Income School Project 24 Review 2024 – Do They Know What They’re Talking About?

Everything You Need to Know About Project 24 is On This Page

Did the YouTube algorithm feed you Income School’s videos too? 

Jim and Ricky’s video content appeared on my radar about a year ago, and I was intrigued, to say the least.

From their videos, I got the sense that they knew what they were doing; and their approach was different and controversial to the SEO community. Did I mention they’re likable people?

Aside from their useful content, they sell a course called Project 24 (P24) that teaches people how to build niche websites. 

Their approach to building sites was a bit foreign to me (no keyword tools or backlinking?), but I knew if P24 students were getting results and leaving great reviews, then it might be worth checking it out.

I went down the Income School Project 24 rabbit hole. It has its pros and cons, and you can’t argue with their student’s results.

I came across more success stories from Project 24 students, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s quickly cover the guys behind Income School’s Project 24. 

What Is Income School?

Income School launched in 2015 to teach people online business. More specifically, how to build passive income websites via their website (Incomeschool.com), YouTube channel, and online courses.

You can learn more about Income School’s story on their about page. Here’s a quick summary of their business story:

Income School is an internet marketing company that teaches people how to create an internet business through blogging and creating Youtube Channels.  Income School is best known for its popular internet marketing and SEO channel on Youtube.

If you’ve followed Jim and Ricky, you may have noticed their consistency via their YouTube channel. Their free content is valuable, and it’s the main traffic channel that people enter their sphere of influence.

And in my opinion, it’s one of the most significant factors in why Income School is a 7 figure per year business.

Who are Jim and Ricky anyway?

About Ricky Kesler and Jim Harmer

Unlike other courses I review, the Income School founders are open about their business (current and past) and personal lives. This makes their brand so popular in the industry and is why I’m dedicating this short section to their backgrounds.

Believe it or not, these guys are not siblings (I thought they were for the longest time anyway).

About Ricky

Here are a few interesting things about Ricky:

• He worked as an engineer at a manufacturing plant.
• He has an engineering degree and an MBA.
• He’s also worked as a marketing analyst, Project Manager (according to his LinkedIn profile), and Product Manager.
• He’s a father of four.

I relate most to Ricky as I also went through engineering school and got a job at a marketing agency when I quit my first career. On his About page, Ricky explains that his job position never fulfilled him, and he always dreamed about working for his own company.

He eventually partnered with Jim, got laid off from his job, worked on Income School part-time until Project 24 was launched in 2018, and left his day job.

About Jim

• Jim was a struggling college graduate stocking shelves at a dollar store in 2009.
• He’s a father of three.
• He eventually started his niche site in the photography space.
• Around the same time, he finished law school and became an attorney.
• His first website ImprovePhotography.com became so successful it earned him more than what he’d make practicing law.

Jim’s late-night shifts were stocking shelves and listening to make money online podcasts before Income School. 

His photography site would be the first of many successful affiliate sites he’d create that would eventually make him an “overnight success.” In 2015, he teamed up with Ricky.

Jim and Ricky are the geniuses behind Income School’s success. They share some great tips and tricks about affiliate niche sites on their YouTube channel. However, you get access to their proprietary process of creating successful sites that make passive income in their course Project 24.

Major Update: In 2021, Jim exited the Income School team to focus on a separate business Backfire. He’s still good friends with Ricky, but it was time for him to move on. You’ll still find him in the course content.

The Income School Team

In recent years, Jim and Ricky have expanded the Income School team by hiring multiple employees. There are dozens of behind-the-scenes employee that work full-time, but two that you’ll get familiar in their content is Nathan Aydelotte and Freddy Betzold.

Nathan is Income School’s customer success manager and teaches course material.

Freddy is a manager at Income School. He also teaches course lessons in Project 24.

What Makes Income School Different?

Let’s jump into the weeds here. 

Income School has a unique and controversial approach to building affiliate niche sites.

Make no mistake about it, Jim and Ricky teach in two of the most competitive niches: (1) the make money online niche and (2) the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) niche.

They do just fine in the making money online niche as they have achieved massive success with their niche sites before Income School’s success.

Where they start to get bullied online is with the SEO community. Take this subReddit, for instance, where mentions of Income School will automatically be removed.

