The Rise of The Email Marketer

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets. I get asked a lot, how did I get started in this industry? Because this is not an obvious career choice, if you know what I mean. It’s not like you go to a kindergarten, they ask you, what do you want to be? And somebody says, I want to be an astronaut. Somebody else says, I want to be a fireman. And, you know, Igor says, I want to be an email marketer and an affiliate marketer. In fact, when I went to school, this didn’t even exist. So how did I even get started in this industry? How did I discover the industry? And what was the driving force behind figuring this out? Because this took a lot of figuring out this industry, this business took me years, years of actually trying to figure it out. There was no manual, there was no textbook, there was no school, there was no education, there was no faculty. There was no university. There was no there was nothing, there was literally nothing, and everything was guesswork. Sure. There were people who said they wanted to help and sold me courses. But we all know how that can go sometimes. For the most part, it was all trial and error. So it required massive amounts of motivation, to overcome the obstacles and not to want to just throw in the towel. So in this episode, I’m answering the question, How did I even get into this whole affiliate marketing slash email marketing slash INFO marketing gig, and what drove me to be so persistent about succeeding, that all the challenges all the bumps in the road all the walls, I hit up against, none of them stopped me. So enjoy.

01:50

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.

02:35

Hey, everyone, this is David Dekel and today I have a very, very, very special guest. In fact, probably from all of the people who I’ve met online, this person has had the most influence on me and indirectly has been, and actually very directly has also been responsible for basically all of my success, because without the guests that you’re about to meet right now, without meeting him, I think my career and my trajectory would have been very, very different. And he’s the one who helped me go from just to give you an idea, I wasn’t even at broke, I was actually below broke, I was over $40,000 in debt. And when I met the person that you’re about to meet right now, he took me from being over $40,000 in debt to having my very first $3,000 month after just about a month of meeting him. And from there, it just exploded by my fourth month. I was already making $18,000 online. And that highest month that first year was over $27,000. So I think without further ado, let me introduce to you my good friend at this point. And my mentor, my personal coach, Igor Kheifets. Igor, how’re you doing?

03:50

I’m doing great, man. I’m excited. And you know, it doesn’t get old. Like I keep hearing you say that I’m directly responsible or indirectly responsible for success. And every single time, I’m so flattered, thank you so much. But I have to give credit where the credit is due. You were a beast, you were like you, if there’s one quality, you had that tops, pretty much every other student I’ve ever had was it you were a master implementer you could just sit down and do as told, which was, you know, separated you by miles from everybody else I worked with. So my head is off to you as well for being such an amazing and amazing, you know, an amazingly easy case study to create, you know,

04:28

right, right. Yeah. And again, I’m so grateful to be able to kind of have that first initial introduction. And actually, the story goes deeper. Now, we’re not gonna get into that, but I actually met Igor a year before that. And I was about to join and I said no, because I thought that the amount of like results that he was getting was just impossible to get like it was beyond my scope of what’s possible even and I said no, and if there was ever, ever a mistake I’ve made in life and in business. That was it right? Inherited, I said no, to actually being coached by this person, because I would have been so far ahead now than I am. I mean today, I mean by at least about a year. Further ahead. A lot of people think that we all do this naturally. And we’re all kind of natural born marketers, and we’re just born with these skills. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I know, I certainly didn’t have those skills. And you certainly didn’t start, you know, was born with marketing skills. So how did you get started in the industry, tell us about the time that you weren’t involved at all with internet marketing, how did that all get started all the way to today?

05:34

I emigrated from Ukraine to Israel with my parents when I was about 12 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 was doing well, he was doing some, you know, he was a small business owner, before that he was an Army officer in the Red Army, the Soviet Union, but that’s kind of fell apart, as you know. So we got used to living or probably like a middle class family, then we moved to Israel. And in Israel, we became, like, we were like, lower than low, right? We were like, the pawns of society, my dad couldn’t get a job, and my mom couldn’t get a job. Neither one of them spoke the language, which was very difficult. I myself, when I later on grew up had to get into jobs, like housekeeping, you know, cleaning toilets, and stuff, boss boy and burger cane, and washing dishes, security guard at a chemical facility where we literally like breathe toxic fumes every day, you know, and get paid a minimum wage. So you know, we got to taste a really crappy life where money was always an issue. And my dad, you know, he couldn’t deal with it like him going from, you know, doing well. And being a provider to being basically a nobody, and not having the ability to provide anymore, I sort of realized that it was up to me to become the provider eventually. And that was sort of the message that was conveyed to me between the lines from my mom from my dad. So they sent me to this Military Academy, which was in a different city. So I had to take a bus for 45 minutes every day in each direction. And in that Military Academy, I was basically, they bred me to be like a junior engineer in electronics, right? So I was never, I never had a sales background. I was never entrepreneurial.

