E-Farming With Igor Kheifets

I got to ask, what do you see for 2023 and 2024? Do you see this even growing more? I see it growing more, especially with social media channels always changing. The one thing you can keep consistent is your lead flow for your database.   Here’s my problem with social media. I know a lot of people who have built a huge social media following and then used it to monetize it and use it to make money. The problem is one day, they wake up and no longer have a social media following. They all have a story. I got a buddy of mine who built a big YouTube channel in the sexual advice for men niche, I think to the tune of 500,000 subscribers. One day, he got a message on Instagram from a buddy of his and he’s like, “I can’t find your channel.” It turns out the channel got suspended, with no warning, nothing. The guy was smart. He ended up building a 50,000-person email list, which he fell back on immediately and started monetizing the list more aggressively while he was building up a new channel. That’s true whether you are on YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok. I have a few friends who specialize in short-form TikTok content. They have now built several accounts to 100,000 followers that got shut down. They have built a list. They move people from social to their list because the list is the real asset. The only asset you control. When you think about it, even if you have got a Facebook account or Facebook fan page with 50,000 followers, that’s not yours. That’s Facebook’s. Facebook owns it. They can decide what reach you are going to have with it. They can decide if they want to take it away from you, and they decide whether tomorrow they will outlaw your industry too. There are industries out there that used to be allowed on Facebook and now they are not. You can’t go on Facebook and advertise things like crypto, for example, if you got a crypto-related business. Why? It’s because Facebook doesn’t consider crypto to be a legitimate business or whatever and they are not going to allow it. I think there’s a lot to be said about the power of an email list because it’s an asset you own. This asset grows in value over time. As you continue nurturing the relationship with your audience that audience continues rewarding you with the response.

This is the only audience that buys, that’s another one. This is, I guess, more relevant to marketers than it is to real estate investors, but I ran a split test when I launched a product and I have had a Facebook page with 9,000 followers and an email list of a bit less than 9,000 people. I say, “I’m going to send the exact same message to both audiences and see where the seals going to come from.” When I posted and I checked the next day, I had close to 100 sales of the product. It was a very low price product, something like $97. It was all about charisma and how to become more charismatic. Same crowd, both Facebook and email. These are people who follow me, the people who know me. I post and I track my links and my sales. What I discovered is that all the sales came from the email list and no sales came from Facebook. Why is that? I don’t know. It’s people who are reading their emails, they genuinely buy. There’s another study that I think later on when I read it, explains it. They have done a study about people who check like the first check of the day. There are people who check their email first thing in the morning. There are people who check their social first thing in the morning. There are people who check news websites first thing in the morning. What they have discovered is that people who check their email first thing in the morning spend the most money when it comes to buying stuff. They do it more often. People who check their social first thing in the morning spend the least amount, amount of money and they do it way less often. The reason is that people who read emails believe that they support a business by buying from that business. They go in and they solve a problem for themselves. People who check their social first thing in the morning genuinely believe that they support a business by liking its content. I have been testing various ads on a certain platform and the same thing, not one sale. We have more success with the list.   It’s a bit devastating to recognize you have got a following that there’s no juice in it because it’s not free or cheap to build a social media following these days. It requires a lot of work and a lot of content for you to stay consistent for lots of time. The ROI on your effort is nothing compared to email.