There are a few reasons why the SEO community isn’t fond of Jim & Ricky’s approach to teaching affiliate marketing with niche sites. You can get a gist of why from the YouTube thumbnail below.

Although I tend to agree with the title of the thumbnail Earn a Full-Time Income in About 24 Months when it comes to newbies, it sounds outrageous to an intermediate to advanced affiliate SEO blogger.

Hint: Project 24. 

I mean, who wants to wait two years for a site to make a passive income? I know I didn’t, but it’s roughly how long it took me.

The icing on the cake that gets them a lot of smack talking by the SEO community is the following approach to niche websites:

• No Keyword Research Tools for Search Analysis: Jim and Ricky don’t believe in using SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush because they’re “inaccurate,” so they disregard them.
• No Link Building: Jim and Ricky rely on people naturally linking to their websites over time and only focus on creating quality content.

These things make Income School controversially different, and we’ll cover them in detail as you continue to read our review.

On more positive notes, Income School does do the following things better than other affiliate internet marketers & SEO guys:

• They’ve Built Successful Niche Websites: Criticise all you want, but Jim and Ricky have launched, grown, and sold multiple sites.
• They’re Transparent About Their Websites: Most affiliate business owners never reveal their affiliate websites for fear of competition, but Jim and Ricky don’t care (great for beginners).
• They Get Traffic Outside of Google: Unlike other SEO guys who stick to their blog and/or podcasts for their content marketing, Jim and Ricky are good at getting attention on their YouTube channel, and they have a YouTube course as well in P24 (more on this soon).

Is It One of The Best Affiliate Marketing Courses?

Although Income School’s Project 24 is a good affiliate marketing SEO course, it’s not the best one we’ve taken or reviewed. It comes in as one of our top affiliate course recommendations, but it hasn’t earned the best affiliate marketing course title.

It never got that title because, from what I’ve gathered, most success stories and websites from Project 24 members are in low-competition niches and are monetized mainly with display ads and not as much with affiliate links. 

A well-rounded course will teach you how to rank a blog for low competition niches AND how to succeed in the tougher competition niches (which more often than not requires link building). 

This is why we ranked Project 24 by Income School as one of the better beginner affiliate marketing courses that teach creating niche sites as an online business.

If you’re a beginner, you can’t go wrong with Project 24. However, if you find yourself reading our Income School review article thinking you need a more advanced course, check our alternatives list towards the end of this article.

Income School Project 24 Review

Let’s hone in on Project 24.

What Is Project 24?

Income School’s home page describes Project 24 like this: “Project 24 means starting a project to replace your current income with money from passive income websites in 24 months.”

More specifically, though, P24 gives you the following course components to increase your success:

• A 60-Step Approach to Building a Profitable Niche Site & YouTube Channel (separate courses within P24)
• A Paid-Members Only Podcast to Give You the Latest Techniques
• A Course Community Forum for Technical Questions & More
• And Dozens of More Courses on Monetizing with Ads, Personal Branding, Lead Generation, Mindset, Improving Your Writing, How to Outsource, and More.

Who Is Project 24 Not For?

Let’s start with who this course is not for. 

Having taken my fair share of spending time and money on affiliate marketing courses that deal with creating a new niche website, getting blog traffic, and consuming P24’s course content, here’s who this course is not for:

• Anyone Who Can’t Dedicate Ample Time to Their Niche Site Project: You may have found Jim & Ricky on YouTube, but these guys don’t teach a get rich quick approach to making money online. You’ll need to dedicate at a minimum 1-4 hours a day in my experience, and that of many people, to have a job replacing blog in 1-2 years.
• Anyone Who Is Looking for a Data-Driven Approach to Building Their Niche Site: Project 24 has an intuitive methodology of creating websites that can bother many people who are used to making business decisions backed by data (i.e., keyword selection).
• Anyone Who Is Looking to Compete In Commonly Known Hard Industries: The P24 course can get you started in any niche, but will you be able to rank well for money keywords in a competitive niche and profit from affiliate marketing? Unfortunately, the chances are low with Project 24 as they don’t focus on off-page SEO strategies (link building strategies).

Who Is Project 24 For?

