Project 24: My Honest Review After 1 Year
I have first watched Income School YouTube channel’s video in 2017. The video was STOP DOING KEYWORD RESEARCH!
I was just trying to dip my toes into the vast sea of affiliate marketing. Except for Income School, everyone teaching affiliate marketing at that time was talking about link building, keyword research tools, etc.
But Income School was different. Not just because they discouraged you to stop keyword research tools, there is something in them that I haven’t found in hundreds of other “digital marketing experts”
Here’s what makes Income School unique & special:
- Income School’s co-founders, both Jim & Ricky are extremely honest and transparent about their site and how they make money. In the public YouTube videos, they show you everything regarding their site- not just the domain. You can see their site’s analytics, amazon affiliate dashboard, etc. Let me remind you, at that time, even gurus claiming to make $10,000 per month didn’t have the guts to show their site.
- Income School’s site making and earning process is very relieving. I have always hated link building. I thought this is the worst step of making a site and preparing it to earn money. However, I believed without link building, your site will never rank in Google. Jim & Ricky taught me that’s not the case at all. You only should focus on writing helpful & meaty content, and Google will do its job. Now, I own several niche sites and haven’t made a single backlink to them. I can’t stress how comfortable this process is!
- Many gurus teach you to write only product reviews, use fake author profile, etc. I always felt like I am cheating with my readers, or deceiving them. That’s not the case with Income School. They teach you to be real, authentic and genuinely helpful to your readers.
So, as you can imagine, I am a HUGE fan of Income School. So, when Jim and Ricky announced their new course program Project 24, I immediately wanted to join in.
However, I didn’t have the money then to join the program. So, I waited. And after a very LONG wait, finally I was able to join Project 24 back in December 1, 2019.
At the time of writing this article, I have been in project 24 for more than a year.
And in this article, I’ll share honestly everything you need to know before joining project 24.
What Is Project 24?
The Project 24 course teaches you to replace your current income with passive income generated from your site or YouTube channel in 24 months.
Now, that’s not a promise or anything. How much you’ll earn depends on your efforts and hard work. However, Project 24 is determined to help you do so.
Now, let’s see what Project 24 has to offer in a nutshell:
The Famous 60 Step Approach
Project 24 is known for its famous 60 step course. Project 24 is not just a single course. It has a library of courses. At the time of writing, there are 25 courses in project 24.
However, if you want to work as a blogger, the most important course that you need to start with is the famous ‘The Blogging 60 Steps’ course.
In this course, you’ll receive step by step 60 instructions that will teach you what specific thing to do each day. The good thing about this is you’ll have specific instructions in front of you along with how to perform that instruction. The only thing you’ll need to do is follow the instruction.
I think this course alone justifies the pricing of Project 24.
Library of Courses
As I have already said, Project 24 currently has 25 courses in its library. I’ll talk about courses in detail later.
Weekly New Podcasts
Every Project 24 member has access to the weekly podcasts where Jim and Ricky talks about the latest developments & news in the industry. This way, you’ll be up-to-date about what’s happening in the digital marketing world as well as in the project 24 course, upcoming courses, any special events, etc.
Till now, more than 100 episodes have been published!
A Very Strong Community
I have been a part of many communities. But I can proudly say, Project 24’s community is till now the best and most helpful one in my experience. We have our own forum style community platform.
There are many members in the community who are earning a full-time income now from their blog and YouTube channel. These brilliant minds are ready to help you whenever you are in a problem.
I can’t count how many times I have asked questions in the community. In every single instance, I have received help from the other members.
Project 24’s Main Principle
If you are not aware of the main principles behind Project 24, you shouldn’t join. First look at these principles that the course was built on and join only if you agree with these:
No Keyword Research Tool
Where almost every guru in the money making niche teach you to use keyword research tools, Jim and Ricky don’t. They’ve found it countless times that keyword research tools fail to show accurate and proven data.
In fact, I checked and found similar result too. I received almost 10x more traffic in a blog post (according to Google Analytics) than the estimated traffic number shown in a keyword research tool.
So, if you join P24, you’ll have to learn doing keyword research manually. There is no automatic short-cut way. It will take time and effort.
However, at the end of the day, you’ll come up with some solid keywords if you understand the concept well.
No Backlink
Jim and Ricky was very much against link building from the very beginning. Their super viral & controversial video on ‘Don’t Do Link Building’ really put them on the YouTube map.