What would be one of the little tips you can give without giving away the whole eFarm? Some tips in terms of increasing response from a list or building an eFarm quickly or which direction you like to take it? How about building an eFarm?   When I started building out my eFarm, when I realized I needed one, I made a few mistakes. The first mistake I made was I tried to use social media to do it. What I quickly discovered is that I started mixing family and business and that didn’t sit well with me. All of a sudden, I’m having conversations with my friends and family about this thing I posted about last week and it’s not the conversation I wanted to have. Plus, social media is extremely unreliable in the sense that, first off, you can get banned, which is an idea I don’t like. The other thing is, even if you don’t get banned, you can get shadow banned and your content can get suppressed. Meaning that even if you have got, say, 5,000 friends on Facebook and you post something, only a handful of them will see what you are posting because what Facebook is doing is it’s filling your feed with ads. It wants you to buy exposure. That’s the business model. Posting stuff on social is not as effective as it used to be years ago. Even years ago, when I built a large social following, it was still not necessarily the most responsive thing in the world. Social was a mistake and I ended up moving on. I tried building a blog and I tried building my list of a blog. I spent a good eight months on it, posted every day, created regional content, and mastered some aspects of HTML and PHP coding. I understood what plugins were, what WordPress is, and the whole 9 yards. The problem with that is the eFarm that I managed to build in those eight months was very small. Only 1,000 email addresses big. It was very unresponsive. When I first mailed that eFarm, I got three opens and one spam complaint. It was terrible and discouraging. I ended up throwing that away and starting over. The success that I have had came from recognizing one thing. You probably heard the statement a buyer is a buyer. It goes deeper than buying habits. It goes into all habits. A gamer is a gamer. A gun owner is a gun owner. A Democrat is a Democrat. Whatever the habit is, we tend to stick to it. I figured out that the best possible way for me to build a giant eFarm fast is to get in front of people who are already subscribing to other eFarms.   I went out and I started getting email drops. I started approaching other people with big eFarms who built them whichever way, I didn’t care. Some people hit it big on social media and monetize it. Some people have a popular blog and monetize that. Some people have a product of some kind and people follow them. Some people write a book, some people publish a newsletter. There are many different ways to do it and not necessarily the ways that I would do it but I started approaching them. I started saying, “Can you drop an email to your entire eFarm with my link for people to get into my eFarm in exchange for a one-time fee?” To them, it made a lot of sense because they don’t always have something to mail. Here’s money upfront, no risk for you. Just send my email. For me, I got no reputation, no connections, nothing. I’m getting them to mail and I’m getting the best email addresses I can hope to get. That’s people who are already reading their email in that particular niche, category, or topic. This way, I started building my first eFarm in a very passive but very fast way, because all of a sudden, I’m adding 100, 200, and 300 email addresses per day to my eFarm. Very quickly, I built a giant one and I started monetizing it. Within weeks, I got my first commission check. I didn’t have my product at the time. I started doing it with other people’s products where I got commissions for referring people to buy from other people. From there, it kept scaling and scaling. Within 6 months, I was at $10,000 per month and I never looked back. To know that you started, you didn’t know anyone. You went out on your own and built this business from the very bottom.   I had no business experience, too. I think I lucked out because I had a system. Yes, I was a straight-A student in high school but I was never a business owner., I was never taught to be an entrepreneur. I was never taught to take risks. In fact, I was averse to risk for a long time. Now I’m a bit more daring when it comes to risk-taking, I will invest in a venture. Back in the day, I was broke. In fact, I had to get a second job so I can have some extra money to play with every month for the email drops so I can continue growing my eFarm on top of what I could afford. I think it’s the system. I think when you apply the right system in the right environment, it doesn’t matter who you are, or what your previous experience is. I have seen people succeed with eFarming from quite literally all walks of life either changing professions or people who have been retired for a few years and realize they are going to run out of money before they are going to run out of life. Of all ethnicities, people who speak English, who don’t speak English, I have taught this to a bunch of people in my hometown who ended up changing their entire lives as a result. eFarming is universally effective if you follow the right system. You must have the system down pat.   