Your curiosity can open a million doors for you just like it did for Igor. Tune in to learn about his journey that sparked from his curiosity for entrepreneurship and online marketing, his challenges and moments of doubts, and little successes that accumulated into a thriving million dollar business.
[00:00] The podcast dives deep into Igor’s journey that started with mere curiosity but gave him a million dollar business.
[01:00] Do you like Igor’s AI-generated voice?
- Leave your feedback at igor.top/voice.
[02:09] A brief look into Igor’s life as an immigrant:
- I immigrated from Ukraine to Israel with my parents when I was about twelve years old.
- And the thing that happens to you when you immigrate, when you’re an immigrant boy is you get a taste of a different life.
- So in Ukraine, my dad, he was doing well. He was doing some he was a small business owner. Before that, he was an army officer in the Red Army, the Soviet Union.
- And in Israel, we became lower than low.
- My dad couldn’t get a job. My mom couldn’t get a job. Neither one of them spoke the language.
- When I later on grew up, I had to get jobs like housekeeping, washing dishes, security guard at a chemical facility where we literally breathe toxic fumes every day and get paid a minimum wage.
[04:00] How to be an entrepreneur?
- I never had a sales background. I was never entrepreneurial. I didn’t have the creativity required to become independent. And my thinking was always very mathematical and very pragmatic.
- The common belief is to be an entrepreneur and to be a great salesperson, you have to be good with people. And I had huge anxiety about that.
[05:04] What made Igor quit the army?
- I got to meet a bunch of these soldiers and the people who graduated their army service, people who graduated their academy service.
- None of them were happy. None of them were rich. None of them had a life. There were slaves to a well paying job, and most of them described their job as a golden cage.
- I was frustrated and then a friend of mine said, hey, there’s this guy, Robert Kiyosaki, and he says that most rich people aren’t really educated. They didn’t go to school, and they didn’t wait until they’re 40 years old to be rich.
- That book shifted my mindset from a belief of I can never be rich because I was born into a poor family, because I’m an immigrant boy, and because whatever other excuse I had at the time to, oh, you can actually become rich by having habits or implementing habits that the rich people have.
- And from that point forward, I got obsessed with the idea of becoming my own boss and becoming rich because I figured that ten years from now I’ll be just as miserable as these other guys. So there’s no point in going in that direction.
[06:53] Igor started his journey with network marketing:
- I didn’t even know what network marketing was. I’m only 18 or 19 years old at the time.
- I google it and I see the pyramid. The guy at the top, two guys, two guys, three guys, five guys, and all of a sudden you’ve got like, a big team that’s making you passive income.
- I looked up this network marketing company online called Global Domains International, where I joined for $10 a month. And if I refer somebody, I’ll get a dollar, and if they refer to other people, I get $2 from that. And then it compounds, and all of a sudden you can be making $3,000 a month.
- Needless to say, just like in this company and two other companies I joined, I never made anything. But it did allow me to get into the whole industry of online marketing, where I discovered the concept of affiliate marketing, which is a lot like MLM, where you refer people to a product someone else has created.
[08:30] Igor’s initial affiliate marketing strategy:
- I built myself like a review blog. But nothing really worked.
- For about eight months of non-stop daily effort in affiliate marketing, I couldn’t really get any traction whatsoever. I got maybe one or two conversions in those eight months.
[09:11] The tipping point in Igor’s online career:
- In every person’s journey, there’s this tipping point. It’s either you make something out of yourself or life makes you.
- For me, going back was not an option. I didn’t have anything to go back to. I didn’t have anything to fall back on. And not to mention admitting defeat at this point in my life would mean total, complete embarrassment.
- And I said, you know what, I need to do something different. I need to change my approach. I need to figure out what exactly is going on here.
[10:00] Copy the successful people:
- I started looking at all the people who were what we now refer to as super affiliates.
- I started funnel hacking them. Now, if you’re not familiar with the term, funnel hacking means going to their website, consuming their content, subscribing to their videos, getting on their email list, whatever you have to do to just find out what are they doing, how are they selling products?
- I discovered that not a single super affiliate, they never subscribed to one particular thing.
- They drove traffic through banner ads, others swore by AdWords.
[10:52] Importance of building an email list:
- There was one thing that was always common between all of the super affiliates and that was they all had an email list.
- They all built an email list of targeted prospects. So even if they didn’t sell you something right away, even if you went on their website, they didn’t necessarily shove a pitch down your throat, but it would still say, you know what, give me your email address and I’ll send you this free ebook.
- If I wanted to become a super affiliate, I needed to build an email list and then I needed to mail my list in order to make money. So that’s how I got into list building.
- And that’s what led to me eventually becoming what we again now refer to as super affiliate. Making as much as $100,000 in a single promotion with one product in a span of just seven days, promoting the product to my list.
[12:54] Igor’s book on email marketing:
- Visit www.igorsbook.com to learn more.