My Journey From A Broke Immigrant To A Multimillionaire Email Marketer

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets. Few people who never had an email list understand the true importance of the true leverage of having one. In this episode, I’m giving a talk to a bunch of people who never had an email list, never thought about building one, and never truly realized the value of having a group of people. They can message with a push of a button, and they break it down exactly why everyone, even if they’re an offline business that seemingly doesn’t necessarily have anything, mass market to launch still needs to build an email list. I don’t care if you’re a cobbler or a baker or a lawyer, or an internet marketer or a coach or consultant, it doesn’t matter. You should be building an email list and you should be building an email list yesterday. This episode clearly explains why this is so important.

01:00

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process. This podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details and now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

01:46

So Igor, you are the highest paid email marketing out there? How did you get there? Oh, wow, that’s look, if I had to simplify this and give you like the nutshell. For me, it’s been about consistency more than anything else and continuously itching, you know, forward, you know, becoming a little bit better, a little bit fine tuning that thing every single day kind of getting a little better, a little better. And I still to this day, follow this process and mentality, I wasn’t a quest really. I grew up in an immigrant family. So I’m originally born and raised in Ukraine, but at some point things are really bad. I mean, they’re pretty bad now in Ukraine. At the time, they were just as bad, just no war, but pretty bad still. And my parents decided because we have a Jewish heritage, Jewish roots. Both my parents are Jewish. I’m Jewish, my brother’s Jewish, you know, they said, Okay, let’s go to Israel. Because it’s not like we had anything going on. But that was better than staying in Ukraine. So you can imagine like my dad, 42, my mom at the time, 39, dropped everything and just moved to Israel, we had about $1,000 in savings. I remember we brought these 12 big bags of stuff, like everything we had, even to a point where my mom brought toilet paper, like whatever we had left, he just took it. And the next 10 years proved to be extremely difficult. Israel in and of itself is a great country, it helps immigrants. There’s different programs, there’s different subsidies, they help you find a job, and they help you learn the language. But when you’re a 42 year old, frustrated Ukrainian guy like my dad was, who used to be somebody in Ukraine, he actually used to own a business in Ukraine, and he used to serve in the Red Army back in the Soviet Union. So he had connections, he had status. And when he came to Israel, all that shattered, like a glass that broke, you know, and he couldn’t really piece it together. So he started drinking more heavily. My mom, she was a housewife. Back in Ukraine, she had to go and get some, you know, a job, really, that didn’t require too much of a language skill or whatever. So obviously, that meant factory or cleaning or stuff like that. And six months after we came, my dad suffered a, it wasn’t really a heart attack, but there was something wrong with his heart. And then the Doctor ran some tests and said, hey, you gotta go into bypass immediately. And so he went into a double bypass. And basically, it took him out of the workforce. Like from that point forward, he could never find a job he couldn’t and jobs he did find usually meant, you know, a security guard sitting on a chair somewhere, but these were occasional jobs. And every now and again, every six to eight months, he would get fired. And then six months later, get rehired again. And so growing up, always short on money. Always been told, No, we don’t have money for this. We don’t have money for that. Living off of handouts from our relatives and friends. Pretty much borrowed money from anywhere, anyone we knew. And never my dad never paid anyone back, which I now realize what a dick move that was. But that was just the reality. And so when I was growing up, there was this message, especially in the Jewish family, right. So that was this message hammered into me. And it’s like, you have to grow up, you have to study well get good grades, you have to find a good job, you have to save us, you know, so they were like putting all their hopes on means but of me having an older brother, but he had his own issues like he actually ended up, you know, racking up a lot of debt way before 30. And, you know, having an accidental pregnancy, and then another one. And so he had lots of money issues and lots of money problems. And so when I was graduating high school, I was heavy into gaming. So I love playing video games online, first person shooters, and stuff like that. And I really didn’t want to go and get a job. Like I didn’t like the idea. And so I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, who was never an A student. I wasn’t a student, but he was like a C student at best. And I was studying for this exam. And I was really stressed out, right? And he’s like, his name is Max. He’s like you were why are you so stressed out? And I’m like, Well, I got this test coming up aerodynamics. And he’s like, so I was like, Well, yeah, you don’t care because you’re like a C student and whatever. He’s like, Yeah, but why do you care? I said, well, because I want to get a good grades and find a good job and, you know, do the whole thing. To which he said, don’t you know, the rich people aren’t the ones who get the best grades. What? I was like, Max, don’t bullshit me, right? You have no idea. It’s like, no, no, you don’t understand. It’s not me saying this. It’s this guy, Robert Kiyosaki, who wrote this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you know, a student’s work for the government sees students work for, you know, B students, and B students or whatever. He said something stuff like that. I basically I hear that and I’m like, Okay, I gotta read this book. And so I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, again, just before graduation, and it flips the script, completely, like it makes me makes me realize that you can do better than a job, that a job is not a way to be rich or become rich. And that if you want to be rich, you got to start asking different questions. And this book suggests two things Either you go into real estate, which is how Kiyosaki, you know, apparently, in that book, he talks about real estate, mostly, although he got too rich through manufacturing and doing some other stuff selling wallets, I think. He says, if you don’t have a business, idea, capital, or anything, you should go into MLM, which is exactly where I went. And I found this Online MLM at $10 a month, it’s called the GDI global domains International. And if you refer to somebody and they refer somebody, and they refer somebody, you know, everyone makes passive income. So I failed miserably with MLM. I recruited my mom, who had no idea because I just used her credit card. And my best friend, Max, the guy who said I should read the book. And you know, he canceled the next day. And so I was really upset with him about that for a while. But he, I, I really, I sucked at MLM. But it’s through trying to promote my MLM business. I learned lots of digital marketing techniques. It’s back from 2008-2009. So there was Myspace, Facebook was just coming out, YouTube was still a relatively small thing before Google bought them. And I was doing everything: doing the social media bit, uploading videos, doing a lot of stuff. And it is in my pursuit of success in MLM that never came. I kept on bumping into this one thing everywhere, you know, either they were saying build the list, or the headless and they were mailing lists, and I was on the lists, buying the stuff they were mailing. And so eventually, the penny dropped after a couple of years of chasing shiny objects, and I said, Okay, well, it seems like anyone who’s anything, anyone who’s achieved anything online, they have an email list, so I better double down on that. Do you know what Clickbank is due to listeners? No, no, so Clickbank is like an online marketplace, where you can find products you can promote, and when you promote them, you get paid a commission for every sale that takes place. So there could be a product that costs 100 bucks, maybe a supplement, maybe a piece of software could be a coaching program, I mean, and could be anything really. And then if somebody buys that through my link, then I get the commission it could be as little as 30% as high as 90%. So there was a point in time when I just started building my list and I really consistently mailed that list every single day. I’ve made my first commission check of about 140 something dollars now in Israel you know, I took that check for about three weeks to arrive from Boise I Of course, but in Israel, that’s about maybe like a week’s worth of job income. Right? So to see that amount of money appear magically in my inbox, like, and then, you know, when I saw that, first off, I was amazed and shocked that finally there’s some real money coming out of this thing. I was still way down in terms of what I invested time and money versus what I made at that point. But at least I had proof of concept that it worked. So the first thing I’ve done is I grabbed that check. I went to my parents’ house, and I waved in front of my dad like this. And it’s like, hey, dead, real internet money from magical internet, you know, from that. So from that day, he kind of stopped getting on my case, and he even started supporting me, you know, he would allow me to use his credit card to sign up for email autoresponders and like he would actually just, you know, not get in my way anymore. Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at the listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files and traffic. Go to www.igorsbook.com. Now to claim your free package.