Yes. I call it my 30-day eFarming system. It’s something that I teach people. I boiled it down to a process and I had to because the first couple of years I kept to myself. I didn’t tell people. I wouldn’t go on a podcast and talk about it. I was too shy and too insecure to do it. People started noticing my success. One time I went to get some coffee and at the time, I was already driving an expensive car. Now don’t laugh but that car was a Buick and the Buick is an expensive car in Israel, in fact, I paid $86,000 for that Buick. I will explain why. There are ridiculous taxes on vehicles in Israel. Every vehicle is taxed by 250%. If the vehicle costs $40,000 or $36,000 in the US, which this vehicle cost at the time, you pay double plus for the same vehicle in the US, but it was a great deal. I loved my Buick. In fact, I loved my Buick so much that when I came to Canada, I got the exact same one. It’s a Buick LaCrosse with leather seats. It’s like a boat. Back in the day, I’m pulling up in my fancy Buick to the coffee place, and his guy whose name was Sammy walks out and he sees me and he recognizes me. We used to work together at a facility. He looks at me and he looks at the car. He’s like, “Is your dad a doctor?” I was like, “No.” He’s like, “Are you selling drugs?” I was like, “What? No.” “What is this car? Is this your car? Did you steal this?” “No, it’s my car.” Short wired his entire brain to see me drive that car. What I didn’t tell him, which would probably kill him, is that I paid cash for the car. I wrote a check for $86,000 and handed it to the dealer and then picked it up and then had them deliver it to me a couple of days later. He thought I leased it, which is okay because it would genuinely have hurt him psychologically, I’m sure. People didn’t get it. They kept seeing me being very successful. They saw me put up pictures of myself traveling all throughout Europe and the US. They saw the toys I had. Anytime there would be a new iPhone, I’d get the new iPhone. I’m big on gadgets. I got all the iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and everything. Eventually, people started approaching me. These are people whom I used to work with, people who got gone to school with, people who saw me every day because I made it a habit to work out of a coffee shop because I hated staying at home. These days I do work out of my basement because I have arranged it to my liking. Back in the day, I would wake up, go to the coffee shop, and have my breakfast in the coffee shop. I had an Igor Breakfast, which was like an omelet special. Did they name breakfast after you?   Yeah, because I would always ask for a custom breakfast. Eventually, they named it the Igor breakfast. They didn’t put it on the menu, unfortunately. I was going for it. Do you have a sandwich named after you?   Just an omelet, not a sandwich. People kept seeing me in the coffee shop with my laptop and they kept seeing me sitting there typing away. They couldn’t understand what I was doing. It was before. Working in a coffee shop with your laptop was cool in a town where most people didn’t do it. Most people worked blue-collar jobs. Eventually, I had to start teaching people because they kept asking me. I started teaching them one-on-one. I quickly discovered that most people have this aversion to everything internet. They didn’t like the idea of playing with pages or writing content, doing a lot of the stuff that I did early on to try and build my eFarm. Eventually, I boiled down my eFarm into steps that anyone can follow. I ask for 30 minutes per day and within 30 days, they can put together their first eFarm that’s already producing emails and producing money. This is outside of the box, your story, and the Buick, I love it.   I got to know what’s in your omelet.   It was a three-egg omelet with brushed feta cheese on top and with tuna, not raw tuna but canned tuna on the side. That is a very Mediterranean thing to eat. Remember, it’s Israel. Back in Israel, people eat a little differently but most people who go to Israel like the food there. They come back and they are like, “The food’s amazing.” I came from Israel, so I was like, “It’s food.” I love tuna because when I served in the military, that’s what we would eat a lot. They feed you with canned tuna, boiled eggs, and bread. Every now and again, you will get a schnitzel with rice. Morning and evening, that’s the food that’s readily available all the time. Canned tuna and eggs. It’s the Igor omelet. When you said the flashback about the car, I remember when I separated from my son’s father years ago and I got nothing out of the divorce but a car and it was this blue PT Cruiser with flames down the sides. It was lovely. I moved to Texas with it years ago. As soon as I got to Texas, where it’s hot and humid and sticky in August, the AC dies on it. The PT Cruiser, which was the PT Loser, with flames on it and no air conditioning in Texas. The car alone is terrible.   No, that’s terrible. Israel gets hot. A common experience in Israel is to get in a car that’s been out in the sun and it’s impossible to be inside. One time, my dad forgot a cigarette lighter on the dash and within three hours it exploded. It was that hot. They will explode here too. I have had people that I knew that theirs exploded quite a bit, especially with those thin, cheap plastic ones.   It was pretty terrible. That’s the part about Israel I don’t miss. Having since then moved to Canada, though, now I’m starting to get a little bit annoyed by the snow. We are still getting it. Now I’m thinking maybe switching to a more of mild even cool place like England or Portugal. It’s cold in England too.   