Inside the Project 24 Back Office: Full Review and What’s Inside

I joined Project 24 on September 7, 2018. At that point the entire program was one course: 60 Steps to a Successful Site. The idea was simple. Follow the steps, build a blog, earn organic traffic, and monetize with affiliate marketing and display ads. That was it. One year later I logged back into the back office and found something much larger waiting for me. Income School had been building the whole time I was writing posts.

If you have been watching my site update videos, you have heard me reference Project 24 dozens of times without showing you what is actually inside the membership. This post walks through every course, every community feature, and every ongoing update that members get access to. If you are deciding whether to join, this is the full picture before you commit.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A complete list of every course inside the Project 24 back office, in the order they appear
What each course teaches and who it is designed for
The real reason I joined the program (it was not just the training videos)
Community features most people do not know exist inside the membership
An honest look at what does not work for everyone inside Project 24
The writing speed system Project 24 teaches and the framework I actually use
If you are not sure whether Project 24 is the right fit for your skills and situation, start at finder.platformproof.com to figure out what actually matches where you are right now

What Is Project 24 and Who Built It?

Project 24 is a membership program built by Jim and Ricky of Income School. The name comes from their target: help members replace a full-time income within 24 months using content websites. When they launched, the entire program was built around one method for building a blog from scratch, getting it ranked in organic search, and monetizing with ads and affiliate commissions.

I found Income School the way most people do: through their YouTube channel. They were giving away a lot of specific information about blogging, content strategy, and organic search, and none of it was pushing the blackhat tactics that a lot of SEO advice was still built around at the time. Jim and Ricky believed in creating helpful content and letting Google find it. That approach matched how I wanted to build.

At the time I joined I understood the basics of affiliate marketing. What I was missing was the connection between knowing that model and actually building a site that could generate traffic. The 60-step framework gave me that structure. I joined on September 7, 2018, and I have been working within the system since then. The back office has grown significantly in that time.

The Foundation: 60 Steps to a Successful Site

The flagship course is still 60 Steps to a Successful Site. The idea is that launching a blog the right way takes 60 specific steps, and following them in order keeps you from making the structural mistakes that most beginners make. The first ten steps are the fundamentals: pick a domain name, set up web hosting, install WordPress. That part is straightforward.

What makes the 60-step approach useful is that it takes the guesswork out of sequencing. You know what comes next. You are not spending time wondering whether you should write posts before you set up your categories or whether you should pick a niche before you buy a domain. The course answers those sequencing questions so you can focus on the actual work.

Jim and Ricky designed it to be handholding-level thorough. If that sounds excessive for people who already have some experience, you are probably right. But for someone who has never built a content site before, the step-by-step structure is what gets them past the blank-page paralysis and into actual publishing. The long-term goal is to grow well beyond 30 posts, but the 60 steps get you started on a foundation that does not need to be rebuilt later.

The YouTube Course

After I joined, Income School added a dedicated YouTube course to the back office. Blogging and YouTube complement each other in ways that are easy to miss when you are starting out. Your blog content can rank for searches that your videos do not, and your videos can send traffic to posts that are still building authority. The YouTube course covers the same core principles as the blogging course, adapted for video: how to find topics, how to structure content, how to build momentum on a channel that has no subscribers yet.

EAT for SEO

EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Since I joined Project 24, Google has made changes that increasingly reward sites that demonstrate real expertise on a topic and penalize sites that look thin or lack credibility signals. The EAT for SEO course was added to help members respond to those changes. It covers what Google is actually looking for when it evaluates your site’s credibility and how to build your pages, author profiles, and site structure to match those signals.

This is one of the courses that shows why keeping membership content updated matters. What worked for SEO in 2018 is not identical to what works now. The EAT course reflects where Google has moved, not just where it was when the program launched.

Monetize with Info Products

Monetize with Info Products is one of the newer additions to the back office. This course is for members who are ready to build a revenue stream beyond ads and affiliate commissions. It covers creating a digital product from your existing content: a video guide, an ebook, a PDF download, or a full membership site of your own. If you already have an audience that trusts you and you want to create something you sell directly, this is the path the course walks you through.

