Why I Chose Income School Over All the Gurus

This video almost did not happen. Alston recorded it four separate times before he finally got through the whole thing. The topic felt important enough to keep trying: why he looked at every major online income guru available on YouTube and decided to invest his time and money into Income School instead.

If you have spent any time watching YouTube videos about affiliate marketing, passive income, or making money online, you know the landscape. Flashy cars. Screenshots of large commission payouts. Promises of $10,000 in your first 30 days. Alston watched plenty of those videos, noticed a few things that did not add up, and eventually landed on something that felt different. This post walks through exactly what he found and why it changed the direction of his online income strategy.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Why posting affiliate links in forums is a full-time job disguised as passive income
The real reason the biggest affiliate marketing gurus started selling $500 to $1,000 courses instead of doing affiliate marketing
What Jim and Ricky at Income School do differently from every other online income teacher on YouTube
How Project 24 is structured: 60 steps, 60 days, three web pages, one checkbox system
What Alston actually earned in his first months and why Jim and Ricky told him that would happen
A free US database that cuts hours of client research for anyone building a web design business on the side
How to figure out which online income model fits your actual schedule — find out at finder.platformproof.com

The Forum Affiliate Link Grind Is Not Passive Income

Before Income School showed up in Alston’s feed, he had already experimented with a couple of approaches. Udemy affiliate marketing was one of them. In theory the setup looks clean: someone buys a course through your link, you earn a commission, and you do not need to do much after the initial push. In practice, the strategy that actually drives clicks requires you to post on forums constantly.

You check forums multiple times per day, write something that sounds genuinely helpful, drop your affiliate link, and hope you arrived before every other affiliate marketer in the same thread did the same thing. Alston described it plainly: an endless hamster wheel. The moment you stop running, the wheel stops. That is not passive income. That is a second job without the paycheck regularity or the job security.

Beyond the exhaustion factor, there is a structural problem with building your business on other people’s platforms. Forums, Facebook groups, Reddit posts, Twitter threads — all of it works until the moderator decides your link looks like spam, flags your account, and removes the post. You have no recourse because it is their platform, not yours. Anything you built there disappears without warning. Alston flagged this as a meaningful risk, not just an inconvenience. The fundamental lesson: build on platforms you control.

What the Flashy Guru Videos Are Actually Selling

YouTube’s recommendation engine is effective at one thing: showing you more of whatever you just watched. Once Alston started searching for affiliate marketing and passive income ideas, his feed filled up with a very specific type of video. The thumbnail always featured a sports car, a designer watch, or someone holding a phone showing a commission dashboard with impressive numbers. The hook was always some version of “I made $10,000 in my first 30 days.”

Alston sat with those videos and then started asking a basic question: how does a complete beginner go from zero to $10,000 in 30 days? If you actually think through the math, it does not work unless you already have a large audience, a proven offer, or a full-time team running paid advertising. Someone holding down a regular job, managing a family, and starting from scratch online is not hitting that number in a month. The math simply is not there.

The promise was appealing enough that Alston kept watching. But the more he thought about it, the clearer it became that these channels were selling the dream of affiliate marketing rather than the reality of building it. There is nothing illegal about that, and Alston acknowledges the lifestyle shown is probably what most people want eventually. The problem is the timeline and the framing. Presenting a years-long grind as a 30-day sprint misleads people into quitting when the sprint does not produce results.

Why the Biggest Gurus Stopped Doing Affiliate Marketing

Here is the observation that made everything click for Alston. He noticed that a lot of the biggest affiliate marketing channels had quietly pivoted away from affiliate marketing. They were spending less time teaching how to do affiliate marketing and more time selling courses about affiliate marketing. Some of those courses cost $500. Some cost $1,000 and required a renewal fee every year whether or not the student had made any money at all.

Once you understand the economics, the pivot is completely rational. With affiliate marketing, you earn a percentage of someone else’s sale. Depending on the product, your cut might be 5 percent, 10 percent, or 30 percent on a digital product. When you sell your own course, you keep close to 100 percent of the revenue after platform fees and whatever marketing costs you carry. For someone who already has a large YouTube following, building and selling a proprietary course is a far more efficient business than continuing to do affiliate marketing yourself.

The problem is the misaligned incentive that creates. These creators are now primarily in the business of selling courses to aspiring affiliate marketers, not in the business of actually doing affiliate marketing successfully. Their income depends on your belief that the method works, not on your results. That is a meaningful distinction worth keeping in mind when you evaluate whether their advice is designed to help you or to help them.

Alston also flagged the upsell structure inside many of these programs. You pay the entry fee, join the community, and then discover that the genuinely valuable content sits behind another purchase. Then another after that. The initial price was just the door. The real cost accumulates over time in a way that was never fully disclosed at the start. That pattern was something Alston found worth treating as a warning sign.

How Income School Showed Up

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, YouTube recommended an Income School video. Alston does not remember which one it was. What he remembers is what happened next: he listened to Income School videos on his commute to work in the morning, watched them on his lunch break, and kept going when he got home. Jim Harmer and Ricky Kesler, the two people behind Income School, had a completely different feel from everyone else he had been watching.