Income School Project 24 was made for beginners and people who’ve been around the digital marketing block a few times before.

Here’s who is a perfect fit for Income School Project 24:

• For Beginners: If you’ve never started an online business before, let alone a blog, this course is for you. You get a step-by-step process on setting up your WordPress blog, which plugins to install, how to write (and outsource) search engine optimized content, and consistently get traffic.
• For Those Who’ve Tried & Failed: The internet is full of get rich quick gurus. A good portion of Income School Project 24 students come from taking guru courses that promised the world, money, and more but left them with nothing to show for it. 
• For Advanced Internet Marketers: If you’re familiar with digital marketing already, but not so much when it comes to SEO, this course is excellent to get started to learn how to grow organic traffic from Google. 
• Mom & Dads: “We help people provide well for their families by creating online businesses” is boldly stated on their home page. Jim and Ricky have seven children between them and approach this course as if they were speaking directly to families. 

How Does Project 24 Work?

Project 24 isn’t a single course. It’s a collection of courses, a members-only podcast, a community, & a vlog that Ricky and Jim add to and improve every year.

That said, once you sign up for the Project 24 course, you’re advised to get started with The Blogging 60 Steps course.

The 60-Step actions are designed to take people from no websites and experience to $1,000 per month in two years. Every step is outlined for you.

The 60 Step Blogging course covers:

• Choosing your Niche and Domain
• Setting Up Your Web Hosting and Website
• Learning SEO to Get Blog Traffic
• Writing a Certain Quantity of Article Types
• Record Accompanying Video Content
• Starting to Monetize Your Blog

To get a better overview of what you can expect from Income School’s Project Project 24, take a look at their Project 24 timeline page on their website.

Some interesting “month notes” in the timeline include:

• Month 6: at the six-month mark, you can expect to be putting in the work and have gained an approximate income of $5.94 thus far, which is enough for “pizza day.”
• Month 12: with 130 pieces of content published and an ongoing content schedule set, you’ll have an approximate $124 per month income and have made $687.94 thus far!
• Month 24: At the two-year mark, based on this timeline, if you did everything right, you can expect a mid-four-figure monthly income. The estimated example timeline numbers are $7,875 per month and $42,828 income earned since starting.

Remember that Project 24’s timeline figures above (especially the latter) assume you’re monetizing with blog articles, display ads, and email marketing.

The other main course in Income School Project 24 is The YouTube 60 Steps for those who prefer video content over blog content (using both are great traffic sources!).

The Project 24 Course Structure

As previously mentioned, Income School’s Project 24 is a library of multiple courses. Each course focuses on a micro-segment of digital marketing, but the core of the course is your website (aka. your blog). 

The Blogging Courses in P24 Include:

• The 60 Steps to a Successful Site
• Improve and Speed Up Your Writing
• Hire and Train Writers
• Mythbusting
• Web Traffic Snowball
• Search Analysis
• No Nonsense SEO
• Picking Profitable Niches
• The Battleship Method
• E-A-T for SEO: a Step by Step Guide for Online Credibility
• Snippet Optimization

The YouTube Courses in P24 Include:

• The 60 Steps to Success on YouTube
• Picking Profitable Niches
• Video Editing with Final Cut Pro

The Monetization Courses in P24 Include:

• Monetize with Ads
• Monetize with Info-Products
• Monetize with Lead Generation

Other Courses Included Are:

• Reviewing Your Sites
• Email Marketing 101
• Pinterest Results
• The Successful Mindset
• Protecting the Downside

Aside from the courses in the members dashboard are the other tools and resources that come with being a Project 24 member. 

Extras include:

• the Acabado Theme 
• their Vlog
• the Project 24 Glossary & Recommended Tools
• The Project 24 Podcast
• The Content Warrior Challenge
• P24 Events
• And the Private Community

The Private Community

Most online business courses have a Facebook group, but not Income School Project 24. Instead, they have a Private Members-Only Community (forum-style).

You can get your questions answered by Jim, Ricky, and other beginners to advanced members of the community.

Student Support

The student support is limited to the members-only community forum and email support.

Project 24 Pricing

So, how much is everything that’s included in Project 24 going to cost? How much will it cost to build your first successful niche website?