I had not gone through this course at the time of this walkthrough. It is there for members who are at the right stage in their site’s growth to make it relevant.

Picking Profitable Niches

Niche selection is one of the most common failure points for new bloggers. Pick a niche that is too competitive and you will be producing content for months with nothing to show for it. Pick a niche that is too small and you will rank well for searches nobody makes. The Picking Profitable Niches course gives you a framework for evaluating whether a niche has real traffic potential and what level of competition you are walking into.

Jim and Ricky are honest in this course about the four biggest niches: health, wealth, relationships, and technology. You can build a successful site in any of them. But those niches attract the most competition, and that means more content, more time, and more patience before you start gaining traction. Entering a lower-competition niche, even something as specific as doorknobs, gets you ranking faster because you are not fighting established authorities for every topic.

The course helps you find your version of a profitable niche that matches your actual knowledge and gives you a realistic timeline to traffic and income.

No-Nonsense SEO

One of the things that drew me to Income School in the first place was their position on backlinks. A lot of SEO advice in 2018 was still based on building links through schemes and shortcuts. Jim and Ricky rejected that approach entirely. Their method is to create content that Google wants to send people to and let authority build organically over time.

No-Nonsense SEO is the course that gives that philosophy a practical framework. It covers what actually moves rankings without the tactics that carry a penalty risk the next time Google makes an algorithm update. This course is probably most useful for anyone who has been exposed to traditional SEO advice and needs to unlearn some of it before they can apply the Income School method properly.

Search Analysis: Keyword Research Done Right

Income School calls it search analysis rather than keyword research because their approach is different from what most SEO tools push you toward. The Search Analysis course covers how to find topics that have real search volume, low enough competition to rank for, and enough commercial intent to convert into income.

I have to be direct about my own record here. I did keyword research wrong on my first site. I did not get the process right, and it showed in how that site performed. The fourth site I built had better search analysis from the start, and the search results reflected that difference. More content helped me get better at it over time, but having this course available from the beginning would have shortened that learning curve on the first site considerably.

Traffic Snowball

Most bloggers experience the traffic snowball effect without understanding why it is happening. For the first several months you can feel like you are publishing into silence. Posts go up. Rankings trickle in. Then at some point the pace changes. One post starts sending traffic to another. Rankings begin stacking. The traffic that felt stuck suddenly starts compounding.

The Traffic Snowball course explains the mechanics behind that shift and what you can do to set your site up to accelerate into it rather than just wait for it. Understanding why the snowball happens also helps you not quit in the months before it does.

Pinterest and Email Marketing

Project 24 includes a Pinterest course that covers how to use the platform to drive traffic to your blog. Pinterest works differently from Google and can deliver traffic faster in the early stages of a site, before you have enough domain authority to rank well in organic search. For newer sites waiting on Google to catch up, Pinterest traffic can fill part of that gap.

Email marketing is also covered inside the membership. Building an email list is something most bloggers skip in the early months and regret when they look back. The Project 24 email marketing training covers how to start collecting subscribers, what to send them, and how to build that relationship over time so your list becomes a real asset to your site.

Myth Busting

Myth Busting is a section of the back office dedicated to correcting the wrong assumptions that most new bloggers carry into their work. What those specific myths are is something you see when you go through the content. The point is to fix the thinking errors before they cost you months of effort spent in the wrong direction. A lot of blogging advice in public forums is well-intentioned but inaccurate, and this course addresses that directly.

Hire and Train Writers

At some point in building a content site, writing every post yourself becomes a bottleneck. Hire and Train Writers covers how to find content writers, evaluate their work, train them to match your site’s voice and quality standards, and build a production process that does not require you to supervise every sentence.

I made a separate video about iWriter and why I will not use that service again. The content quality was not what my sites needed. Jim and Ricky have had a different experience with iWriter and do not share my concern about it. Their hiring process is more involved than simply posting a job on a content marketplace, and the course reflects that. If you are at the stage where you want to scale content output without writing everything yourself, this course gives you a system for doing that.

