How Ike Transitioned From Struggling Realtor To An $80K+ Digital Marketing Job

What's happening, guys? It's Shane here, and in today's video, I'm going to be interviewing somebody who got into digital marketing relatively recently. Ike is a couple years into their career at this point, and I'm going to be asking them certain questions that people told me in the comments that I should be asking people when I interview them, so definitely stay tuned for that. Also, go ahead, gently tap that like button, ask any questions that you have in the comments down below, and let's go ahead and jump right into it. What's happening, guys? Welcome back to the channel. Today, I have another very special guest. Today, we got Ike to come on the channel. He has quite a bit of experience in digital marketing. He's someone who transitioned over from real estate into digital marketing, so it's going to be great to get his perspective on whether you should get into digital marketing and the different ways that you can do that. Thank you so much for coming on the channel, Ike. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me, Shane. If you could just briefly give me a little bit of your background and your experience that you had before you discovered digital marketing. Yeah, sure. For me, I graduated college in 2011. I went to Montclair State University in Jersey. The thing was, I didn't really have anything I really wanted to do after college, in a way. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I did have a finance and management degree, but then I ended up going into restaurant, becoming a waiter, and then becoming a general manager later on. I was in that industry for four years. Then, after that, I got into real estate sales, just like you touched on, in New York City. I was doing that for another four years. Then, I was seeing my greatest motivator to get into real estate, not real estate, sorry, the digital marketing, pretty much was because these are kind of, to me, it was kind of dead-end jobs, in a way. I would make income, but I can't really see where I'm going to go with it, how high it's going to go. I saw a limit to how much I could do with it. That's pretty much because I probably just don't have any passion for it. I was thinking, while I was on my fourth year in real estate, I was like, yeah, I should probably start thinking of doing something else because I don't want to keep on doing this forever. I don't want to be working like a zombie, just being all motivational all the time. That's when I was scrolling YouTube. Then, I just found Seth talking about his channel, pretty much. I first found him through another channel called Engineer Truth. That was another career channel that was promoting his course. Through there, I encountered Seth's course. Then, I saw a bunch of testimonials, a bunch of positive testimonials. It kind of sounded real to me on what he was talking about. He really emphasizes on, if you actually get into his course and follow his blueprint, per se, because his course is called Seth's In-Demand Career Blueprint, then you can get rather fast results to get into the digital marketing realm, which I had interest in back then, a little bit, on e-commerce and all that stuff. I was like, okay, yeah, why not take a shot at it? Maybe this is something that I can maybe look into, just open up my horizons, in a way. I was watching his testimonials and just seeing what's possible with his course and with the industry. He lays out career paths and opportunities available and stuff, and how anyone can really follow his blueprint and gain success from it. I got pretty hyped up. I just took a shot at it and just joined his course. I just wanted to quickly ask, how long after you saw the opportunity to do the course, did you actually decide to make the purchase and go through with it? Good question. It took me, I don't exactly remember, but probably a month or two, maybe, since I was kind of hesitant to make that little investment. I was watching a bunch of testimonials. I don't know how many I watched, but after a couple, I was sold. I was like, okay, let's do this. I got to change somehow. That's something I always tell people, the great thing about Seth's course is he literally, between his Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram, he literally has thousands of testimonials. If you're the type of person who wants to watch videos, lots of videos on YouTube, if you're the type of person who just wants to read testimonials, tons of them on his Instagram, I think Seth has probably helped more people than any other person in the world get digital marketing jobs. He literally has thousands of testimonials. There's just overwhelming proof that his system, what he teaches, works. That's great because I was actually just doing research on some of these digital marketing boot camps because it was a request. It was a video request I got. First of all, they're $15,000, these digital marketing boot camps. Crazy expensive. That's basically like a college degree. Then second of all, I couldn't find hardly any testimonials. All the testimonials they had were just a picture of a person's face and then a quote, which that could just be an exit survey. That's not even necessarily a testimonial. It could just be an exit survey like, oh, what did you like about this course? After they've already taken it or something. Or it's just on their website. Exactly. That's not even a legit review or testimonial. It's just crazy how little proof a lot of these programs, and then don't even get me