End Of False Pretences? – Income School Project 24 Review

If you are looking for way to make money with your hobby, create a blog that earns you an income, or perhaps building up a passive income. Maybe you are looking to find a profitable niche to build a niche website. Either way, you probably have come across Jim & Ricky’s awesome YouTube channel: IncomeSchool.

They are two funny, down-to-earth guys who have a unique view on SEO and building niche websites. Their latest training course is called Project 24 and I am glad I found them about a year ago.

What struck me straight away as I was watching their videos was their transparent and genuine approach: promising you to be able to earn a full time income in 24 months through their 60-step method.

They are totally open about what worked and what did not work for them, and they are happy to share it. They don’t promise you quick success, but hard work and…more hard work. But they are the best example that what they preach about actually works RIGHT NOW and could work for anyone – they are still building niche websites, in fact, several niche sites to constantly test and prove new methods, reflecting on changes in SEO etc.

So I was really eager to find out more about their training course called Project 24, and to share my findings with you. In this post you’ll find out;

• What Project 24 is
• What Project 24 is NOT
• How it works
• Pros and Cons, strengths and weaknesses
• What others have achieved using the methods learned in Project 24
• Frequently asked questions about P24
• Summary and Verdict
• Alternatives (if you think P24 may not be the best choice for you)

Quick Summary

IncomeSchool Project 24 Review - 60 Steps to Full Time Income

Project 24 is a beginner-friendly step-by-step program gouiding you through 60 steps on how to start a niche website from scratch and build it into a full-time income within 24 months. Project 24 has a unique take on SEO and linkbuilding, focusing on saving time and making efforts where they benefit the most. The method also leaves more control in website creators' hands.

Editor's Rating:
4.5

What Project 24 IS

Project 24 is a step-by-step program for how to start a niche website from scratch and build it into a full-time income within 24 months – hence the name Project 24.

Project 24 teaches you how to;

• select and research a niche without using expensive online tools
• how to pick a domain name and register it with a domain registrar
• how to prepare for creating your content
• how to build up your content to maximise your chances of ranking #1 on Google
• how to write your content to maximise organic traffic
• how to win Google Snippets (yep, that’s the one BEFORE the #1 result, on top of the page, BEFORE the video suggestions)
• how to plan for the most effective monetisation method of your site

Besides the core training, there are other features too. Ricky and Jim are active part of the community and constantly engage with the students. They help where they can.

New training material is also added on a regular basis, so you will never run out of training videos.

Project 24 is also featured in my collection of ‘Best Affiliate Marketing Training Courses for Beginners‘ article. I wrote there, and it may describe what Project 24 is perfectly:

Project 24 is NOT an affiliate marketing training. However, the methods and techniques they teach are the same that you would use for building a website specifically for affiliate marketing anyways.

They have a unique take on content marketing and SEO, as they prefer a more ‘manual’ method of optimising the content for search engines.

They also very honest about how soon you can expect significant results, and I mean a full-time income by this: that’s where the program got its name from. 24 months may seem many, but if you think about it, it really is not a lot at all to completely change your life. You may not get better results any sooner with other training courses anyways, but those don’t tell you this.

It is a little bit a ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst’ scenario.

What Project 24 is NOT

So we already know that Project 24 is NOT an affiliate marketing course.

In addition, Project 24 – as you may suspect it already – is not a get rich quick scheme. 24 months is a long time. Although the methods explained in the training maximise your chances to create a niche website that earns you a nice income, no-one can guarantee you success.

So you may find that after a year you still have not earned a dime…

But the chances are, if you put in the hard work through this two-year period, you will see spectacular results.

Project 24 actually tells you, what you can expect at each stage. After 6 months for example, if you earn your first $5 (they call it the pizza day :)) you may think that ‘this niche site thing does not work’.

Thanks to their experience, Jim & Ricky actually can tell you that you are right on track to replace your full time income with online income within the next 18-24 months.

I must admit, if I had not had that information back then, I would have quit around 6 months, only earning a few dollars a month. But I did not, because there was someone who told me that hey, you are actually doing great.

Also, Project 24 is NOT a done-for-you training where you get everything handed over to you, and, like a trained monkey, you just copy and paste and wait for the money to roll in. P24 actually encourages you to be creative and find your own perspective in your niche. This involves exploring new ideas, finding new views, being a voice unheard of before, recognising and REFLECTING on your own mistakes.

Their techniques and methods prefer ‘manual’ grind-work. Keyword research, for example, does not need a keyword tool. So there will be nothing to tell you the numbers on search traffic, competitiveness etc., it will be down to your INTUITION and COMMON SENSE to understand what your audience will likely be interested in, and come up with keywords accordingly.