Photography for Bloggers

Photography is one of those areas where most bloggers do not realize how much it matters until they look at their pages next to a competitor’s. Good images improve how posts look, how they perform on social media, and how long visitors stay on the page. The photography course inside Project 24 covers how to take better photos for your content without needing expensive gear or professional training. It is a practical course aimed at getting your site looking more credible without a major investment in equipment.

Site Reviews: Real Feedback on Real Blogs

Early in the program’s development, Income School reviewed actual member sites and catalogued what was holding them back. What they found is that most blogs share the same set of problems. The site review content inside Project 24 lets you see the specific feedback Jim and Ricky gave on real sites and apply those lessons to your own without waiting for a personal review.

The value here is pattern recognition. When you see the same issues flagged across dozens of different blogs, you start to internalize what to look for in your own work. You are not just reading abstract advice. You are seeing what the actual problems look like in practice.

Improve and Speed Up Writing

Project 24 has a specific belief about writing pace. They think a response post of around 1,500 words should take about one hour to complete. That is the target they train toward, and the course gives you the system for getting there. The three post types in Project 24 are response posts, stable posts, and pillar posts. Response posts are the shortest and most frequent. Stable and pillar posts go deeper and take longer to produce.

I made my own video on how to write faster, and my approach is to answer who, what, when, where, why, and how before I write the first sentence. That framework gives me a working outline before I have touched the actual post, and it cuts the time I spend staring at a blank screen almost entirely. The Income School method for speed and my own framework share the same underlying logic: if you know what you are going to write before you sit down to write it, you write faster. The course gives you their version of that setup process.

Monetize with Ads

A question that came up in my comment section a few months back was whether you can monetize with premium ad networks before your traffic reaches a high threshold. The assumption behind the question was that you have to reach a certain traffic level before better networks will accept you. That is not entirely accurate, and the Monetize with Ads course breaks down the ad networks available to you at different traffic stages and how to set them up correctly.

For newer sites that are still building traffic, this course gives you a clear picture of what monetization looks like now versus what it looks like at higher traffic volumes, and what steps to take at each stage rather than waiting until you feel like your numbers are good enough.

Success Mindset

Building a content site to the point of real income takes time, and most people who fail do so not because the method is wrong but because they stop before the traffic snowball starts moving. Jim and Ricky include a success mindset module to address that problem directly. It is a motivational component of the program designed to help you keep going through the months where the work is not yet producing visible results.

Some people will find this kind of content unnecessary. Others will find it is the thing that kept them from quitting at month eight when nothing seemed to be working. It depends on where you are mentally going into the project.

Not sure which online income model matches what you actually know and have time for?

Get a specific answer in under two minutes at finder.platformproof.com.

Community Features: Podcast, Mastermind, and Constant Updates

The courses are only part of what separates a Project 24 membership from just watching the Income School YouTube channel. The community and ongoing content are the features most people do not account for when they are deciding whether to join.

The podcast is included in the membership. Jim and Ricky cover blogging strategy, SEO updates, monetization decisions, and real conversations about what is working and what has stopped working. You get that without any extra cost.

There is also a mastermind experience you can join inside the community. Having that level of access to the people who built the methodology is something you cannot replicate by watching free content. Jim and Ricky do not answer every question personally, but they are more present and accessible to members than they can be to their public audience.

The ongoing updates were one of the things I have appreciated most in over a year as a member. Internet marketing changes fast. Algorithm updates happen. What ranks in 2018 may not rank the same way in 2020. A program that does not update its content becomes worthless quickly. Income School has consistently added new modules, adapted existing courses based on member feedback, and responded to changes in the market. The EAT for SEO course did not exist when I joined. Neither did the YouTube course. Both were added because they reflected something real that was happening in the market and that members needed to respond to.

Honest Drawbacks

Project 24 is not the right fit for everyone. There are real limitations worth knowing before you join.

The 60 Steps course is designed for beginners. If you already know how to set up WordPress, research a niche, and structure a post for search, the early steps are going to feel slow. The course does not have a way to skip ahead based on existing knowledge.