They don’t get much snow. They have lots of rain. I guess it’s like Vancouver, cloudy and rainy. Don’t you love having the choice to pick that?   I love that, but with it comes a different issue. Having the ability to live anywhere in the world. It makes me question my own decisions and plan ahead, especially for my kids. I moved to Canada because I thought that being stationed here is a much better future for them. It is. It’s a much better future for them than Israel, in my opinion. I see downsides of them growing up in Canada. I’m considering moving to a different spot for sake of a different outcome for them. Your environment defines whom you become. Even seeing this, when I moved to Canada, I moved with my best friends. Your environment defines who you become. Click To Tweet It was six of us. It was me and my wife and two of my best friends and their wives. We were close. Even they changed dramatically since moving. These are adults in their 30s. The environment they live in molded them differently. The conversations we used to have years ago differ very much from the ones we can have now. The things that I can say to them differ and the things they can say to me differ now than years ago. It’s not as it used to be. I think it’s down to the environment, not just the age. The fact that all of us aged. I’m not particularly liking it. One thing I’m not liking and I think that’s something that I would appreciate about Texas, because that’s the reputation Texas has, in Canada, you can’t go around telling people what you think. Everyone’s close-minded and they don’t want to communicate with people who disagree with them about this, that, or the other. For the first couple of years, I was alienating people by stating my mind, because that’s what you do in Israel. Israel is a very street-shooting place. It took a while for me to adjust to this because that’s important for survival. If I wanted to have any friends here or if I wanted to be able to participate in the social life and I have to because of my kids because when I take my daughter to a birthday party or something, I can’t be the dickhead. I have to get along and it forced me to change my communication style but with it, my ability to make friends and my social life diminished as a result. As you grow, it’s common that your social circle changes with the environment as well. That’s what I find so fascinating.   I’m pretty sure if I move to a different place where my communication style fits, it could be a Southern place in America. It could be back in the Middle East, where people are more straight. Back in Israel, the expression is people stab you in the face because no one’s trying to hide what they think. If they think less of you, they will tell it to your face. What’s funny is, in Israel, even though you disagree with everybody because everyone’s so opinionated, people get along. You can be friends with people and tell them they are idiots and that’s fine. Over here, you have an argument about anything with anyone, they don’t call you anymore and they don’t pick up when you call. That is a different culture, for sure.   Plus, consider that Toronto is a bit like New York where it’s like a melting pot of cultures. There are lots of people from Israel, Ukraine, Russia, India, Pakistan, China, Korea, and a bunch of other countries too. Lots of European countries too are represented here as well. You never know whom you are talking to and what’s okay and what’s not okay. You learn to keep your mouth shut. That’s got to be difficult.   I’m blown away a little bit by that.   With that, I have to say that Canada is very inclusive. They never make you feel like an outcast. That’s something I had to go through in Israel because I moved to Israel when I was twelve and I felt like an outcast all throughout high school for sure because I had a thick Russian accent when I spoke Hebrew. Even in my early adulthood, I still felt out of place. I only stuck to my kind, the other Russian/Ukrainian-Israeli people. My wife is like that. She’s a Russian Israeli.

  For our readers, you need to check out Igor’s book. You can find the book at IgorsBook.com. It’s going to review a lot of the things that we went over here. Before we close, I got to ask another question. I don’t think I asked you this. Who is the most influential person that has been in your life? Do you have anyone that sticks out?   The most influential person as far as my late teens and early adulthood is a person whom I only got to meet on Zoom one time and it was Robert Kiyosaki. The reason he was influential is that I read his books. I reached that Rich Dad Poor Dad and the Cashflow Quadrant and it changed my entire perspective on the path that I was on. It made me get away from the idea of the American dream. It made me start looking for ways to make money, become independent, and become an entrepreneur. It was this idea, this bug that he planted in my mind, that changed my entire life as a result. It is because of him that I ended up stepping away from the path and wandering around a bit for a couple of years and as a result, meeting my wife too. If I didn’t read his book, I wouldn’t be married to Anastasia. He changed my trajectory for sure when it comes to making money in business, financial independence, and things like that. On a personal level, the most influential person is probably going to be my best friend, Dennis. I don’t know what is it with this guy, and it’s not like he’s trying. I don’t think he is, or if he is, then I don’t know, he’s good at it. His opinion and his ideas, his point of view of the world and the people in it are tremendously influential on my decision-making. There are life decisions that I made purely based on his advice. Not necessarily an advice but rather an opinion. I didn’t ask him like, “Should I do this or that?” I would find out, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that?” When you are best friends with somebody, you understand their views on life pretty well. You can probably guess what they are going to say. Hanging out with him and being close to him had a tremendous influence on my life. On the personal side, that’s probably the guy. When you are best friends with somebody, you understand their views on life pretty well. Click To Tweet You met Kiyosaki one time on Zoom.   