Lies about eMail marketing

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Jonathan: This is episode number 1 of The List-Building Lifestyle. I’ve got the master list-builder himself, Igor Kheifets. What’s up, brother?

Igor: What’s up, Jonathan. Excited, man, excited! We’re talking about some extremely important stuff today.

Jonathan: Yeah, what have you got for us?

Igor: Well, we’re going to be talking about relationships, and not the kind that gets you in trouble with the ladies, but more so the kind that will result or not result in a bunch of sales coming into your PayPal account or your merchant account. Specifically we’re talking about the relationship you have with your list and how it is, my friend, just a bunch of bull crap.

Jonathan: Oh, my. You don’t need a relationship with your list? Is that what you’re saying to me?

Igor: Uh, yes. In fact, I believe you should treat your list kind of like your baby sister. Let me explain.
You see, a lot of people what they do is they try to serve their list before the list gives them money. So they believe because they’ve been taught by the gurus that they’re supposed to give a lot of value for free and they’re like supposed to give their best stuff, and then because they do so their list, their subscribers are going to just say ‘Hmm…look at this fellow! – Or this lady! They’re amazing. They’re giving me all this free value. I should reward them by buying something from them.’

Jonathan: Mhm…yikes.

Igor: You know, we’re laughing because, you know, I spent about 8 months building a list doing that hoping that one day the list is going to repay me back. And the reality of it – I didn’t make a dime.
In fact, not only did I produce like tons of unique content, not only did I like record video tutorials teaching how to build squeeze pages and teaching them how to create their own products doing all…basically giving them all that stuff I was learning from the paid products. Alright? I was just giving…

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: …All that stuff for free, and it resulted in absolutely zero sales and zero activity. In fact, I had more people complaining to me telling me I’m a spammer for some weird, you know, reason than actually giving me any money.
And, you know, as you probably – and I’m sure you’re pretty much, you know, followed the same route at some point – but when I’m emailed my list with a pitch after emailing so much with all the good stuff, with all the free stuff that I believed that they wanted from me, you know, the response I got was ridiculous.
First there nobody bought anything, and of course, you know, people also complained how dare I, you know, pitch to my list.

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s right. They have pitchforks and torches and they’re ready to hang you.

Igor: Exactly, like they went on a witch hunt and basically I started losing subscribers very fast. So it turns out I was attracting a crowd of freebie-seekers. Can you believe that, Jonathan? [03.00] It’s just…

Jonathan: Shocking.

Igor: Shocking, right? And then now that I would tell….no, now I’m really sarcastic about it, but, you know, back in the day it really made sense, because that’s what I was told to do. And if I pick up, you know, if I just randomly pick up like three books off Amazon about list-building and email marketing, I’d…you know, they still teach this crap, and I can’t believe it.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: And so this is why I’m standing up and I’m saying that you should not give your list value. You should not give freebies…

Jonathan: Whoa…

Igor: Yes, controversial, right? You should not give your list any freebies or any gifts, and instead what you want to do is you want to condition your list to want to buy your product.
And I’ll even take that one step further – you want to condition your list to attach, quote-unquote, “good behavior” to buying stuff.
So the definition of a great, good-behaving list is a list that buys your stuff. Okay?

Jonathan: Alright. But I want to…look, I want to push back a little bit and it’s because I like you, and I want our listeners to know a little bit more about you, but I think that you’re stretching it.
Maybe I’m wrong – correct me if I’m wrong – I feel like you’re stretching it when you’re saying “Don’t provide value,” because if it’s entertainment or something that’s going to help their business, then isn’t it value?

