Income School by Rickey Kesler and Jim Harmer is an internet marketing company that teaches people how to make money through blogging and YouTube channels. There are a variety of courses within the Project 24 program to help you make money online and achieve financial freedom. There are courses that teach you website creation, topic selection, search analysis, content creation, monetization of your sites, and more. In this Income School Project 24 Review, we'll cover what the major Project 24 courses are, if Project 24 is worth it, if affiliate marketing is lucrative in 2023, if blogging is worth it, and how affiliate marketing compares to the local lead generation business model that offers a passive income.
Pros
Income School is constantly updating their program to ensure they're teaching you how to always stay profitable whether you're blogging, creating a YouTube channel or both
Ricky and Jim have made millions through their affiliate niche websites
The private forum-style community is a valuable resource for any Project 24 member because the community is very engaging
Live mastermind sessions held each week
Cons
Few recent success stories of students earning 6-figures
Some SEO methods taught in this course are unorthodox
Creating niche blogs and YouTube channels isn't a business model that's going to earn you a passive income.
Price:
Project 24 costs $449 for the first year and $249 each year after, if you choose to continue with the course.
Refund Policy:
No refunds allowed
Training:
27 total courses within the Project 24 library covering topics such as blogging, YouTube, marketing, monetization, and more.
Group:
Income School private Forum
Origin:
The domain name, IncomeSchool.com, was bought in 2013. The platform was created in 2015 and Project 24 started in 2018.
Reputation:
Rickey and Jim have been making money online for 20 years and have earned multiple 7-figures. They have a good reputation in online marketing.
Who are Jim Harmer & Ricky Kesler?
Ricky Kesler is from Meridian, Idaho and graduated from Meridian High School. In 2004, he attended Brigham Young University for his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering. 3 years later in 2007, Ricky worked as an assistant at Pond's Plumbing and Heating. In 2009, he worked as a marketing intern and a Process Engineering intern at the Celanese manufacturing plant.
Ricky signed up at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Kenan Flagler Business School in 2013 and got his MBA. He worked as a manager at HP and then as a research engineer and strategic marketing & business analyst at Celanese. Time passes and he just didn't feel fulfilled like he thought he would. Although he wanted to start his own business, he didn't know what exactly to do.
Jim Harmer is from Rexburg, Idaho and started a web design startup called Journey Advertising. In 2009, he got into photography and in 2011 attended the Ave Maria School of Law, as well as the University of Idaho College of Law. All the while, he started his photography business, Improve Photography. That business venture proved massively successful as he gained over 1 million followers on social media and was one of the 40 most photographers online. Jim even wrote a book called Work Energy.
This book talks about his life experience with internet marketing. You learn how to find the things that motivate you and that make you successful to build upon them.
Though Jim was having outstanding success with his photography business, he realized he was making more money blogging than he was as an attorney. This made him want to continue blogging.
In 2015, Jim and Ricky started Income School to teach others how to drive massive amounts of traffic to websites and earn an income online. Project 24 came to life in 2018. On their Income School YouTube channel, they post videos weekly about SEO, blogging, and online marketing.
They also share more tips and strategies that are currently working on The Income School Members podcast.
What you'll learn in the Project 24 course
Project 24 is a library of courses that allows you to use the power of content to generate an income online. The courses within Project 24 are constantly being updated, and the top two courses are The Blogging Course and The YouTube System.
With this course, they teach you how to choose the right profitable niche, how to create content for your niche site and how to monetize it. They show you their Search Analysis method, which helps you pick topics for your article so that you're never without ideas.
The goal of this course is to help you grow a YouTube audience quickly and sustainably instead of a blog or together with your blog. Within this section, you learn how to create perfect content from the start, how to create your own information product, market and sell it, how to build authority to your site, and how to make money through your channel with affiliate marketing.
In this section, you learn how you can promote your blog and YT channels. Some important ways to do so are...
- Affiliate Links
- PPC ads
- Social Media marketing
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
This group of courses shows you how to monetize your blogs and YouTube channels. Some ways to do so are...
- Affiliate marketing
- Paid channel memberships
- Patreon accounts and more.
Other Courses in Project 24
Within your Project 24 dashboard, they also give you a list of tasks for you to accomplish each month to keep you on track.
What is Acabado?