started on college. Colleges have almost zero proof that what they teach works. I always recommend to totally understand. A lot of the time people are very skeptical. I've had people in the comments say they're extremely skeptical. That's great. You should be skeptical. Go and look at all the proof. Go and look at all the proof that it works. I was definitely skeptical. I kind of implied, yeah. For sure. I think anybody who's making the claim that they can get you into a really solid career in just a month to three to four months, something like that in many cases, where you can scale that career up to 100K per year within three years, that is a pretty bold claim. Everyone should be skeptical and look into it. I totally understand that. Most of the time when people make claims like that on the internet, it is BS. In this particular case, there's overwhelming evidence. Definitely look into it. I always tell people to do that. I also have a playlist of different people that I've interviewed. You can check that out on the YouTube channel. How was the course? What did you think about it overall? What's great about the course is there's a lot of information out there, almost too much information now on the internet, YouTube as well. Seth's course, Blueprint, is really organized in which it goes step-by-step into what you should start with, how you should review the course, or how you should study for the course, or what exercises you should be working on, what information to focus on as well. Again, there's so much information out there, but he's just like, just really take these practical skills and just make it yours and just go with that. I thought it was, in that sense, very efficient, which I think really brings value. Got it. What did you think about the community that they have with the Facebook group and the instructors and all that sort of thing? Very, very helpful. At least in my time, I can't speak to the instructor part because at least in my time, two and a half years ago, it was really only Seth teaching himself and answering back in the community board, in which, of course, he gets back within a day or two. It was very, very helpful whenever I had questions. Whenever I had some question or anything, I would just post on the community board and either him or some other person in the community will get back to you as well. I thought that was a great community. Also, I made a lot of connections on LinkedIn with those people. We got to take each other's brains out or brainstorm with each other or just endorse each other on LinkedIn as well. I think that helped as well. It was a very beneficial community overall, I would say. Awesome. From the time that you purchased the course, I know you said that you went through it slowly and that's totally fine, but from the time that you purchased the course to the time where you got your first job offer, how long was that approximately? I would probably say a month and a half to two months because the thing is I started looking around Thanksgiving. Pretty much all these companies and recruiters are on vacation. Well, not everyone, but at least the company that I got into, Mindshare, the recruiter from there, I reached out to him around Thanksgiving and he got back to me around January. Then I got in that company. I think if actually he had gotten back to me sooner, then I probably would have gotten in a lot sooner. I would say because of all that factor, it's probably a month and a half to two months. You actually got your first job offer before you even finished the full course because you said it took you about four months to get through the course or so? I don't know. Sorry. After the four months and then after going through the material, I started to apply and then around that time was Thanksgiving time. Okay. Got it. Got it. I know everybody's going to want to know. If you're comfortable, you can share this. If you're not comfortable, maybe just tell me generally speaking what people can expect, but everybody's going to want to know about salary. Let's talk about the money. People are going to want to know what was that first job offer like in terms of salary? Yeah. For me, it wasn't that high, of course. Well, it was not high at all. It was really starting salary was $40,000 for me. Then in Seth's course, he says just go in for the experience. Don't really worry about the salary in the beginning because in six months to a year, there's a lot of people who jump up to $60,000, $65,000 in which that happened to me as well. My second job after a year or my second company after a year, they offered me a $65,000. That's how it started out. Then right now, it's like two years later, I got into another company called CMI Media Group. They offer me like $80,000 right now plus bonus. Yeah. That's pretty much my career path so far in terms of salary. Got it. You said you're two to two and a half years in now. Was that correct? Yeah, about two and a half right now. Yeah. Awesome. You got to that like $80,000 plus the bonus. If the bonus is good, you might even make it to like the six-figure level around like two and a half to three years in, something along those lines. By the way, I should probably mention at this point, Seth does have a free masterclass. You can check it out down below. If you're kind of confused about all the different routes you can go into or you're just confused about digital marketing in general, Seth does have that free masterclass. I'll put that down in the link as well as the pinned comment below. It's about three hours or so, very