Igor: Well, that’s a great question and thank you for pulling me back a little bit.
When I say “Don’t give your list value,” I mean ‘value’ in the sense that we’ve been taught by the gurus, if you will, alright, by all these so-called experts and wolves in sheep’s clothing basically who’d tell you “Look, just write an e-book or get a PLR e-book or something and send them the e-book for free. They’re going to love you, because you’re giving them content” – and they won’t, and you should not do that.
Instead, you should give them a different type of value – and thank you, Jonathan, for helping me clear that up – and that value should show up in a form of information in a trimmed down version and entertainment.
So, you know, the first time I learned this was from our mutual friend, Ben Settle, and he attributes to have learned this from Ken McCarthy, the…

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: …The founding father of internet marketing, basically the first guy ever to be making money from the internet before eth internet was actually considered to be the internet.
And so, if you look at our society as a whole, we are consuming information now in a form of entertainment. Think about it.
You know, let’s take Oprah – Oprah built a multi-billion dollar business with her show and investments and stuff like that. And she could literally make people rich by getting them on the show. It’s like, you know…

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: …In case you didn’t know, Robert Kiyosaki – you know, Oprah made Robert Kiyosaki, because Robert Kiyosaki, believe it or not, you know, today he’s a best-selling author and everything, but he used to struggle to publish the book, the Rich Dad Poor Dad.
When he wrote it nobody wanted to publish it. In fact, 23 publishers turned the guy down, okay? And, you know, somehow the book [06.00], you know, he self-published it, but it wasn’t a great success obviously, but somehow the book ended up on Oprah’s table. It just came across her desk. Maybe one her employees picked it up, I don’t know, but she saw the book and she called up Robert, well, one of her assistants obviously called him up.
They got him, you know, they flew him from Australia [where] I believe he was at the time, he was on vacation, and they got him on the show. And so lights went off and cameras rolling.
And an hour later lights go off, Oprah turns to Robert Kiyosaki and she says “You’re welcome, honey. I just sold a million copies of your book.”

Jonathan: Wow.

Igor: Now, if you really think about it, the whole show was a pitch. It was just talking about what the book can do for you in a benefit-oriented forum as well as some misconceptions about the way people treat money and investments, right. But, you know, the audience ate it up and they loved it, and a lot of people because of that show bought the book and improved their lives and it was also done [as] a form of TV entertainment. Right?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: So that’s what I’m talking about, and that’s how we consume information today all the time.
Nobody wants to sit through a 3-hour lecture on squeeze pages. Nobody wants to sit through a 2-day seminar giving you hard content on how to write the perfect headline. People are just too bored for that.
You know, they’re so consumed with their day-to-day stuff and all the crap that hits them every day, all the advertising messages, all the information that they can consume in a…in a single click like that, because everything is instant now.
So, you know, the stream of information hitting you right in the face since the moment you wake up is insane.
Therefore, your information or the value you put out to your list on a daily basis mind you should be very easy to consume and entertaining, because then by the time the client finished reading your email they feel like they’ve learned something new. They feel like they didn’t waste their time for nothing, and they’re more open to checking out your product and buying it, because you delivered the message in a way that’s easy to understand and entertaining. Right?
That is why, you know, sometimes you can have two different teachers teaching the exact same thing, but one will do a great job and his stuff will stick with the students while the other one, although much more qualified, right, and much more accomplished and just has a much wider knowledge of the subject will still fail to deliver the message to the students and the pupils, because he just doesn’t know how to deliver the message.
Therefore, your job is to focus on the way to deliver that message very day and not so much on the hard teaching and the content and the ‘do this/do that’ sort of approach the way most people do and the way I see most people do today. And, you know, anytime I see anyone email their list like that, I can just say immediately that that person is not making much money with their list.

Jonathan: And they’re broke, right? So, Igor, let me ask you this – why do you think then if it’s not working that the gurus keep teaching this [09.00] whole pushing the free line and giving the free, free, free? Why are they still saying that?

Igor: I’ll tell you why, Jonathan. And that’s an awesome question. You see, the answer to that question lies within sex – okay?

Jonathan: Alright.