How Much Does Project 24 Cost?

Project 24 costs $449 for the first year and an ongoing charge of $199 per year afterward.

Aside from the course cost, keep the following in mind:

• Minimal Online Business Expense: You’ll have to invest in yearly costs for your domain name and web hosting. With P24, you don’t have to worry about additional tools (such as SEMRush and Ahrefs) for keyword research or link building (unless you want to).
• Not a One-Time Payment: Be aware that Project 24 is NOT a one-time payment. After the first year, you’ll be billed annually to continue having access to the course training material and community. If this isn’t for you, read our alternative section (towards the end).
• Project 24 Discounts: As of 2024, there is no discount page or coupon code for P24. However, P24 does go on sale Black Friday weekend for a $50 discount off the first year.

No Upsells

There are no upsells with Income School Project 24. What you see on the sales page is what you get.

These guys are not like most internet marketers that include upsell after upsell. In a popular Income School video, Jim Harmer said: 

“Most internet marketers want to sell you on a zillion different courses, and that was one of our manifestos when we decided we were going to do this: no upgrade fest. We want to give you what you need to be successful online. And so it’s all in there.”

It’s a refreshing approach to an online business course pitch.

Project 24 Refund Policy

Project 24 used to provide refunds, but not anymore. They felt too many buyers took advantage of their refund policy by downloading all the course material and asking for a refund shortly after.

The above screenshot is from P24’s Refund Policy Page. The page goes on to explain finer details.

What Income School Project 24 Does Well

Before I tell you what I dislike about Income School 24, let’s cover what I think it does well compared to other courses.

Students Get Results

A factor that comes into play when recommending courses is whether the students are getting on a monthly/yearly basis. A course that doesn’t have authentic reviews from students who started in the same position as you once will have a  sales problem.

Luckily, Income School Project 24 doesn’t have this problem. The following screenshots were captured from within the Project 24 forum community and are still members.

You can’t argue with results (more screenshots later).

Transparent Instructors

Not surprisingly, the majority of marketers behind SEO courses never reveal their main niche sites. This is due to competition and haters who may potentially do negative SEO to their website.

Yet, there are some brave souls in the world who reveal their full-time niche sites to their audience, show their analytics, discuss their earnings, discuss flipping the site(s), and more. Jim and Ricky fit this mold.

The video below reveals one of their websites that earned over $8,000 per month in passive income at its peak. They do this on multiple occasions throughout their YouTube content.

You can see all of the blog sites Jim and Ricky are working on here (including their failed sites).

They’re In the Digital Trenches

The Income School guys are notorious for starting a new website or YouTube channel every six months.

Although they have a portfolio of public-facing sites (and I’m sure some non-public sites) and the Income School, a brand that brings them $60,000+/month, they continue to pump out content in different niches. 

Why? I mean, they don’t need to. Are they human? Are they content machines?

Probably not machines – they have the team infrastructure to launch new projects often.

Episode 43 of the Income School Members-Only Podcast discussed why they launch a new project every 6 months. They start new projects frequently from scratch to prove that what they’re teaching in Project 24 still works.

One of their latest YouTube projects is Backfire, a channel for people who like the outdoors and shooting as a sport. 

Launched a year ago, they’re already at the 54,000+ subscriber mark. Again proving that every step of their YouTube course in Project 24 works.  

They Make Money From Affiliate AND Display Advertising

One of the biggest pros of P24 I like is that they don’t solely rely on affiliate commissions to earn money from their sites.

Unlike other courses that primarily teach monetization with affiliate links, Income School teaches you how to earn money from page views. They have a dedicated course to it in the P24 dashboard.

On affiliate marketing, they’ve also decided to abandon Amazon Associate’s program this year as they continue to decrease affiliate commission rates. You can check out their thoughts on the matter on Income School’s YouTube channel.

No Hype Train or High-Pressure Sales Tactics

“How to make $3,000 a month in just 30 days…” is something you’ll never hear from the guys at Income School to promote their Project 24 course.

They don’t promise you’ll replace your job income with their training, and they’re upfront about it. 

Hence, their course name Project 24. The meaning behind the name is that it’ll take, on average, about 24 months for your blog to replace your full-time income. 

