which was nothing but me wanting to work with a mega-celebrity who actually
didn’t live up to my expectations.

Jonathan: I bet you had him on a pedestal. It’s hard to live up to those
expectations. So what are some tips you can give? First of all on figuring out
people’s ethics and then the second part which we touched on a little bit is the
alignment piece?

Igor: Well, first off, do your research. Second, listen to your gut. These are like
cliché advice, I know that. Now third, you really want to link arms with somebody
who has a proven track record, case studies, and not only that this is something I
tell people when I educate them about buying traffic, like go and seek out feedback
about the person and seek both positive and negative feedback because a lot of times
people only seek negative feedback and if they find some they immediately kind of
leave, they don’t want to work with that person and ignoring all the positive
feedback and sometimes there are people who just look for the positive feedback sort
of kind of reaffirm their decision they already made and soon as they find even a
tiny little bit of feedback they will jump in without checking negative feedback.
Here’s the thing though, anyone who is real will piss some people off like when
you’re speaking from your core when you’re teaching from your core, you will not
be everyone’s cup of tea. So that means that if that person is real, he probably
has lots of positive feedback and a bit of negative feedback. That’s the perfect
ratio to identifying the kind of coach, mentor, upline that you want to link arms
with because that means they are real. If all the feedback they’ve got is positive
and not a single negative thing is being said about them on the entire internet that
doesn’t make any sense. It means something ain’t right because again if you’re
real you’re going to alienate and piss people off. That’s for sure. Right in
fact there is a whole science behind repelling people off, just repelling people and
building a business around that which if you want to learn more about you can just
listen to the Ben Settle episode when Ben and I just kind of discussed that how to
really repel people and by doing so make more money. But that’s what I’m talking
about. That’s what I find to be the golden middle if you will. When there is a lot
of positive and a little bit of negative feedback which gives me personally the
confidence that this person is real and I can then go ahead and check out what
they’ve got.

Jonathan: Yeah, you’re giving me an idea here. I need to capture some of my
negative feedback. [laughter] And put that out there, front and center. [laughter]
Every time I get on a show with you, I’m taking notes, what can I do next?
You’re always giving me ideas. I appreciate that Igor. I get coaching while I’m
here co- hosting. [laughter]

Igor: No fair, man. No fair.

Jonathan: Oh man, so what else do you want to talk about ethics and what to watch
out for and really caution the List Builders on how to live better with the right
people?

Igor: Well, another thing to remember is that there can be a guru out there who
teaches something really well that they are doing something which really works for
them but it might not necessarily work for you. In other words, if you’re
following somebody who’s doing lots social media marketing for example and they
are young and vibrant and you’re like 60 years old and you’ve got low energy and
arthritis or something. Probably doing Facebook Live videos is not for you. You know
Facebook Live or posting on social media about the dream life etc is something that
young vibrant people do but it’s not something that an older person is necessarily
going to be effective at so for that person a different strategy like pay traffic
might be a better fit. You know what I mean? Like writing an email because like
that’s not about their lifestyle will probably be a much better fit for that
person because they have a rich life experience which they can use as email fodder.
One of the most interesting things about email marketing that I noticed in the
recent months is that a lot of times when I try to teach email marketing to young
folks and when I say young I mean younger than me so I’m 27 so I’m talking like
19, 20, 21, 22 especially because these people don’t have life experience yet and
often times they got nothing to write about simply because they have no perspective
on life. They still haven’t lived. Any great writer, any good writer usually has
lots of rich life experiences which really, really helps. So keep in mind as far as
strategy and as far as relevancy to your situation.

Jonathan: No kidding. So you’ve been using this Facebook Live videos, how has that
been going for you?

Igor: Well to be honest, I still haven’t been able to measure the effectiveness of
the thing but people seem to dig it and I get to chat with my audience in a very
cool way so I’m doing it. I’m doing it but I really don’t have any monetary
data. I still believe that anything you do at the end of the day it’s all about
sales so if you’re making sales with that thing, do it. By the way, I do apologize
if you can hear the baby. The coffee shop is really busy today. Unfortunately there
is a huge table here and the baby is going crazy. That’s one of the downsides of
working at coffee shop, Jonathan, you can’t do anything about other people coming
in, and having a good time because you’re the one that is basically who is weird,
who’s working.

Jonathan: What’s wrong with you? I think your claps when we synced up ruffled that
babies feathers.