They were not filming in front of rented sports cars. There were no promises of instant wealth. They talked like people you would run into at a grocery store, which was Alston’s own description. No performance of success. What came through instead was a direct explanation of how they built their own niche websites, what the process actually looked like, and what a realistic timeline for results might be. The contrast with the other content he had been watching was noticeable enough that it was hard to miss.

What Jim and Ricky Do Differently

The most important difference Alston identified is what Income School gives away for free. Most online income creators treat their YouTube content as a funnel. They tease a tip, mention there are 40 more where that came from, and put the link to a lead magnet or paid community in the video description. The entire point of the free video is to capture your email address so they can sell to you later. That is the marketing funnel model and it works. But it means the free content is specifically designed to leave you feeling like something is missing, because the paid product is what solves the problem the video created.

Jim and Ricky take the opposite approach. Alston’s estimate is that Income School’s free YouTube videos contain roughly 80 to 90 percent of what lives inside the paid Project 24 course. They explain the full process, lay out the reasoning behind each step, and show you what real results look like at different stages. At the end they say: if you want everything organized in one place with a clear step-by-step sequence, here is Project 24. The paid product is positioned as a convenience and a community, not as the vault where the real information is hidden.

For Alston, that felt like a business operating with a different set of values. Give the information first. Let the customer make an informed decision. Trust that doing good work sells itself without artificial scarcity. That approach was different enough from everything else in his feed that it stood out immediately.

What Project 24 Actually Is

Project 24 gets its name from the timeline. If you follow the method as designed, Jim and Ricky say you can reach full-time income within 24 months. Some people get there faster. Some take a bit longer. The number is not a guarantee; it is a realistic benchmark based on what their actual students have done.

The structure inside Project 24 is what Alston found most appealing. Everything is organized step by step across three pages. Step one through step sixty, in sequence. When you finish a step, you check it off and move to the next one. That sounds simple, but compare it to the experience of trying to self-educate through scattered YouTube videos where you spend as much time hunting for the right content as actually learning from it. The organized, linear approach is a genuine practical advantage that shows up in how much time you waste versus how much you actually build.

There is also a community inside Project 24 with a lot of helpful people. Alston notes with characteristic honesty that, like any internet forum, the quality of participation varies and some people are less useful than others. That is not a reason to avoid the community; it is just something to go in knowing.

The Recommended Pace and Why It Matters

Income School strongly recommends publishing 30 posts on your niche site within 60 days or fewer. The reasoning is about how Google processes new websites. If you publish 30 articles over 10 months, Google is looking at a site that updates slowly and unpredictably. If you publish 30 articles in 60 days, Google sees a site that is active, consistent, and committed to the topic. The faster you establish that pattern, the sooner Google starts to trust the site and consider its pages for ranking.

A slower publishing schedule still works eventually, but it pushes the entire growth timeline further out. If you are already working a day job and can only publish two articles per week, you need to understand that your 24-month target will likely stretch to something longer. Income School does not hide this. They explain it clearly, which is part of why Alston trusted the framing. The method comes with honest math attached.

Honest Drawbacks: The Ghost Town Phase Is Real

Alston does not paper over the hard part. When he recorded this video, his total earnings from his niche sites were $1.63. One dollar and sixty-three cents. He does not present this as a failure. He presents it as confirmation that Jim and Ricky told him this was exactly what would happen.

Income School describes the first three to five months as the ghost town phase. Traffic is essentially zero. You are writing and publishing into silence. No one is reading. No revenue is coming in. Understanding this ahead of time is important because most people quit during this window. They see zero traffic after two months of hard work and conclude the method is broken. Income School’s position is that this period is normal and expected, not evidence that something went wrong.

Google takes real time to crawl a new site, assess the quality of the content, and decide how to rank the pages. That process is not fast and there is no workaround that speeds it up reliably. The only productive response is to keep publishing and wait for the delay to clear. After month four or five, pages start ranking, traffic starts growing, and affiliate commissions begin appearing. Alston’s $1.63 is a real data point from his own early months, and it matches the timeline Income School describes.

Not sure whether niche site blogging, freelancing, or a different model fits where you are right now?

Answer six questions and get a specific recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

The Reference USA Lead Gen System for Web Design

The second half of the video switches gears. Alston is building two things at once: his Income School niche sites and a separate web hosting and WordPress development business called Revolt Web Services. He walks through one concrete finding from his early client outreach that was useful enough to share.

Other YouTube videos recommend going to Yellow Pages or YP.com to find local businesses without websites. Alston tested this and found it inefficient and slow. What he switched to instead is a database called Reference USA. It contains records on essentially every business operating in the United States, and you can filter results by county, zip code, search radius, and business type. For every business category in your search, the database shows a count of businesses in that area. You can click into any category, see the full list, select the records you want, and download everything to an Excel spreadsheet.