By pure accident, I managed to get him on my podcast and interview him. I was still back in Israel, so I had to be up at like 2:00 AM my time to match his time zone. One of the most underappreciated things about Kiyosaki, in my opinion, is his advice on parenting. He’s got a great book. It’s called Rich Dad’s Rich Kid Smart Kid which is tremendous for parenting, in my opinion. It’s one of the best parenting books I have read for parenting a teenager. I didn’t know he had a book on that.   He’s big on parenting. He’s big on that. Mel, do you have any final questions for Igor before we close?   I don’t think so. Not that I can think of. If I would, it would keep us here for another 2 or 3 hours. We love having you on Igor. For our readers, you need to check out Igor’s book at IgorsBook.com. Igor, it’s been such an honor having you on the show. Thank you for taking the time out of your crazy busy schedule and spending it with us.   It’s my pleasure. I’m tremendously grateful for this opportunity and I hope that my story was valuable to your readers. I think it will be. It’s incredible. I didn’t know your story until now. I’m even more in awe of your story now and knowing you.   Thank you. That means a lot to me. I appreciate that because you got to respect somebody that puts in the work. If we are ending the show, this is an idea that I would love for us to end it on. I don’t think this generation, the one that’s coming after us, it doesn’t seem like they put as much emphasis on work. The idea of living a lifestyle by design somehow also sold a concept that you are not supposed to work, that you are not supposed to be dedicated to your craft, and that you are not supposed to excel at your job. You are not supposed to put in the hours and burn the midnight oil and get those 10,000 hours into it. I’m very comfortable where I am and I can choose to work as little or as much as I want but there are some days when I will work. I will wake up. I will be so excited about a particular project I’m involved in that I will sit here and I will forget to eat and I will work. This generation doesn’t seem to be. I worked with a younger copywriter who volunteered to write an ad for me. He sent me the ad. I sent him back my critique and he disappeared for two weeks. Eventually, I was able to get him on the phone and he admits that he was dreading the project and that it caused him mental stress and mental illness almost, and anxiety because when I was giving him feedback, I said something that made him feel like I don’t appreciate his work. Therefore, it set off a chain reaction or something like that. He avoided work because of that. He said, “I don’t want to do the project anymore.” When I was his age and I needed the money and somebody told me, “I will pay you $250 for you to build me a capture page,” which is a page you used to capture someone’s email address and a thank you page. It didn’t matter that I had two other jobs. I said yes. I wrote the copy for the damn page while on the toilet because I had to find a time somewhere. I will be on my computer, on my laptop on the toilet typing away the headline. You don’t say no to work, especially when you need it. You don't say no to work, especially when you need it. Click To Tweet That’s this thing that annoys me about this generation. They have great opportunities coming their way, but they don’t value these opportunities. They think it’s supposed to. It’s like they think it’s supposed to be perfect every time. Unless it’s perfect, they are not supposed to settle. No, that’s not how it works. You got to suffer a bit first. It is like if you haven’t suffered and been at your lowest point and knew that at that moment it was life or death or this has to change, kids now, don’t have that responsibility. They are given a green light. Most of them feel entitled. It’s a different era that’s coming up, for sure.   I think they are in for a shock because the economy is going down the drain and AI is taking over. Lots of these low-level jobs will get outsourced technology as they usually do whenever there’s a new revolution happening, whether it’s the industrial revolution or the internet revolution, so they will have to figure out a way. Yes, you can still work remotely and that’s amazing but you have to work. You can never be successful if you are not willing to put in the work. I agree. Thank you again, Igor, for closing on such a good note. I appreciate you being on the show and spending time with us. We love spending time with you.   Thank you. It’s a pleasure. If you ever need to fill a gap with a guest or something, then keep me in mind. We will be having you on again.  

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