This may sound frightening for some, as we crave assurance in our decisions, but the method actually works, maybe even better than anything else built on the false numbers of keyword tools.

Having said that, the videos and all the training material is super-informative, easy-to-digest, beginner friendly.

Perhaps, even more beginner friendly than other methods involving expensive and complicated plugins and software that do the same work ‘for you’.

How Project 24 Works

Signing Up

You simply click on this (affiliate) link, and after filling in the form and making a payment of $449 for a one-year membership, you instantly have access to all their courses, forums etc. Second year would be $199. (They increase the price every year though, last year it was only $359).

What’s On

They have a lot training courses available, here are a few I’d like to highlight:

• Income School Project 24 – 60 Steps to a Profitable Website
  Start here. This is the BLUEPRINT for your NICHE WEBSITE. An easy-to-understand, step-by-step tutorial of setting up a website, generating traffic and monetising it in the most effective way.
• E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
  EAT is what every website owner is talking about. Understand this and you’ll rank well in Google. Ignore this, and you’ll likely never rank. This is the latest addition to their training platform, and to be frank, the P24 course lacked this aspect of SEO before.
  Whereas other courses tell you how to build authority from Day 1 eg through backlinks and guestposting, or creating a personal profile to establish authority through past experience and content, P24 never focused on this until now. Other courses would have told you to start your website with an About Me page, Jim & Ricky only just realised this oversight and amended the training (more on this later). Point is, they constantly reflect on what works and what does not work.
• Web Traffic Snowball
  This was the first Aha moment I had with this course (and most of what I have written in this article is based upon what I learned in this module). It is the most effective way to maximise traffic potential with the 3 different types of posts. So instead of writing hundreds of the same Review posts, you would learn how to create Answer posts, Pillar Posts and Staple posts, 10-15 of each. They target different segment of your audience, and serve different purpose on your website. But this is it. And you’re done. Basically.
• How to hire and train writers
  Perhaps not for beginners, but if you’d like to speed up the process until making money with your website this is the one and only DONE-FOR-YOU module in Project 24. All you need to do is finding writers, you show them this video, get them to write posts for you as per the training. You select the best ones and voila! you just doubled / tripled the speed of creating content for your website.
  One seasoned affiliate marketer, who had suffered for months trying to find a good writer on Fiverr, said, that this video training ALONE worth the $359 for him.

And there are a lot of other training modules like ‘Picking profitable niches’, SEO, Email Marketing 101, Photography or Mythbusting etc. As I said, Jim & Ricky consistently update and upgrade the training, and you also have the live forum where you can ask any question you may have.

Pros & Cons

What’s good about P24?

• Income School does a great job at creating amazingly interesting yet easy to understand video and audio content
• Jim & Ricky are very transparent and you can truly learn from THEIR mistakes
• No pushy upsells. Actually, they give away a lot of stuff and information that you would not find anywhere else.
• They are aware of your budget. While the course itself is not cheap (as a one-off payment), apart from the cost of hosting & domain you don’t really need to buy anything else. And they actually recommend you to stay away from buying expensive online tools!
• They’re adding new courses and content all the time
• They’re actively participating in the daily life of the P24 members area.
• They have an exclusive podcast and vlog for members only. If you liked their YouTube channel, you surely will dig this too.
• They ‘hold your hand‘ until they deliver on their promise. Other training courses tend to teach you the principles, but if you would like to take your website to the next step, you may find yourself looking for another training course. Not with IncomeSchool.

Their biggest selling point is their transparency. I still remember it felt like a breath of fresh air watching their first video.

I had been so fed up with the $100 / $500 / $1000-a-day ClickBank method videos, and that every Tom, Dick  & Harry was (still is) pushing ClickFunnels or Legendary Marketer, yet they had no purpose to teach anything, they were after my money. Finding an informative channel that a) I could understand as a beginner b) as a person with common sense I believed that could work, was extremely motivating.

What’s not so good about Project 24?

Numbers may be skewed?

This has been my number #1 fear factor about Project 24 and the credibility of the method they teach. I already said that how transparent the owners are, they share every niche website they have so you can have a look and learn.

But actually, Jim’s first website, Improvephotography.com was built in a different era of SEO…so to me, whatever traffic it gets (millions a month) is not very relevant today. The way he built it, would not lead to success today, even Jim admits that.

What about the others? Jim & Ricky often say in their videos that they have started a new website but they don’t share it yet cause everyone would just go there and that would completely skew their numbers in terms of growth. Fair enough.