They don’t toy with people’s expectations like your run-of-the-mill internet marketers. Yet they’re successful. How?

I think they’re successful at attracting people to their course because (a) they are creating profitable niche sites and are transparent about it, and (b) they ooze a nerdy yet your Average Joe type of charisma through YouTube. And people (especially newbies) gravitate towards that.

They spend lots of time and money testing their teachings and creating helpful content on YouTube without promising the world or hard selling.

Compare their approach to scammy YouTube advertising. Other marketers do whatever they can to get you into their webinar and then pitch you on a course.

They’re not aboard the hype train, and they set a realistic expectation of up to two years for a full-time income.

Consistent Updates

Since Jim, Ricky, and their team are in the trenches; you can expect the courses within Project 24 to improve throughout the year.

A recent update to P24 is their Pinterest Results course.

Initially, Ricky and Jim didn’t have a lot of experience with Pinterest traffic. So, they invested in Pinterest marketing courses, experimented with the new traffic source on their niche sites, and interviewed Pinterest experts.

Only after understanding and getting results from Pinterest were their Pinterest Results lessons added to P24. 

You can expect new additions and improvements to existing courses when you’re a P24 member.

Awesome Community

P24 has created a fantastic community of affiliate marketers within their Members-Only forum. Members range from beginners to advanced, and the topics are split up into different discussions.

To give you a taste of how active the community is, take a look at this recent post about a Google Core update (not the most fun topic) that’s happening at the time of writing this review:

There are already 58 replies. Some people don’t know what a Core Update is, and they’re learning about it for the first time. And some people have been around longer and sharing if their sites have been impacted by the update positively or negatively.

The members-only community is insightful no matter your experience level.

Members-Only Podcast

The P24 podcast is excellent for people of all experience levels. They’re consistent about their podcast uploading and drop gems here and there, depending on what stage of your journey you’re on.

For instance, I listened to episode 110 recently, which had some great pointers about taxes and business entities for people who do this full-time.

You can’t subscribe to the podcast on your mobile app without following their specific instructions (Android or iPhone). You can learn more about their Members-Only podcast on the P24 sales page.

Access to Their Free Theme Acabado

You may or may not know it yet, but each WordPress niche site you make will require a “theme” (think of it as your site’s framework).

Now, there are free themes and there paid themes. Free themes limit what you can do with the site, and paid themes make things easier. However, not all themes are created equal.

Some themes are better suited for people who need traffic from Google. Google pays attention to your website’s performance. If your site takes forever to load, people will bounce off your site and go to another site, and Google will not like your site very much, leading to poor rankings.

Since paid themes can be expensive, Ricky and Jim provide you with their free WordPress theme Acabado when you become a member of Project 24. You can check out Acabado’s sales page here (you can buy it separately without being a P24 member).

I haven’t personally tried Acabado on one of my sites yet, but members like it. There’s an entire forum category dedicated to this theme.

Is it one of the best parts of being a Project 24 member? Meh. I’m sure it works well, but I put it in this section of my review because it’s one less thing that beginners have to pay for when starting their blog business.

Where Income School Falls Short

Alright, here we go…

No Keyword Tools

One of my first gripes with Income School’s approach to “Search Analysis” is that they don’t use keyword research tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush.

The video that started it all was this one:

Project 24 students are advised NOT to use keyword tools because they’re inaccurate and lead to more harm than good. Yet, Ricky and Jim’s approach relies on a combination of  “guesswork” and “intuition,” which is inaccurate.

You don’t have to be a member to know their keyword research process; just watch the video above.

Essentially, they’re saying tools like Ahrefs do not provide accurate data. 

This is true, but it doesn’t mean that such keyword tools are useless. Sure, Ahrefs data isn’t 100% accurate, but they’re always improving their keyword database metrics.

Additionally, Ahrefs addresses that their keyword data isn’t what will be reflected in your Google Analytics account. 

It’s more about the big picture; as Ahref states, “You get the most value from Ahrefs when you look at the actual keywords that your competitor is ranking for and the pages that bring them the most traffic from search. This data is much more accurate than our “big picture“ traffic estimation.”

As more of a data-driven digital marketer, I stand with the Ahrefs of the world. Here’s why.