Igor: And…bear with me for just a sec and I hope we don’t have any sort of closedminded folks listening. Remember, if you’re closedminded, don’t listen to our show.
You see, most people, men and women, stop learning about sex at about the age of 17-18 maybe, maybe 19. That’s pretty much it. They live the rest of their life thinking the same things about sex as they learned, you know, 20, 40, 60 years ago – depending on whether they of course have sex when they’re 80 – but…
But, you know, the point is that most people learn a little bit about sex when they just get curious and then they just stay on the same level of awareness about it although there’s a while world of sexual bliss that you can explore with your wife, with your spouse, with your partner, with your husband, which I believe we owe it to ourselves and our sexual partners to explore.
So now, you know, let’s stop right here and I’ll take you away from sex and let’s get back to list-building and email marketing.
So most, quote-unquote, “gurus” stop leaning about list-building, stop learning about email marketing the moment they start it. So they hear someone else and just republish or feedback misleading information. They pick it up and they do the same thing. And then the people they feed it to, pick it up and do the same thing again and again. So all it does, it sends the entire industry back to the Stone Age, you know, when it comes to their understanding of list-building and email marketing.
Now the fact of the matter is, giving that value and, you know, hard content, if you will, to the list used to work when guys like Ken McCarthy started online, but it’s been at least a decade since we have transitioned as a species from being curious and knowledge-hungry to being entertainment-hungry.
You know, how this famous song – I think it was Robbie Williams who sings it – “Let me…entertain you…” right? That is very true. That is very true about our society and day.

Jonathan: Yeah, man. It’s…it’s definitely…it’s definitely different than what they’re telling you and I like that angel that they just stopped learning. It reminds me of the Warrior Forum a little bit where everybody’s selling the same product over and over again.
So then can you speak a little bit too…why people do not value free information?

Igor: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, it really comes down to how much do you sacrifice to get it, because things we don’t sacrifice for to get, we never value. I mean, think about it, the definition of happiness is, I mean, happiness cannot be defined to this day and the reason is because happiness isn’t a state. Happiness [12.00] is understanding of how you used to be happy, how you used to be happy in the past.
Think about it. If you’ve been, if you’re happy right now, let’s say you’re making great money and you have a great spouse and your kids are healthy and everything is going well for you – but you still find thigs to bitch about, right? You’re still not quite happy, and that’s like universal. Doesn’t matter if you make a billion dollars or ten dollars or if you’re fit or if you’re fat, doesn’t matter.
Now, thin about it this way. Let’s just say you have a healthy child and all of a sudden your child gets some sort of a major dead dangerous disease, God forbid, right. All of a sudden you realize how happy you were, right, just yesterday when the child was healthy. So, you know, we’re not able to value things we don’t necessarily lose, right, so we only value things we lose.
Therefore, we will only value the information we get if we had to sacrifice something to get it, and in my own life here’s a great example of how it comes to be. basically last month I decided to learn how to speedread, and that’s a skill I wanted to learn like since about 5 years ago, but I kept on delaying because I thought maybe I’m not smart enough to do that, maybe I’m not skilled enough, maybe it’s just not, you know, I’m not gifted or whatever, because somehow it seemed to me always that people who know how to speedread are like superheroes, you know what I mean?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: Like they can read a book in an hour, which is crazy to me, but I really decided, you know, I decided ‘Okay, no more making excuses. I’m just going to learn how to do that,’ and so I had options.
I could get a $17 very special offer, right – believe it or not you could get like a WSO on the Warrior Forum for 17 bucks or something teaching how to speedread.
You could also get an $80 software that teaches you how to speedread by basically you uploading the txt into the software and it’s just breaking it down and displaying it in a way where you’re forced to speedread the text so eventually over time you learn how to do it.
Or I could perhaps pick up an Udemy course for 47 bucks that would walk me through, like there would be a series of videos that would walk me through the whole process, right.
But instead I dismissed all these option, because they were very cheap and instead I went and I contacted the person who created the Udemy course who turns out to be I think it’s Israelis’…I think she’s from Israel, but she is there the champion of the country of Israel when it comes to speedreading and speed-learning, which is another industry, believe it or not, like you can actually improve your memory, you can be sharper, like a lot of different things.
And so, I, you know, reached out to her, just reached out to her, just sent her a message and I’m like ‘Okay, I want to work with you one-on-one,’ and she’s like ‘Okay, it’s going to cost you $400 an hour and it’s a minimum 4 hours.’ I’m like ‘Okay, let’s go for it.’
Now, did I do it because I had the $400 and I didn’t know where to, you know, to spend them? No. I could think of at least a million other things I could by with the 400 [15.00] bucks.