Jim and Ricky don’t say that backlinks are useless. They are obviously helpful and a very significant ranking factor for Google. What Jim and Ricky say is, wasting time on asking for links is not smart.
You can better spend that time on writing good, helpful contents. And guess what, if the content is good and helpful, it will automatically attract links in the long run.
No Quick Result
Do you know why it is called Project 24? Because, the main vision of the course is to replace your current income with passive income from your blog or YouTube in 24 months.
Yes, you saw it right. It will take you roughly 24 months to see significant income from your site. So, if you are looking for something quick and easy that will produce result just after a week, then I am sorry, project 24 is not for you.
Creators Of Project 24: Jim & Ricky
Project 24 is the brainchild of Income School, co-founded by Jim harmer and Ricky Kesler.
“Jim Harmer is a well-known internet entrepreneur, co-founder of Income School, and author of Work Energy. His sites and Youtube videos have been viewed tens of millions of times.”
– Jim Harmer
“Ricky Kesler is an internet entrepreneur, influencer, and co-founder of Income School. He has helped numerous others become financially independent by helping them create online businesses.”
– Ricky Kesler
What Will You Get With Project 24?
All that was the introductory part. Now we’ll see what you’ll actually get from the Project 24.
We’ll start with the courses:
Course Dashboard
Currently, you’ll get total 25 courses in Project 24. The courses are divided into different categories, but all are made keeping one simple goal ahead: to help you make a living online.
In the below table, you’ll see which courses fall under which category. I have also made a category of the courses I like most:
Blogging | YouTube | Marketing | Monetization | Other | My Favorites |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
The Blogging 60 Steps | The YouTube Course | Email Marketing 101 | Monetize With Info Products | The Success Mindset | The Blogging 60 Steps |
Improvement and Speeding Up Writing | YouTube Beginnings | E.A.T for SEO | Monetize With Ads | Reviewing Student’s Sites | Improvement and Speeding Up Writing |
Reviewing Student’s Sites | YouTube 60 Steps | Personal Branding | 10 Day Info Products | Protection From Downside | Reviewing Student’s Sites |
Hiring and Training Writers | Video Editing with Final Cut PRO | Monetize with Lead Generation | How To Get Traffic From Pinterest | Search Analysis | |
Mythbusting | 10 Day Info Products | No Nonsense SEO | |||
Web Traffic Snowball | Picking Profitable Niches | Picking Profitable Niches | |||
Search Analysis | The Battleship Method | ||||
No Nonsense SEO | E.A.T for SEO | ||||
Picking Profitable Niches | Snippet Optimization | ||||
The Battleship Method | 10 Day Info Products | ||||
E.A.T for SEO | The YouTube Course | ||||
Snippet Optimization | |||||
10 Day Info Products |
1. The Blogging 60 Steps
- Total Lessons: 60
This is the core course that Project 24 was built on. Before Project 24, Jim and Ricky sold just this course. If you join Project 24, this should be the course you need to start your journey with.
From picking a niche to writing blog posts, you’ll find lessons on every aspect of blogging in this course. And the best thing is, the information is presented in such a way that you won’t feel intimated.
Everyday, you’ll need to perform just 1 step. So, this should be a 60 day course for you, meaning, if you stick to the required pace, this course should be finished by 60 days.
At the end of this course, you should have a fully functioning blog with 30 posts. However, that doesn’t mean that the blog is finished.
In these days, just 30 posts in a blog is hardly enough. You need to write more content.
What this course teaches you is the basics and helps you to put a seed into the ground. Later on, you’ll need to water the seed and make it turn into a giant tree!
2. The YouTube Course
- Total lessons: 33
This course is a very new addition to the Project 24 course library. There is a previous version of this course named 60 Steps To YouTubing. However, Jim and Ricky felt many things have changed and the course should be renovated. And that’s the good thing about project 24, you’ll always get the up-to-date stuff!
While the previous 60 Steps To YouTubing course is specifically geared towards beginners and still relevant, the new ‘The YouTube Course’ is for any video creator at any stage and skill level.
Whether you are a professional YouTuber with 100k subscribers or just starting out, you’ll be benefited from this course.
In contrast to the previous YouTube course, this one just give you a step after another. In stead, in this course, the Project 24 members will teach you the core principles that you’ll need in order to succeed on YouTube.