But at the same time they claim that the method they teach will get you 75-100k visitors a month, that’s what you need to get into premium ad networks.

This traffic volume is based on the traffic data of the websites they DO share with everyone.

How is that traffic data not skewed then?…

Controversial methods in Keyword research and SEO, linkbuilding

I was a bit sceptical about their old-school, manual keyword research method but it sorta’ made sense. Their view on SEO is that you must stop writing for Google, writing for the algorithm. Google has become smart enough to pretty accurately guesswork what people search for, and it is less and less based on what they actually type in the search bar. (And more and more based on user data, and preferences of other user groups who search for similar phrases).

The point is, optimising for ONE keyword – long-tail or no long-tail – is probably not that important any more. Instead, you should focus on solving a problem, answering a question, being helpful, and…most importantly…finding weak spots with less competition.

Then I realised that this is basically what marketing is about, so there is no non-sense here. It has been Google – and the way the algorithm worked, and how people tried to game it – that took SEO off the tangent a bit.

As for linkbuilding, they teach you how to EARN links, rather than building them. Earned links are much more valuable anyways. Bad news is that for some niches it may be more difficult to create your own data- or survey-driven post that other can refer to.

Behind the Game in terms of E-A-T.

Authority has been the prime focus for a few years now for Google in determining ranking. I just don’t know how on earth these guys overlooked it. They are upping their game now and have amended the training course now.

In fact, they not just amended but made MASSIVE changes. Whereas before they talked about how to create a niche website, PLANT THE SEED AND LET IT GROW, they don’t say this anymore.

They encouraged you to start building your 2nd website while the first one grows. They don’t teach that anymore.

They said they earn passive income with their sites, while they didn’t even look at them for years. They just created the initial content (30-50 posts), placed a few affiliate links and let it grow. Well, you’ll never guess, they don’t teach this anymore.

What they teach is E-A-T: in other words how to build authority, how to own your niche. How to build a community. How to be brandable.

This questions the whole idea of building a (semi-)passive niche website. Where are they heading then? What will happen to those sites that were built by their students a year or 18 months ago, and still don’t rank and don’t make money because they have not built authority?

Is the blind leading the blind in this constantly changing world of SEO?

UPDATE: Jim and Ricky announced not so long ago, that they sell all their niche websites, and they start new ones from scratch. They that to keep up-to-date with what’s working RIGHT NOW.

Project 24 is not for you if you want to learn about PPC advertising and driving traffic to your website using non-organic search traffic

Fact. If you rather pick a ClickBank product and learn how to spend $6-700 a month on Facebook and Insta ads wisely for nice return, Project 24 is not for you.

Not for you if you don’t have the right mindset, patience, persistency and motivation to see through the 24 months.

To be honest, that’s true for every decent training course. The fact that Project 24 tells you to make a 2-year plan makes it more real all of a sudden. So if you are not sure, wait until you CANNOT NOT START CHANGING YOUR LIFE.

No proven results other than the owners’.

I’ve touched on it before, but there is one important caviat: the method actually works. As Google is becoming more and more sophisticated, old-school SEO, link-building and co. is becoming less relevant. Because Google knows that the old way was full of cheating, black-hat SEO.

People are getting results already, even though no-one in Project 24 has reached the 24-month mark yet.

It may not be as passive as you might want it to be, but the value-based, helpful, high-quality, relevant content will always have a place on the Search Engine Results Page.

It may take longer. It may be more difficult. But it sustains. As they say, if it comes easy it goes easy.

Does Project 24 Works? – Real Life Examples

So what results people actually get with this? There is very limited information available in the public domain. One guy is worth checking out though: he has been publishing his progress for months now and he is actually ahead of the plan in terms of traffic.

Here’s a link to his Channel and his latest (15 Months) update of his progress.

Or here’s another one. The results he has got may look humble, but don’t forget, he is on a 2-year plan, and the real growth only comes in year 2. And he’s got 4 websites already with a ton of content. That’s 4 more than he had a 1 year ago. I do wonder though, how his main website would perform if he focused on it during the first year and the content he made for 3 other sites would earn the clicks on his main one.

Success of Project 24 Forum Members

I can’t even count the number of success stories on the discussion board. They are like mini testimonials.

Frequently Asked Questions about IncomeSchool.com’s Project 24

Is Project 24 a Scam?

Project 24 is definitely not a scam. The method they teach works. It may be slower than other methods, but it operates on a very low cost-level and they actually tell you what you can expect. There is no magic involved, but hard work, quite a lot.

Can my website rank without backlinks?