The program does not give you traffic faster than the natural timeline of organic search. Jim and Ricky are upfront about this. You are looking at 12 to 24 months before you start seeing consistent traffic and meaningful income. If you need revenue faster than that, a content site built on organic search is probably not the right primary vehicle, regardless of which course you buy.

Keyword research is something you learn by doing, not just by watching. I went through the Search Analysis course and still got it wrong on my first site. The course gives you the framework, but it takes repetition and actual publishing to develop the judgment that makes the framework work reliably.

My experience with iWriter differed from Jim and Ricky’s recommendation. Content quality from writing platforms varies widely. If you are going to hire writers, test multiple sources before you commit to any one platform or service. What works for someone else may not produce the quality your site needs.

Find Your X

Project 24 is one path to income online. It is a good path for the right person at the right stage. If you are trying to figure out whether it fits your skills, your schedule, and where you are right now, do not guess. Go to finder.platformproof.com and get a specific recommendation built around what you actually know and what you have time to do.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is included in a Project 24 membership?

A Project 24 membership gives you access to every course in the back office, including 60 Steps to a Successful Site, the YouTube course, EAT for SEO, Monetize with Info Products, Picking Profitable Niches, No-Nonsense SEO, Search Analysis, Traffic Snowball, Pinterest, Email Marketing, Myth Busting, Hire and Train Writers, Photography, Site Reviews, Improve and Speed Up Writing, Monetize with Ads, and Success Mindset. You also get access to the member podcast, the community, and the mastermind experience.

How long does it actually take to see results with Project 24?

Jim and Ricky are honest about the timeline. Organic search traffic takes time to build, and for most sites you are looking at 12 to 24 months before you reach consistent traffic and income that replaces a meaningful amount of your current earnings. The early months often feel slow. The Traffic Snowball course addresses why that is normal and what eventually changes.

Do you need experience to join Project 24?

No. The 60 Steps course is designed for complete beginners. The first ten steps cover the basics of getting a domain, hosting, and WordPress set up. If you have never built a website before, the course walks you through every part of the process. If you already have experience, some of the early material will feel familiar, but the niche selection, content strategy, and monetization courses provide value at any experience level.

What niches work best with the Income School method?

The Income School method works across a wide range of niches. The four most popular niches, health, wealth, relationships, and technology, all have real income potential but also the most competition. Lower-competition niches, even very narrow ones, can rank faster and reach profitability sooner. The Picking Profitable Niches course helps you find a niche that matches your knowledge and gives you a realistic timeline to results.

How is Project 24 different from free blogging advice on YouTube?

The Income School YouTube channel gives away a lot of useful information. What the membership adds is structure, sequencing, and access. The 60 Steps course puts everything in the right order so you are not piecing together advice from different videos and guessing what comes first. The community gives you more direct access to Jim and Ricky. The podcast and mastermind provide ongoing guidance that the public channel does not. And the back office gets updated regularly as the market changes.

Do you have to write all the content yourself?

No. The Hire and Train Writers course covers how to bring on content writers so you can scale your site’s output beyond what you can produce yourself. Jim and Ricky recommend building some content yourself first so you understand what quality looks like on your site and can train writers effectively. But the program does have a path to building a site that does not depend entirely on your own writing.

What is the difference between a response post, a stable post, and a pillar post?

These are the three post types in the Income School system. Response posts are the shortest, around 1,500 words, designed to answer a specific search question directly. They are the most frequent type of post in a new site’s content calendar. Stable posts go deeper on a topic and tend to stay relevant without needing frequent updates. Pillar posts are the most comprehensive pieces on your site, covering a topic from multiple angles and linking to related response and stable posts. Jim and Ricky estimate a response post should take about one hour to write once you have the system down.

Is there a free webinar for people considering Project 24?

Yes. Jim and Ricky put together a free webinar that walks through what Project 24 is, how the method works, and what to expect when you join. It is designed to answer the questions most people have before committing to the membership. If you are on the fence, the webinar is a good next step before you decide. The link to the webinar is in the description of the video above.

Sources

Project 24 back office walkthrough video by Alston Godbolt, recorded late 2019
Income School YouTube channel, Jim and Ricky
Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, public documentation on EAT signals