Suppose I have Keyword A and Keyword B that I think are good article ideas for my niche site, but my time, or budget, only allows me to write one article this month.

In that case, I want to go for the keyword that yields me the most results in the long run (no matter the keyword difficulty, as I like getting “hard stuff” out of the way quicker).

In this case, Ahrefs would provide me with a volume estimate and a traffic estimate metric that my niche competitors are getting for Keyword A and Keyword B. From the data, I’d make a more informed decision on how to proceed. Sounds logical, right?

Not according to Income School. 

Their keyword research analysis starts with compiling keywords into a list using the following methods:

• First, you do an old school technique called Alphabet Soup that consists of typing in your keyword, adding the first letter of the alphabet after it, and checking what Google’s drop-down autosuggestions say (as seen above). You’d rinse and repeat with each letter of the alphabet.
• Note down keyword ideas from the People Also Ask section of your topic’s search result.
• Note down keyword ideas from the Related Searches section of your topic’s search result.
• You then go to sites like Answer the Public for more keyword suggestions.

Next, you’re supposed to use Jim’s inverted pyramid technique to decide which keywords will become blog posts on your website.

In their analysis training videos, Jim says, “You are just using your intuition a bit. You are just guessing a little bit. Sometimes you’re going to be a little bit wrong, and you’ll write one, and ah, that just didn’t bring as much traffic as I’d hoped. Sometimes you’re going to strike gold…”

The two keywords there (no pun intended) are intuition and guessing. This is essentially Jim and Ricky’s version of inaccurate data for search analysis.

As you can tell, I’m not on board with their approach here, yet to each their own. 

Side note: Sometimes, I think they secretly use keyword tools but create controversial videos in the blogging SEO community on YouTube to grow their audience.

A 2021 Course Update

In 2021, the Income School’s course instructors updated how their blogging course and introduced a better keyword research process which they first on their private podcast.

Their new approach to honing students’ SEO keyword research skills is much better, but still don’t recommend beginners buy premium keyword tools like Ahrefs.

However, they did have a standalone lesson where they did a tutorial with Ahref’s keyword research tool and how you can snoop on competitors’ keywords with. Jim cautions about the use of this tactic and leaves it to online entrepreneurs to question the morales of the strategy…

No Link Building

Yet, another controversial topic that has made Income School a subject in some SEO crowds: no active link building. This video that started it all is still on the Income School YouTube channel.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, link building is simply the process of getting other sites on the internet to link back to your site.

Common link-building strategies include the skyscraper technique, email outreach, broken link building, public relations, and guest posting.

Well, these strategies fall by the wayside, according to Income School, as they don’t partake or recommend building links even though it’s common knowledge (in the SEO community) that backlinks play a role in competing in the most competitive niches.

After rewatching the video above, I took the following reasons why they don’t build links:

Reason #1: link building takes too much time, and we would rather spend time creating high-quality content!

To which I say, stop thinking so binary. Why not do both? 

Some P24 members will join with a vision of going into a somewhat competitive niche where the competition is spending time to acquire links to their sites. In other words, some P24 members will be fighting an uphill battle that they can not win simply because of reason #1.

Reason #2: “The worry factor… the more stuff you try to trick Google, the more potential worry you have.”

Towards the 5 minute and 20-second mark, Ricky starts talking about the worry factor that some SEO affiliate marketers start having when a yearly Google core update occurs. They start worrying because they’re not sure if the update will impact their site negatively or not. 

To this, I say, have you heard of white hat link building? Google’s okay with some types of promotional efforts that result in backlink campaigns.

Strategies such as email outreach to promote your latest how-to guide article, a reply to HARO (Help a Reporter Out), or guest posting on a website in your niche are all forms of white-hat link building SEOs do that they do not sweat bullets over.

Note: these are all link strategies that one of  Income School’s competitors, Authority Hacker’s The Authority Site System, teaches and used to sell an 18-month-old site for over six figures. 

These are high-quality links and not the low-quality links that some people try to “trick Google with,” such as comment and PBN links.

To conclude, I’m not fond of Jim and Ricky’s “forget about link building” speil as some niches require it to rank on page one of Google. 

In some niches, you can get away with no link building, but rarely is it the case in competitive niches that some people want to go after when buying a course such as P24.