Igor: Yeah, might have been. But so circling back, where was I before I got
distracted by the baby?

Jonathan: I don’t know, we were talking about monetary value.

Igor: Do you even listen to me?

Jonathan: No, not all.

Igor: Be honest with me, do you even listen to me?

Jonathan: I just gave you a big shout out about how I get free coaching. [laughter]
But you were talking about the monetary data things you do and really just relating
everything back to sales.

Igor: Oh yeah, basically any media you attempt, any strategy you attempt, it’s
always about are you making sales at the end of the day. That’s it so if I’m not
going to see any real measurable data which tells me that Facebook Live is
delivering X dollars per view or X dollars per like or something, I’m going to
drop it and I’m going to use my time more efficiently with a strategy that
actually produces monetary results.

Jonathan: Now, I want to circle back to being real and so you talk about being an
entrepreneur living the laptop lifestyle, working in coffee shops and I think that
baby is a perfect sign that you’re really ethically, really living this life.
[laughter] Like it or not.

Igor: Yeah, it’s not always a glamorous life. Often times it’s quite difficult
too. I remember my first trip abroad on a vacation to Czech Republic when I was an
internet marketer. I’m not sure how that happened but basically I was an
inexperienced traveler at the time and I didn’t realize that all throughout Europe
the power sockets, they are different than what we’ve got here in Israel.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: So when we came down, we unpacked in the hotel, I realized that I could not
charge my laptop. I was screwed basically. So spent half the day, going around
Prague looking for a new charger that would fit the local power sockets so that
sucked that sucked bad but that’s part of the List Building Lifestyle and having
to deal with crap like that which probably is better than dealing with a boss or
working on weekends or something.

Jonathan: Let me ask you something about that laptop List Building Lifestyle when
you go on vacation, are you ever really on vacation or do you always go back do
work?

Igor: The only time I’m really on vacation is when my wife insists. So when I
first went on vacation for the first couple of years, probably I’ve had four or
five vacations throughout that time, I was not really on vacation, I will be honest
with you. My mind was preoccupied with work at all times because at the time I was
also started hiring some employees to help me outsource a few things so I was always
thinking about managing them etc. Today, after I’ve built a solid team, I am able
to go on vacation and actually relax and check in once a day rather than have to
pretend I’m not working by the pool with my laptop.

Jonathan: [Laughter] That’s the other downside, right that’s it right there, is
that being this mobile entrepreneur, you have a laptop and internet everywhere and
so it is hard to unplug and that’s something that people get wrong. They think
that is glamorous and I’m on the other side of that, I think it sucks that
sometimes you can’t disconnect.

Igor: Yeah, well you see that’s why you got to love it. That’s why you got to
love this business. That’s why you got to love the whole process of advancing
yourself because I believe that internet marketing is just a long process of
evolution because the better you get at this the more you evolve as a human being so
as long as you’re committed to this lifelong process of development you don’t
really take it as work. It really becomes a second nature to you so you can’t help
but constantly try to develop, constantly try to improve, constantly try to serve,
constantly try to give, and constantly try to advance your business even if you’re
on vacation. Because that’s what you’re mind is preoccupied 99% of the time
besides eating, sleeping and pooping and having sex. For the most part that’s what
my mind is preoccupied with.

Jonathan: So Igor what do you have coming up for us next time?

Igor: Well, you know I was thinking the other day, Jonathan, like who can ask a
bunch of questions about succeeding from home, about succeeding with home-based
business if you’re a newbie and all of a sudden I just realized that there is no
better person to ask than someone who owns their own business opportunity. So I’ve
done that. I reached out to Joel Therien from Global Virtual Opportunities or GVO
for short who pretty much has been around for a good 15 or 16 years and I said hey
let me interview him and see what he thinks about what it really takes to become
successful from home if you’re just starting out. So we ended up having a really
long episode, I think it was like 30 or 40 minutes which is longer than we usually
do and the guy went nuts. He just no holds barred, like if you’re brand new in the
business then you will find this episode not only eye opening but most likely life
changing.

Jonathan: Wow. Excellent. That is a wrap for another episode of List Building
Lifestyle. We will be back with you next time.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to subscribe on iTunes
or Google. Play to never miss an episode because who knows just one conversion tactic
we share on the show might double your list and double your business. Download the
transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and
don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival
Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival . This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

This is the ThePodcastFactory.com.