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Editor:
This time, we are talking with Igor Kheifets, who has been totally crushing it recently as an affiliate marketer, an online course creator, an author and speaker.
He’s the guy behind the claim product such as Elite Traffic Pro and the 301K Challenge. So, Igor, it’s a real pleasure to meet you.
Igor Kheifets:
It’s great to be here. I’m excited to share and excited to drop a few nuggets and see if we can help you guys listening make some more money, have more fun doing it as well.
Editor:
Sounds good. Now let’s start by finding out more about you and your background, if that’s okay.
Igor Kheifets:
Yeah. I’m originally Ukrainian. I was born in Ukraine. Both my parents are Russian. My dad was stationed in Ukraine because he was an officer in the Soviet Army. He graduated the Suvorov Military Academy in Moscow.
And me and my brother were born in Ukraine. And by the time I was born, my dad decided that he didn’t want to stay in the army because the wall came down. It was just coming down.
It was 1988, and he went into business for himself. So I grew up watching my dad doing all kinds of entrepreneurial things.
And then around when I was about 12 or so, just before my bar mitzvah, as you can tell I’m Jewish, my family decided to move to Israel, and this is where we entered this really, really, really, really rough patch that lasted about 10 years or so.
Now, I guess you can also say that the rough patch started in Ukraine because that was the reason we moved. We ended up selling all of our possessions. We were really living pretty well. I’d say we were considered to be upper middle class back then.
We had a car. We had an apartment. We had food on the table. So we didn’t struggle. But towards the move, yeah, we started struggling. And I think the reason we moved was because of that.
My dad made a bad investment. He borrowed about 10,000 US dollars, which at the time was crazy ridiculous amount of money from a local mobster, Nikolai Makarenko, and obviously a guy you don’t want to mess with.
And he invested in something called [inaudible 00:02:10], which is kind of like a farm. It used to be a state-owned farm, but then they got privatised after the wall came down, and it was just a wild, wild west.
So my dad and a few other people invested together, and the [inaudible 00:02:24] CEO at one point decided not to do anything for the [inaudible 00:02:29]. He decided to drink and have fun, and he spent the money.
So when my dad realised that he just sold our possessions, and I think he had 1000 US dollars left to his name, and then we just moved to Israel once we paid off the debt. And that sparked one of the most difficult eras of my life, and I guess in life of my family members because we quickly sank into debt. My dad went to see a doctor, discovered he had diabetes, then he went into a double bypass, and he couldn’t find work.
The few occasions were when he could find work usually was some sort of security guard job, which obviously didn’t pay anything. But to make it worse, the security company would usually hire him, keep him for about eight months, and then fire him for three months to only rehire him again after a three months period because that was their way to leverage the loophole where if they didn’t employ him for nine month straight, they didn’t have to give him seniority, and of course, raise his paycheck, give him benefits and so on.
And growing up, my dad remembered that when he was a part of the Soviet Army, life was good. So he told me that I should do the same. And so in Israel, everyone has to do mandatory army service. So my parents enrolled me into a Israeli Air Force Academy when I was about 14. And I spent the next six years being trained as a soldier and going to school all the same time. I was wearing the uniform. I had my beret always sitting on my left shoulder.
I was a proper little soldier. And then, I enrolled into the actual military, did my bootcamp, and started serving my time. And I say serving my time as if it’s prison because it kind of felt like prison. I realised quickly that it wasn’t the life I wanted because the guys who graduated before me, couple years before me, they were already serving for a few years, and they were still frustrated and broken.
I mean, it was just… They seemed like a bunch of miserable dudes. That’s the impression I’ve got. So I decided I didn’t want to do that, and I quickly found loopholes to get out of the army. I kind of broke that bureaucratic machine, which is when I learned quite a few lessons, to be honest with you, trying to game the system.
And so once I got out, I got involved in network marketing as a result of reading Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad because in the book he says, “Look, you should do real estate, but you should also go in business for yourself. And if you don’t have any business ideas or money or sense or whatever, just go into MLM. And becoming a network marketer, you learn lots of great skills, including a skill of actually selling,” which I did. But I went into an online market in the… I went into network marketing in the online space.
So I seek out these network marketing companies that were internet-friendly, if you will. And as a result, I got involved and exposed, I guess, in the world of digital marketing, social media marketing, blogging, running ads. At the time when I started, MySpace was still around. It was still a thing. So you could build MySpace profiles, promoting your business. I think I had five or something. And I just kind of built that skill set of a digital marketer. I quickly understood what WordPress was, and I started building WordPress websites.
I became skilled, but I wasn’t making any money. And it was through that I got exposed to affiliate marketing, which made a lot more sense to me than network marketing because it had that commission element where I didn’t have to create the product myself, and I could make money, but there was no human motivation required. I didn’t have to build a team and keep them motivated to continue to do the work, and I didn’t have to do any kind of three-way meetings or go to hotel lobbies and pretend I’m having fun.
And so that’s where I’ve experienced my first success. It was when I combined affiliate marketing with building my own email list, which at the time I came to realise is probably the only one thing that is common for anyone who was successful making money on the internet. They all had email lists, and it’s like the bigger the list they had, the more money they were making. And when I realised that, I kind of put all my effort into building my list.
I really just did everything. I tried every technique to do it, but everything I’ve done was eventually leading to an opt-in form or a capture page that was asking people for an email address and was after I built my first list of I believe at the time was about 1700 people or 2000 people that I started mailing offers.
I remember one day, I had this little thing that I’ve done on the side where I would drive people to the airport to make some extra money using my dad’s car. And I came back from one of these trips, and I think I must have been stuck in traffic for at least three hours on a six-hour drive. It was terrible. I came back. My back was hurting like hell. And I just sat down. I realised didn’t write my email for the day because I was really trying to stick to that daily email routine.
And that day, it was a new product launching. It was, I think, 70 bucks or 67 bucks, and it paid a 50% commission. And there were also a few upsells that paid, I think, 40% commission as well. And I just sat down and I wrote an email. It was a really heartfelt email. I didn’t really write a marketing email. I just shared my thoughts like it was my diary.
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