3. YouTube Beginnings
- Total Lessons: 11
This short course is basically for teaching the technical skills that you need to be a solid YouTuber. Planning, filming, editing videos, setting up the equipment, etc. are discussed in this short & sweet course.
4. 10 Day Info Products
- Total Lessons: 23
If you are a regular viewer of the Income School channel, you’ll often hear Jim and Ricky talking about informative products. According to their experience, info products are a fantastic way to sky-rocket your earning from the site.
They increase EPMV (Earning per 1000 visitors) by many folds (typically 4x to 6x). Suppose, if a site is earning $25 EPMV from ads and affiliate, with a successful info product, the EPMV can even cross $100.
However, building a successful info product is not easy if you don’t have the experience. From creating the product to setting up the sales page, copywriting, there are tons of things you need to learn.
Fortunately, this course is here to teach you all of these.
5. Protection From Downside
- Total Lesson: 1
This is not a typical course. This is more like a single half hour seminar type video where Ricky shows the importance of keeping income consistent and reliable.
The Internet is unpredictable and lots of things can change within seconds. In this unpredictable world, what are some of the things you can do to keep your income stream as much reliable and consistent as possible?
Ricky shows all of that.
6. The Success Mindset
- Total Lesson: 1
This one is also a half hour seminar type video where Jim shares his stories to motivate the people that have joined him in a fine noon. He shares the most important thing you need to have in order to make it in the Internet World.
7. Improvement and Speeding Up Writing
- Total Lesson: 18
Jim and Ricky have always put the most importance on content. Writing helpful, long and meaty content is their secret to win Google rankings over and over again.
But, how can a complete beginner write such good content? Not only that, you need to write the content efficiently so that a 1200 word response post doesn’t take 5 days time.
As the name suggests, this course teaches how you can improve and at the same time, speed up your writing.
8. Reviewing Student’s Sites
- Total lessons: 13
The Project 24 members reviewed several of the student’s sites and shared their opinion on what is causing the site lag behind or sky-rocket success.
These reviews will tremendously help you to locate if you are making any mistakes or if there is any lacking in your site that you need to take care of immediately.
9. Hiring and Training Writers
- Total lessons: 5
You won’t be the only one who is writing for your site. Eventually, you’ll want to get additional help with the writing part.
And for that, you’ll need to know how to hire and train writers. When it comes to hiring, the most tiring thing is to teach the writers the Project 24 way to write.
However, this course will do the teaching for you. Whenever you are ready to hire a writer, just ask them to watch this course. It will be enough to train the writer on the Project 24 writing style.
10. Mythbusting
- Total lesson: 1
There are lots of myths lurking around in the Internet regarding SEO, making money online etc. This course busts some of these myths real hard!
11. Email Marketing 101
- Total Lessons: 7
This is not an intensive course on email marketing. You’ll just tip your toes into the world of email marketing, learn some of the basic concepts, set up your first email list and so on.
If you are interested about email marketing but don’t have a good idea about it, this course can be a great place to start.
12. How To Get Traffic From Pinterest
- Total Lessons: 6
This course is a bit different. You won’t learn anything from Jim, Ricky or any other member of the Income School Team. Instead, the Income School team interviewed some people that are doing very good in Pinterest.
I personally didn’t like this course that much. I hope we’ll get an intensive course on Pinterest Marketing from Jim and Ricky soon.
13. Web Traffic Snowball
- Total lesson: 1
This is a nearly 1 hour masterclass type video to increase web traffic in your site. You’ll learn some simple yet brilliant techniques that you can try today to increase your site’s traffic.
14. Search Analysis
- Total Lessons: 8
This is one of the core courses of Project 24. When you’ll go through the 60 steps to blogging course, you’ll already cover this course in the process.
Search Analysis (aka keyword research) is what sets Income School apart from hundreds of other teachers. As I have said earlier, Jim and Ricky don’t use any keyword research tool. In fact, they discourage to use and rely on such tools.
According to the Project 24 method, you’ll just need Google and your intuition for researching keywords. So, there is no need to spend hundreds of bucks for any keyword research tool.
15. No Nonsense SEO
- Total Lessons: 7
SEO is one of the most controversial topics in the digital marketing world. Everyone has their own opinion about SEO. However, most of the opinions are basically same.