Jonathan: Sure.

Igor: What I did is I wanted to get some skin in the game and I thought ‘Look, if I’m going to pay this chick 400 bucks for an hour, there’s no chance in hell I’m not going to sit there and work my ass off to acquire this skill and follow what she teaches me.’

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: Now incidentally, I didn’t need 8 hours or 4 hours minimum that she requested. I actually got the gist of it in a single hour and then by practicing I have, you know, mastered the skill, and basically I didn’t, like I’m not lightning fast, but I doubled my speed, my reading speed from 200 words a minute to 400 words a minute with about, say, 70% comprehension, which is, you know, again above average. It allows me to get by rather comfortably.
Now here’s something though very interesting. After doing this call with her I found myself procrastinating, really, really bad.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: Maybe…maybe you’ve had a similar experience, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Sure.

Igor: So now I found myself procrastinating like hell and I’m like ‘Uh…I don’t wanna practice. Yeah, I know it’s only 20 minutes a day, but I…you know, maybe I can just watch another episode of American Family or whatever.’
So…but then I’m like at the back of my mind there’s this thought says, and there’s a little voice, and it says, ‘Dude, you paid 400 bucks for an hour. Come on! You can’t let it go to waste.’
And so eventually for the next two weeks I practiced every day and I got what I wanted to get, all thanks to getting my skin in the game.
Therefore, when you give all this free information give all this free information and all your best stuff for free to your list you’re, you know, you’re allowing your list to dismiss and ignore this information and give up on themselves and this is actually doing your list a huge disservice.
So if you know whatever it is that you’re promoting, maybe it’s a business opportunity like Empower Network, for example, which I believe has changed many, many, many, many lives. It created multimillionaires in the last 5 years, and I think it has a place to be in our marketplace and a lot of people are making good money with it, and awesome, great.
And if you’re selling that, if you’re promoting that, why would you allow anyone to get off the hook because of their own laziness and their own, like, human nature, which we’re all guilty of anyway by strategically setting them up to fail?
You know, giving free stuff to your list and asking nothing in return and, you know, it’s almost like setting them up for failure.

Jonathan: Wow. So we’ve covered a lot of ground, dispelled a bunch of email myths today including pushing the free line where there’s no value in that, why you shouldn’t actually be hard-teaching in emails, all kinds of good stuff today, Igor.
What do you have coming up for us next time?

Igor: Well, next time we’re going to be talking about solo ads, and specifically why people who believe solo ads don’t convert and they kind of avoid solo ads like the plague are leaving a lot of money on the table, especially if they’re promoting business opportunities right now, and how Facebook ads is actually the wrong traffic source for that sort of offer.

Jonathan: Interesting. So you’re going to crush Facebook ads on the [18.00] next one. Looking forward to it.

Igor: I’m going to crush Facebook, yeah. Facebook is the enemy. I got the crosser on it and I’ve got a picture of Mark Zuckerberg on my wall right now with a big, huge, red X on it.

Jonathan: Careful. He might come get you.

Alright, so that’s a wrap for The List-Building Lifestyle Episode-1 where we dispelled a bunch of email myths. Thank you, Igor, and thank you, listeners, for tuning in. We’ll be back in your earbuds next week.

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