Monetizing Is Not a Priority

The duo at P24 are not known for taking a strategic approach to niche selection, and in the course, they prioritize monetization last. 

In fact, in one of the lessons, Jim is quoting a couple of criteria for selecting a niche topic for your site. Here they are:

• Are there any magazines on this topic?
• Are there any boutique shops in the topic’s industry?

If you answered “yes,” then apparently, you’re good to go! “Traffic = Money… if you can get traffic, you can get money,” said Ricky and Jim.

That’s all well and good, but it becomes a problem for P24 students in the long run.

For instance, Frank, a P24 member, talked about one of his earlier sites in a video stating, “I was more passionate by far on the first niche… I didn’t really think about monetization too much, and now I’m stuck trying to figure this out… I need to figure out how to find some affiliate offers that will work consistently…”

This is a common issue I’m sure other P24 members have faced that are brand new to niche blogging. 

For instance, take my agency business partner (a big Income School fan); he followed Jim’s criteria and thought about making an affiliate site about a sports league in the U.S.

When he shared this idea with Gael from Authority Hacker (co-creator of The Authority Site System course) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, he poked fun at my biz partner a bit.

He wasn’t doing this to be mean. Still, we were at an Authority Hacker meetup after all.

Gael gave my biz partner a hard time because he hadn’t thought about other factors, such as ranking difficulty and affiliate commission rates in his niche selection process (factors that are taught in Gael’s course).

All this to say is that if you don’t have monetization as a factor in your website’s planning process, you may come across difficult situations, as Frank did. 

Unfortunately, even in the latest version of P24, Monetization is still the last priority as it’s the final step in their blogging course.

Is the Course Ultimately Worth It?

Income School’s Project 24 is worth it for beginners or people who’ve tried and haven’t had success yet. 

You can’t argue with their student results. Their students get results no matter my criticism (or others in the broader SEO community).

After consuming a lot of Income School’s content, including re-watching their training material, for this review, I can recommend it with a bit of advice.

Advice: follow their approach to creating websites, don’t deviate from their teachings, and make use of their community forum and ask questions whenever they arise. If you can do that, I’m sure you can be one of the next success stories in the P24 community.

Who Should Take This Course?

Is this course for you? Well, the Project 24 sales page states that its course is made for:

• Beginners
• Those Who’ve Tried and Failed
• Advanced Internet Markters

I tend to agree, however, more so for the first two bullet points above.

I invested in the course because I wanted to see if there was anything that could help my existing affiliate marketing business. I thought it was going to be a pure affiliate marketing course, but I was wrong.

Instead, I got introduced to the world of writing quality content that goes after low competition keywords and monetized with display ads. Display my ads effectively compliments affiliate income perfectly!

That’s the reason I joined and what I got out of it. Here are more stories of real people that Income School helped.

Results and Success Stories

The images below are mini Income School reviews in the P24 forum.

In the image above, the P24 student generated $392 from Amazon’s affiliate program 7 months from first publishing articles on her site.

It’s pretty cool that she’s almost close to being approved for Mediavine ads.

The P24 member above reached the $1,000 mark with his website after 7 months. His earnings came mainly from Amazon and ad platforms.

This is your typical story with P24 member websites, and it’s not bad at all: affiliate commissions + display ads = $.

Top Income School Alternatives

If you think P24 by Income School isn’t for you, no worries, you have other options. The following two alternatives are from the top-recommended list of our best affiliate marketing course article.

The Authority Site System (TASS)

The Authority Site System by Authority Hacker is our #1 alternative to Income School’s P24 because Gael and Mark, the SEOs behind the course, teach beginners and intermediate marketers to make job replacing income.

The key differences are that TASS is more data-driven about their decisions (they make use of keyword tools), and they have an entire module dedicated to link building.

They monetize with affiliate links and display ads, but their approach to ranking their sites are different. 

The Affiliate Lab

The Affiliate Lab is an affiliate SEO course by Matt Diggity. His course is suitable for beginners, no doubt.

Yet, it’s a loaded course with several advanced modules that may not fit the beginner audience that TASS and P24 are going for. You can learn more about Matt’s course in our Affiliate Lab review.