Some of the common opinions are:
- You’ll need to use the main keyword exactly as it is in the article 5-6 times to make Google understand what the topic is about
- You’ll need to use LSI keywords to help the search engine understand what the article is about
- No ranking is possible without backlinking. So, you’ll need to set aside a large budget for backlinks
- You can get away with moderate 1000 word articles if you have good backlinks, etc. etc.
Income School shattered these old ideas. Their new approach to SEO is so much fun and liberating. According to them, there is no need to waste time on Backlinks.
Yes, backlinks are obviously important. But your time is better spend on creating contents rather than cold-emailing people for a backlink.
They also have earth-shattering ideas regarding On Page SEO.
The No Nonsense SEO is one of my favorite courses in the entire library.
16. Picking Profitable Niches
- Total Lessons: 12
If you are just starting out and don’t have a site yet, boy you’re gonna love this course! Jim and Ricky have made Niche Selection super easy with their process.
No need for any tool that presents you incorrect data. You’ll learn some principles in this course with which you can understand yourself if a niche has enough audience interested/engaged in it or not.
You’ll also learn about some of the niches that you need to stay away from!
17. The Battleship Method
- Total Lessons: 8
This is one of the newer courses in the library and boy it is so awesome! Let me explain to you what the battleship method is.
Suppose, you are continuously writing on your blog and a year has passed. Now, one fine morning, you’ve seen some of the posts are not performing as they should. On the other hand, some are not even ranking.
Which one should you update? Or should you let go of the posts and start focusing on creating new ones?
Jim and Ricky made a tool for us that will tell you exactly which posts you need to work on again and which ones to let go. Not only that, the tool will also suggest you how you should improve the post for better ranking!
Isn’t that totally cool?
18. Monetize With Info Products
- Total Lessons: 2
This is a rather old course on the Info Product. Though you won’t get much actionable steps in this course, it is better to watch this course for having a solid idea about how info products work and how they can increase your revenue.
Once you are done with this course, do not forget to watch the new 10 Day Info Product Course!
19. E.A.T for SEO
- Total Lessons: 30
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
EAT is the newest addition in Google’s algorithm but most people aren’t even talking about it.
In this course, Jim dive deep into the mysterious world of EAT and shows you 30 specific steps that you can do to increase the EAT of your site.
Just watch each video, implement that step and voila! Your site will be ready for some serious EAT!
20. Snippet Optimization
- Total Lessons: 12
It is bewildering to see not many people are talking about snippet optimization as they should. Snippet Optimization is the new way to rank in Google higher than your authoritative competitors.
Snippet is the little box google shows when you search for something, mainly a question. Google shows this little snippet even before the 1st position.
If you know how to crack the snippet optimization idea, you’ll be able to rank an article even if it is highly competitive. This is some serious stuff.
And I believe every serious blogger need to know what this course is teaching!
21. Monetize With Ads
- Total Lessons: 12
Income School highly suggests to implement ads on your site as a monetization strategy. Ads is one of the easiest and most passive sources of revenue for a niche site. You set up it once and you are good to go as long as the website runs. Nothing can be more passive then revenue from ads.
In this course, you’ll learn a lot about ads, how they work, how much revenue they generate, which ad network to go for, how to make your site eligible for the premium ad networks, etc.
Even though you might not need to watch this course at the early stage of developing your site, once your site starts to get more than 10,000 pageviews per month, this course can really help you out to multiply your EPMV (Earning Per Thousand Visitors).
22. Video Editing with Final Cut PRO
- Total Lessons: 12
Along with the blogging the route, project 24 is also very active in teaching YouTubing as a career. As a YouTube, you’ll definitely need to know how to edit videos. But that doesn’t mean you need to do a 6 months extensive course on video editing now.
You don’t have to edit videos like you are editing a Christopher Nolan movie. Some basic ideas and techniques are enough for editing YouTube videos. In this course, Jim will teach you exactly those preliminary editing concepts as well as some advanced techniques.
23. Personal Branding
- Total Lesson: 1
This is a standalone 35 minute video on Branding from Jim.
What is Personal Branding? Why it is important? How to achieve that?
All these questions are answered in this video. This lesson is specially important when you have a decent audience and thinking of scaling up your business.
24. Monetize with Lead Generation
- Total Lessons: 5
Though this is not an extensive course on lead generation, these 5 lessons will help you to understand what lead generation is, how to use lead generation as a monetization technique and how to implement lead generating ideas on your site.