It is absolutely possible, the backlink profile is only one of many ranking factors. Actually, actively building backlinks is not even recommended by Google. It does not mean you can’t EARN backlinks, and Project 24 teaches you how to create content that earns you backlinks.

How do I find keywords if I don’t use a Keyword Tool?

Project 24 claims that if you rely solely on keyword research tools you may actually chase keywords that nobody searches for. You accidently can also omit search phrases that are shown as low search volume in the keyword tool but in fact they are highly relevant and popular.

IncomeSchool’s Project 24 teaches you to go back to the source (Google) and let Google tell you what people search for. This is a bit more labour-intensive but much more reliable and predictable.

Although you can try out my method that only takes a couple of hours and you get more than 150+ longtail keywords and hundreds of blog-post titles: The Ultimate Niche and Keyword Research Method

Summary & Verdict

I must admit I am a big fan of IncomeSchool’s Project 24. Jim & Ricky are totally transparent about what you will get if you sing up, and they are absolutely clear what you need to do to succeed. And even if you do what they tell you to do, it takes 24 months on average to get where you want to be.

Having said that, if you do follow their 60-step blueprint, you’ll see success much faster than if you only tried to figure out things yourself. It took them years, after all, to perfect their method. You can also leverage other courses made available to you with your membership, that can teach you everything to scale your business in the coming 2-3-5 years, not just replacing your current income but to completely change the life you live.

So when you are ready to start your niche website just head over to IncomeSchool.com/Project24 and sign up.

The price tag is more than reasonable: if you started earning money with your website only 1 month sooner than you would have done it with other courses (or on your own), the $449 cost of the membership would come back very quickly.

IncomeSchool Project 24 Review - 60 Steps to Full Time Income

Project 24 is a beginner-friendly step-by-step program gouiding you through 60 steps on how to start a niche website from scratch and build it into a full-time income within 24 months. Project 24 has a unique take on SEO and linkbuilding, focusing on saving time and making efforts where they benefit the most. The method also leaves more control in website creators' hands.

Editor's Rating:
4.5

Alternatives

Related post: What Is the Best Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners?

If you already have a website but you kinda struggle, the best alternative for the paid Project 24 course is the free stuff Jim & Ricky give away on their YouTube channel. Go check out every single video they have uploaded, and implement EVERYTHING. And after you have done that, then it may be worth having a look at their 60-step method and all the other training videos that’s not available on YouTube.

Actually, I did not start with IncomeSchool’s Project 24 as a beginner either, exactly for the reasons above; but I glad I joined later as it complemented Wealthy Affiliate’s training really well.

Wealthy Affiliate vs. IncomeSchool Project 24

I started the training course at Wealthy Affiliate for free, I even started my first website for free, however it was no question for me to pay the monthly membership fee as soon as I saw the value, compared to…well, even to Project 24.

Wealthy Affiliate has a different, yet very similar value-based approach to Project 24. The training at Wealthy Affiliate is even more beginner friendly, with walk-through videos at every step of your journey.

WA – as their name suggests – focuses on Affiliate Marketing. And as such, the structure of your website will receive less attention than Project 24’s highly optimised method. Bear in mind, in P24 you need significant amount of traffic to achieve your money goals (through a mixture of affiliate commissions, info-products and premium ad revenue). With WA you need much less traffic to earn more money, and the healthy combination of various income sources is achieved through different affiliate programs and different niches, rather than different revenue streams on the same website.

WA has been on the market for 14 years now with countless success stories. It has a much bigger community that can help you, no matter what questions you have.

You also don’t need to worry about hosting as they have their in-house state-of-the-art hosting solution. Their site support is lightning fast when you – once in a blue moon – need them.

WA also comes with a free keyword research tool, that I use complementary to the method I learned in Project 24.

Thanks to the huge community, WA could build out a network where you can request feedback on your website, you can request comments (to boost SEO), and you can practically earn money through being a helpful member of the community alone, without even having a website.

Added to these differences, some other advantages of Wealthy Affiliate over Income School are:

• Weekly live trainings
• Huge (I mean HUGE) library of training courses
• On Premium membership your referrer / mentor is there for you through private messaging and coaching (at least I am, for my referrals, others may have a different approach).

You can go and test Wealthy Affiliate for free using this (affiliate) link.

I would be really humbled to welcome you and help you achieve your dreams.

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Greg

Aspiring entrepreneur online and offline for the last 14 years who is not afraid to share his trials, errors, failures and successes to help you avoid the same mistakes. Owner of 2 websites and 2 online shops, making websites ever since FrontPage Express was a thing and earning a side-income online since Amazon was a small business.

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