07:27

I didn’t have the creativity required, you know, to become independent. And my thinking was always very mathematical and very pragmatic. So you know, when you say, David, that, you know, we don’t come into this industry with a bunch of skill sets that make us natural at it, you’re absolutely correct, because I was probably the opposite. Because to be, you know, the common belief is to be an entrepreneur, and to be a great salesperson, you have to be good with people, for example, and I had huge anxiety with that, like, I was very, very bad with people, I was specifically bad with girls, which you know, only added to my whole social anxiety, I didn’t have many friends, I used to stay home a lot and play video games, that would be my, my sanctuary, if you will. So eventually, though, you know, after going through this Military Academy, where the messages study hard, and if you study hard enough, eventually, after you’re done with the army service, which was three years on top of your high school years, you’d get snatched into a really good job, a job that pays you well, that gets your company, cell phone, the company, car, company, vacation once a year, some allowance for food, and whatever, in closing, whatever. All right. And so I genuinely believe that until I actually started the project, where I would go during the summer between the 11th and 12th grade, I would visit this military base every day to conduct a project and one of the planes and I got to meet the bunch of the soldiers and people who graduated their army service people who’ve graduated their academy service. And guess what, none of them were happy. None of them were rich, none of them had a life. Most of them still lived with their parents at the age of 27, or 26, or 29. And they were like saving up to buy a beat up, you know, Chevy Cruze or something like that. The life was not really the glamorous life that was promised. And a handful, maybe 1% of all of these people did get snatched up into Intel, or aim docks, which are big companies where they got, you know, like a $5,000 US per month salary, accompany current accompany cell phone, but even those guys, were not happy, you know, because they could get a call in the middle of the night and they had to rush to the base and, you know, fix something or, you know, so they were not Masters of the Universe. They were slaves to a well-paying job and most of them describe their job as a golden cage. And again, those were like the super minority, because most people still struggle. So looking at that I was kind of frustrated. A friend of mine said, hey, you know, if you’re really thinking of getting rich, you really, you’re doing it wrong, you know the wrong way. I’m like, what do we mean? The minute it’s clear, you have to study hard. And that’s how you make money towards you know, when you’re 40 years old, you can be the CEO. Then he says, No, you have it completely wrong. There’s this guy, Robert Kiyosaki, who wrote a book about it. And he says that, you know, most rich people aren’t really educated, they didn’t go to school. And they did wait until they’re four years old to be rich. And this comes from my friend who’s a deadbeat, literally dead into somebody who did not, who dropped out of high school, who was smoking pot, who didn’t have anything going on for them in life. And it made me so angry, I was like, you know what, show me the book. So we went to his place, he showed me Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and I read the cover, I read the back cover, I took it home, and I read it in one breath, like literally three hours later, I was done with it. And that book, shifts my mindset from, from, 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, you know, 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 10 years from now, I’ll be just as miserable as these other guys. So there’s no point in going in that direction. So from that book, that book said, Look, if you don’t have any business ideas, if you don’t have any business capital, if you don’t have a good credit score, and don’t have anywhere that you can get some money from, you should get into MLM you should get into network marketing, because that’s where you get to learn some, some skills, you know, with some, some human resource for resourcefulness and, and selling that stuff. So I didn’t even know what network marketing was, I’m only 18 or 19 years old at the time. So I Google it, and I see the pyramid, right. So the top two guys, two guys, two, or three guys, five guys. And all of a sudden, you’ve got like a big team, that’s making you passive income. I’m like, Wow, that’s so much better than having a job. And so I looked up this network, network marketing company online, called Global domains, or national, where I can join for 10 bucks a month. And if I refer somebody, I’ll get $1. And if they refer to other people, you know, 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 that, 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. But a lot of times it’s not a physical product, it’s actually a digital product. And this product pays way better. And your results do not depend on whether the person you referred to actually uses the product or not. For example, if we’re talking about network marketing, and we’re selling lotions and potions, if the person is not using the lotion and potion and is not renewing next month, you’re not getting paid. But in affiliate marketing, you can sell a course for $1,000 Someone else’s course, someone else’s program, someone else’s software, and get half the money and walk away with $500 Regardless of what the other person does, or you know when that software uses that software at all. And that was a much better proposition. And I found myself buying products through other people’s links a lot, you know, most of the time, and I said, you know what, maybe I’ll give this affiliate marketing thing a shot. So I got really deep into that. And I, you know, even built my myself like a review blog. And, you know, but nothing really worked for about eight months of nonstop daily effort and affiliate marketing, I couldn’t really get any traction whatsoever. I got, you know, trickles of traffic, I got maybe one or two conversions in those eight months. But if you took all the money I’ve made and all the time that I invested and divide, you know, you know, to find out what was my average earning per hour, I was probably getting paid maybe 1/10 of what the average McDonald’s employee is getting paid. So the return on that was just, just pathetic. And that was that was, you know, every, like in every person’s journey, there’s this tipping point. It’s either you make something out of yourself or life makes you right. So I think that was the moment and that is the point where I could have given up which is what most people do. Usually they kind of try try try try, try, fail, fail fail. They hit this point, they’d be like, you know what, I’m wasting my time I’m done with it. And they leave. Now for me going back was not an option. Remember, I didn’t have anything to go back to and I didn’t have anything to fall back on. And not to mention admitting defeat at this point in my Life would mean,