informational. I went through it myself and I learned a lot even though I already knew quite a bit about digital marketing, but very, very awesome masterclass. So definitely check that out. But next, I want to kind of ask about your quality of life. So how is sort of just the quality of life of the job itself and your job satisfaction versus back when you were doing real estate sales? Yeah. So when I was doing sales, I wasn't really happy about my position, not just from the income perspective, but like from my, I'll say like fulfillment level as well. And of course, I get like a lot of angry clients or customers, right? Naturally, like real estate salesperson, you're not the most popular guys. So I kind of like, I would say I kind of got sick of that in a way and got into this. And then right now, I feel very fulfilled. I think it's a very mentally stimulating career path. I mean, it's kind of a lot of strategy and kind of like data analysis and all that. So I kind of found out I really like that part about this business. So just for like job function itself, I'm very happy with it. It's a very important job for one thing. So I'm very happy about that. And I guess just to get to kind of like a work-life balance, I think I don't want to get into that, right? Yeah, it's really good. When I was in real estate, I was working like almost like six, seven days. Oh yeah, real estate is crazy sometimes. Yeah, weekends is like business time. But then other times you got to be like, you know, prospecting or reaching out to people or like, you know, touching base and stuff like that, right? So you kind of like almost don't have a day off in a way. But I wasn't making that much, you know, income anyways. You know, I was struggling there. Whereas right now, it's really like, so my hours are like 8.30 to like, you know, like 4.30 or 5 depending on like the workload I have. And then my past company was like 9 to 5 pretty much. And, you know, they don't really encourage you to like stay overtime or anything. So like, they're like, you can if you want to. But like, you know, if you have something you can just pick up tomorrow, then just, you know, please do so. So, you know, there's like almost, I'm not gonna say no pressure, but yeah, like almost, almost no pressure for me at this point right now. So it's like a lot less stressful, basically, than the real estate sales job. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for another another thing, like, you know, I'm working remotely right now. You know, even after two years of the pandemic, where, you know, a lot of people are trying to kind of like go back to the office. And, you know, my company kind of gives a choice. So like, they're like, you can come into the office if you want. But like, you know, just want to stay home, you can stay home. All right. So if there's somebody who's watching this, they're on the fence, they, you know, they're thinking, maybe I should do digital marketing, or maybe they've decided that they want to do digital marketing, but they're wondering if they should purchase Seth's course, what would you say to that person? Yeah, good question. I mean, I was there, I was on the fence before. But, you know, I took a leap of faith, I jumped into his course, I trusted his process, you know, his blueprint. And I pretty much got what I want from it. You know, in a very efficient way, I would say so I would, I would totally recommend, you know, going through that route for you, if you were very interested in this field. And then one one comment I got on one of my past videos, I just wanted to ask you this, are you getting paid to do this interview? No. Okay. Yeah. And I was like, all right, yeah, sure. I'm happy to share my experience. Yeah. Yeah, there's there's skeptical, which which is great, guys. I always recommend everyone, you know, be like, a rational optimist. That's what I always recommend for people be a rational optimist. So being skeptical is a good thing. But then then there's borderline, like conspiracy theorists, who are like, Oh, you're like a paid actor or whatever. So I just wanted to ask you that just to make sure, just to make sure you're not a paid actor, right? And I mean, if anything, anything, probably looking at my LinkedIn profile would be proof that I'm not, you know, like, there's, I kind of don't have, you know, I kind of don't really have a reason to, I just I just thought, I'm spreading this idea, like, you know, just this positive feedback would be a good way for me to give back a little, you know? Yeah. And like, it's amazing. A lot of these $15,000 boot camps can't even get somebody to come on camera. They might even like pay them to do that. Right. And then with Seth's course, it's so good. And people so many people have had such a amazing outcomes from it that all of them like want to come on camera and do interviews. So it's just like a night and day difference. So yeah, that's, it's really awesome. It's amazing what Seth has done. And if people only knew how picky I am with who I promote on this channel, I am super, super OCD and picky, like some of the some of the ones I've turned down are like good, but they're not great. They're not the best. And I only try to partner with the absolute best people when it comes to getting people results. So thank you so much for coming on the channel. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you sharing your story. I think a lot of people are going to get value from it. And yeah, thank you so much again. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.