This is not for everyone. Lead generation works on specific niches. If your niche falls into that, congratulations! Lead generation can be a fantastic way to earn some extra revenue from your site.
25. YouTube 60 Steps
- Total Lessons: 60
This course is now archived. It is the old version of the latest ‘The YouTube Course’. Though this course is the old one, don’t ever think it is useless.
This course can be a fantastic starting point for absolute beginners who are just starting with YouTube. You’ll get 60 steps, just like the 60 steps to blogging course.
Each day, you’ll need to complete 1 step. As you’ll go through the steps, after about 2 months, you’ll find yourself with a brandable YouTube channel with a good amount of content already generating views.
If you are new to YouTubing, I’ll highly suggest to start your learning from this course.
My Story
In this section, you’ll get to track your progress with the Project 24 system from month to month. According to Project 24 timeline, each month you should accomplish specific goals and get specific results.
Here, you can insert what have you done throughout the whole month, suppose your month 1. Then you can see if you’ve done everything that is required by the Project 24 timeline. If not, you’ll see that you are lagging behind.
Here is a map of the Project 24 timeline:
Connect
Project 24 Community
I am proud of this community. Frankly, I believe this community alone justifies the price of the Project 24. This is a private forum including all the project 24 members.
Not only Jim and Ricky, other P24 members that are not earning a full time income from their site and channel are here to help you out with any problem. You can ask help from the senior members, see what others are doing and form a real bond with all the members.
Many times this community has helped me to get on with my site when everything seemed bleak and hopeless. I love our community!
Project 24 Podcast
Here you’ll find all the episodes of the Project 24 podcast. If for any reason you want to hear the podcasts from your laptop or PC, you can do it from here.
Content Warrior Challenge
This is a biannual challenge for project 24 members. This is the concept of the challenge:
For a whole month, you’ll need to write 2000 words each day for your blog or publish one YouTube video for your channel.
At the end of the challenge, your site will have 60,000 words published or a YouTube channel with 30 videos ready to generate views. Attending this challenge is not mandatory, but it will certainly help your site a lot!
P24 Events
Here you’ll find information about all the P24 events that are organized throughout the year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend any of them as I live far, very very far from them (in another continent!).
More Resources
Project 24 Milestones
Here is what Project 24 says about Milestones:
Milestones are monetary achievements reached by implementing Project 24 techniques on your website or YouTube channel
– Project 24
In project 24, there are several milestones. Once you reach a milestone, your profile on the community will bear that milestone’s badge as an honor. Some of the milestones are:
- Curry day
- $100 per month
- $1000 per month
- Full-time Income
Acabado Theme
With the Project 24, you’ll automatically get access to Income School’s famous ‘Acabado’ theme. Acabado’s main specialty is it’s stupid fast! The theme is specifically made for bloggers keeping content in focus.
If you are not a project 24 member, you’ll have to pay $50 annually to use Acabado. However, all project 24 members can get this theme for free!
Files
In this section, you’ll find all the downloadable tools and files that are needed for your blogging and YouTubing journey. Whenever Jim or Ricky mentions some file for download, you can pretty much find it in this section.
Some Things That Can Improve
I really love Project 24 and what Jim and Ricky have tried to offer throughout the course. If you ask me to point out some things in the course that might need some improvement, it will be really hard for me to do so. Any way, here are the things that are coming on the top of my head:
- I didn’t like the lead generation course that much. I felt it a bit boring and not very instructive. The course is good for giving you a basic knowledge on the lead generation monetization strategy.
- The Pinterest course can use some improvement. Frankly, I didn’t like the course at all. It was not taught by P24 staff. The course mainly comprises of interviews of some of the leading Pinterest experts. I would hope to get something that shows specifically what to do to win it in the Pinterest game.
How Much Does Project 24 Cost?
Project 24 costs $449 for the first year. If you want to continue with the course for the upcoming years, you’ll have to pay $199 every year. You might wonder why continue the course? It’s because Project 24 is constantly getting improved with newer courses all the time (you might not want to miss those).
Is There Any Guarantee Of Success?
Final Words
So, this is all about my Project 24 review. I know if you get project 24 through my link, I’ll get a handsome commission. But, trust me, everything that I’ve written here is true and from my heart. I really believe Project 24 is one of the most solid courses in the internet that really helps its students to success.
If you want to join the course, do it now. Why keep your success await?
See you in the Project 24 community!