15:02

like total complete embarrassment in front of my parents in front of my girlfriend or one of my best friends. And, you know, 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. So I started looking at all the people who were what we now refer to as super affiliates. So it’s the people who are making crazy amounts of money with affiliate marketing. It’s the people who dominate affiliate leaderboards. Right. And I would look at those affiliate leaderboards. And anytime I would see a name there. And most of the time, as you know, David, it’s the same people, right? It’s just, you know, they’re always like the same people. 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, you know, getting on their email list, whatever you have to do just find out what they are doing? How are they selling products? And you know, what I’ve discovered, I’ve discovered that not a single one, super affiliate, or, you know, if you take them as a group, like they never, they never subscribe to one particular thing. You know, some super affiliates, they drove traffic through banner ads, others swore by AdWords, other people said that they’re getting you know, backlink traffic, other people have built JV networks, like there’s like everybody uses a different strategy. But there was one thing that was always common between all of them. And I always ended up seeing that. And that was the old email list. They all built email lists of targeted prospects. So even if they didn’t sell you something right away, even if you went to their website, you know, they didn’t necessarily like to 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 or give me an email address. I’ll show you the three step video series on how to, you know, build your website. And after Funnel Hacking, hacking, most of them I realized my inbox was flooded with emails with all kinds of different offers. And then I noticed something even more interesting than that is that the launch day had some kind of product. Like say I remember in particular the den Brock’s deadbeat super affiliate, which was just launching the time. All of a sudden, you see like 12 Different people all mailing you about that product, every single one of them. And you know some of them just say going by this right now others are saying a buy this and get a bonus. Others are saying no, if you buy this product right now, I’ll give you a free ticket to my seminar that’s happening later this year. But they’re all mailing. They’re all like, for the next few days, there is a mailing mailing mailing. And guess what? I’m looking at the leaderboards at the same time. And all of these names that people are mailing are on those leaderboards. And I’m sure they’re competing against each other. Somebody’s like on the spot number five, and somebody in the spot number one, then they switch whatever. But it was obvious to me that 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 for me to me eventually becoming a what we again now referred 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

18:28

my list. That’s incredible. Man, I’m so glad you discovered that because that actually changed my life. So thank you for that research. That was amazing. The first thing is, don’t quit, you know, eager, as you’ve seen, had many, many opportunities to quit. After several months of not being able to produce any kind of results with whatever else you were doing there, you know, making like just a few conversions here and there. You don’t quit. That’s the first thing you need to kind of put in your head if you really want to make it in this industry, because it doesn’t break when the breakthrough happens, it’s going to happen in a major way. It certainly did for me certainly did for I mean, Igor, you can probably confirm that too. Once you find something that works just all of a sudden, just all this, all these results are happening. And you’re like, well, where were all these results like a week ago or two weeks ago, or a month ago. So definitely that’s the first thing. Second thing is you got to build your email list that is so important. I mean, I probably attribute if not 90 Over 90% of my results today to just being on the email list. Because if I wasn’t building that, essentially what you’re doing if you don’t have an email list is you’re starting from zero every single day. Isn’t that right? You’re

19:42

absolutely correct. What happens is when you drive traffic of any kind, I don’t care what your traffic source right now is like say you have a blog? Say you have a YouTube channel. I don’t care if you got clicks coming to your website if you’re not building your list, meaning that if you’re not capturing those as a tourist in the form of email addresses, you’re simply allowing those visitors to leave, it’s kind of like pouring water into a bucket with a bunch of holes in the bucket. So every time you pour some water, it just comes out the other way. Right? So you need to seal all these holes. So when you pour some water in, you actually have something in it. So every day, instead of starting from scratch, you’re sort of like building your house brick by brick. And after a while after putting the bricks all of a sudden you realize, oh, my, wow, I have a big house. I don’t have to start from scratch anymore. Like, say, David, you’ve got a huge list at this point. And if God forbid, right, if something happens, and somebody breaks into your house, okay, they take away your laptop, they burn your house down, they delete all your websites from the internet. And like they do that, but they leave your list intact, or you have a backup of your list saved in the safety deposit box in your bank. You can literally take those records, put them into an email responder software, an email, and simply email your list because there’s always a relation to already a relationship there. They like you, they trust you. They know who you are, you don’t need to prove that yourself all over again. Right? And you can just say, Hey, guys, my house broke down, my house burned down. I got mugged. And I needed some new furniture. Right? So for that reason, I’m offering three slots for a private coaching program. I’m going to teach you something that these people want to learn. And I’m charging this much. And the first three takers, you know, that’s why I’m doing it. Because I need to buy some furniture, let’s go here’s a page, here the link, here’s my PayPal account, whatever. And that’s literally how simple it is. And just it’s the ultimate unfair advantage you can ever have in your business.