Acabado is a WordPress theme by Income School that was designed to help improve site ranking by increasing page speed, improving SEO, and making it more mobile friendly.
With Acabado, you have anti-bounce protection, unique home page customization options, Pinterest image optimization, and more. Acabado costs $67 per year or $179 for 100 years.
Is the Income School Project 24 worth it?
Jonah is a student who reached a monthly income of $2.4K. Project 24 was his first experience with blogging and said he learned everything he needed to know from Jim and Ricky. His blog reached 60K page views per month and can still work at his full-time job. He says that what he appreciates about Jim, Ricky, and the Project 24 team, was that they keep the course content up to date and the private community is very helpful. Jonah said this course will teach you everything you need to know to build a successful blog.
With the help of the P24 team, Lisa was also able to build her site and reach almost 60K site visitors per month. She did a parenting blog and has monetized it through ads, Amazon, and other affiliate programs. She went from having no experience creating a site, let alone a blog, to making anywhere between $500 and $2000 per month.
Income School Project 24 Alternatives
The Affiliate Lab, by Matt Diggity, teaches you how to build, rank, and monetize your authority niche website. This course takes things a step further by showing you how to flip your sites for between 32X-40X the monthly revenue your site generates. Matt is an SEO expert who teaches some of the best ranking techniques to help you rank your affiliate website. There are over 100 training videos and you get templates, SEO tools, and several bonus courses.
Price: The Affiliate Lab costs $997.
More info: The Affiliate Lab review.
The Super Affiliate System by John Crestani teaches you all the ways you can make money with affiliate marketing in this 12 week course. John dives deep on Facebook and Native ads, although they can be expensive. There are over 50 hours of video training and they provide you with tools, funnels, landing pages, and emails. Each week, John holds live weekly webinars within the private Facebook group.
Price: Super Affiliate System costs $997.
More info: Super Affiliate System 3.0 review.
For a complete list of alternatives to Project 24, read my article on the best affiliate marketing courses.
Is affiliate marketing profitable in 2023?
Affiliate marketing is still profitable in 2023. Of all the online business models that you can choose from, affiliate marketing has a low barrier of entry and doesn't require much to get started.
The thing with affiliate marketing is that you need to rank globally for your search terms. Therefore, you need to generate more traffic than the thousands of affiliate marketers worldwide you're competing with if you want to see a worthy return. Another knock against affiliate marketing is that you can't expect to see any commissions for the first 6-12 months. This goes for your blogs and YouTube channels. When you finally get money, it won't be a predictable income.
Whether you're starting a blog or a YouTube channel, you'll need to publish content often. If you are running paid ads on Facebook, you need to set aside a good amount of funds to split test and see what ad format, copy, image, and call to action offer the best conversions.
With affiliate marketing, you can still make money if you're patient, but there is too much instability and unpredictability.
Are blogs still relevant in 2023?
Blogs are still relevant in 2023 and you can still make money from them. Although I also maintain my blog, Ippei.com, it's not the most passive income. There's content that needs to be created, articles that need to be written and ranked. That all takes time. To build up the authority of the site also takes many months and years. I started this blog in 2018 and have been consistently building its authority.
Blogging won't pay you thousands of dollars overnight. It's a long-term play for any content creator. For that reason, many people choose local lead generation as their first business over affiliate marketing and blogging. Let me explain why.
Final Thoughts
With local lead generation, you're in much more control over how much money you make and when you get paid. You choose who you work with, the niche you're going to get into, and if you don't think your client is taking care of your leads, you can forward them to another.
The websites I create rank first on Google for the keywords relevant to the niche I get into. For example, this tree care site has been paying me ever since 2015 because I ranked it and it continues to generate leads each month.
I don’t have to worry about competing with thousands of marketers when I can focus on 10-15 local small businesses. Once my site ranks, it keeps its rank with very little to no maintenance.
In 2020, even during Covid-19, I continued to build more lead gen sites and I write at least 1 blog post a day for this site. I realize that these are the high-income-producing activities that directly increase my free traffic every month. With local lead generation, you can get into pandemic-proof niches that continue to pay you on autopilot.
There are over 7000 students who are in the coaching program that are building lead generation sites and working on ranking and renting them to local business owners. Those business owners are happy to receive more customers every month and pay you for it.
To learn the skills that will allow you to live a financially free life, click here to learn more about the local lead generation training program.