21:49

Right? Right. And it’s it again, with that without the list, I’d be nowhere near where I am today. In fact, probably not even 10% of where I am today. Because just a recent promotion that I’ve actually done with one of your programs, Igor, I literally sent four emails for emails, that’s it, just four emails over three days. The last day, I had to send two emails just because the promotion was me. So I had to remind the subscriber that hey, we’re done with this promo. So if you gotta hop in, hop in, if not, then this has gone forever. And literally, that promotion has netted me most close to multiple, five figures now, as far as you know, conversions and everything else. So that’s just to show you and I didn’t talk to a single person, I didn’t pick up the phone, I didn’t walk to a hotel with a pitch book and sit down with people and do all that stuff. You don’t need any of that. As long as you have an email list just for reference points, guys. He showed me on the screen live his earnings for a single month, a single month was just his last 30 days or so that he was making. And that was more than I was making an entire year with my job and some. So to see that it’s almost like imagining you’re looking at your window and you see like a unicorn flying and you’re like, what was that? Like? You know, I can’t believe I didn’t just see that I did, it was way outside of my reality, I just could not believe that something like that was even possible. So that’s

23:22

exactly my point. Because when you discover for yourself, and when you for the very first time in your own life, make more than a single day of literally just sending out an email or to your email subscribers, then you are currently or used to make in a month working a really hard job like say construction jobs or you know, maybe you’re a clerk at an office or at a bank or maybe you’re selling insurance on the phone. It’s like, you know, all day long you have to smile and dial, right? When you see that when you discover that, wow, I can I can create so much leverage with one email and I can have money flowing to me rather than me chasing other people trying to give me money, rather than me busting my back to earn just as much and work with my body instead of my you know my mind for a little bit. When you see that at first, it seems very, very unrealistic to you. But it is only those people that I’ve ever worked with that were able to fully embrace this idea that yes, you now can create leverage thanks to the technology that exists. Yes, you can have people who never met you and never spoke to you before and don’t even know who you are where you live, send you $500 $1,000 Even $2,000 at a time. Yes there are products out there that payout crazy high commissions where the product creator does all the work and you will literally walk away with the money from the sale the moment the sale occurs without having to worry about anything at all. When you see all these things what I only asked you to do is delay the skepticism. Okay, don’t even believe it yet, but just laid for a few minutes. So we have an opportunity to show you how exactly the shoe and exactly how it can and will work for you seriously, because the only difference that I’m seeing between people who go from complete zero to owning Ferraris, and people who are starting the exact same position of zero and to remain zero for the next, you know, five years trying to build an online business is that the people who end up buying Ferraris, they have this audacity, believing that they can like they are able to say, You know what, why not me? If that person is successful, why not me? So you really can truly need to feel that this can work for you, in order for it to actually work just like Henry Ford once said, he thinks he can and he would things he can’t are both usually right. So please be the one believing that you can, so we can help you achieve very similar results because neither I nor David started out with the skill sets built in. We didn’t have a huge budget. I’m actually not a native English speaker, I only improve my English over time. Okay, and neither one of us was like an award winning copyright or something like that. We were not, we barely can spell like we actually trust you know, a Grammarly and an on our Google Chrome to do that for us. And we never really deviated from our lifestyles like David. And I come from very simple backgrounds. Family oriented, you know, we don’t like to own crazy expensive cars or live in big mansions or live in LA and hang out with celebrities who are literally the most average people you’ll ever meet. So I want you to see and understand and to truly recognize the fact that it doesn’t matter if you start out from the dumps. It doesn’t matter if you live in a trailer right now. It doesn’t matter if you live in a two bedroom condo, in a you know in Manhattan, it really doesn’t matter where you are, who you are, you can change your life literally starting from today, so don’t look back on where you’ve been. Let’s focus on where you can be in the next 3060 90 days. 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 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 booklets go to www.igorsbook.com. Now to claim your free package