The downloaded data includes the business name, address, phone number, email address, whether the business currently has a website, and estimated annual spending on computer and technology expenses. That last field alone is useful: you can filter for businesses that spend meaningfully on technology but still do not have a real website, which tends to be a warmer prospect than a business that has never engaged with any tech services at all.

The key detail: Reference USA is free for anyone in the United States who has a library card. Most library cards are also free. You are not buying a lead list or subscribing to a prospecting tool. You are using a public resource that most small business consultants and web developers do not know exists.

Alston’s process after downloading the list: filter for businesses without websites, send postcards to that group, then follow up by phone. The opening of his phone script at the time was “Did you receive my postcard?” which turns a cold call into a warm follow-up without being dishonest. He was making roughly 20 to 30 calls per day from his car during lunch breaks. Some calls led to appointments. He also started stopping into local businesses on his way home from work to make in-person contact where the phone was not the right tool.

One concrete result: he rebuilt the website for a neighbor who ran a small CPR training business. The existing site was a five-page HTML builder on GoDaddy that had not been updated since the early 2000s and could not accept payments online. Alston pointed the domain to his own name servers through Revolt Web Services, set up WordPress, and delivered a site the owner called far better than what they had. He did the work at no charge as a portfolio piece and proof of concept.

Five Questions to Ask Before Joining Any Online Income Program

Alston’s experience watching the full range of online income content, from the flashy guru channels to Income School, clarified a short set of questions worth applying to any program you are considering. Use these before you spend money or significant time.

Does the person teaching still actively do the thing they are teaching? Jim and Ricky at Income School still run their own niche sites. They are not just selling a course about niche sites while their own sites have gone dormant.
Does the free content actually teach you something, or does it exist primarily to sell you something? Income School’s YouTube channel is substantive enough that you can build a working understanding of the entire method without paying anything.
Is the timeline realistic and honestly presented? 24 months to full-time income is a long commitment. Income School presents it clearly. Programs that promise dramatic results in 30 days are not being honest about what the work actually looks like.
What happens immediately after you pay? If the first thing you encounter inside a paid program is pressure to upgrade to a higher tier, that is a signal about how the business model actually works.
Can you genuinely handle the ghost town phase? If you need income within 60 days to stay motivated, a niche blog is not the right model for where you are right now. Knowing that before you start saves months of frustration.

Find Your X

The Income School model works well for people who have a day job, can write consistently, and are willing to wait 12 to 24 months before significant results show up. It does not work well for people who need income this month or who find writing large volumes of content without immediate feedback genuinely difficult to sustain. That gap is honest and it matters.

If you are trying to figure out which online income path fits your actual situation — your schedule, your existing skills, your financial starting point — the Platform Proof Finder was built for exactly that question. Six questions, one specific recommendation. Find it at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Income School?

Income School is an online education company run by Jim Harmer and Ricky Kesler. They teach people how to build niche websites that earn money through affiliate links, display advertising, and their own digital products. Their main course is Project 24, named for the 24-month timeline they say is realistic for reaching full-time income if you follow their method with consistent effort.

What is Project 24?

Project 24 is Income School’s paid membership and course program. It is organized into 60 steps laid out across three pages. You work through the steps in order, check each one off when complete, and have access to a community of other members working through the same process. The course is designed to be followed sequentially rather than browsed, which is part of what makes it faster to use than trying to piece together the same knowledge from scattered YouTube videos.

How long does it take to make money with Income School?

Income School describes the first three to five months as a ghost town period. Traffic is extremely low and earnings are minimal. Real growth typically begins after month five or six as Google starts to rank your pages more consistently. Reaching full-time income takes most students somewhere between 18 and 30 months of consistent publishing. The $1.63 Alston had earned when he made this video matches the timeline they describe.

Why did Alston choose Income School over other affiliate marketing programs?

He noticed that the biggest affiliate marketing gurus had shifted their actual business from doing affiliate marketing to selling courses about it, which created an incentive problem. He also found that most free content in the space was built to funnel you toward a sale rather than to genuinely teach. Income School’s free content explains the complete method. The paid product adds organization and community rather than hiding the core knowledge behind a paywall.

Is forum affiliate marketing worth doing?

It can generate clicks and commissions, but it requires constant daily attention. You need to check multiple forums, post before other affiliates do, and stay within platform rules you do not control. Alston found it was not truly passive because the results stopped the moment he stopped running the process. There is also the platform risk: forum moderators can remove your posts or flag your account without warning, and you have no way to recover that traffic.

What is the recommended publishing pace for Income School niche sites?

Jim and Ricky recommend publishing 30 posts in 60 days or fewer. A site that publishes 30 articles quickly signals active, consistent content production to Google’s crawlers. The same 30 articles spread over 10 months sends a much weaker signal. The faster pace does not guarantee faster ranking, but it typically shortens the ghost town window before traffic begins growing.

What is Reference USA and how does it help with finding web design clients?

Reference USA is a free business database available to anyone in the United States with a library card. It lists essentially every business in the country and lets you filter by location, industry, and many other criteria. You can download results to a spreadsheet that includes the business name, address, phone number, email, whether they have a website, and estimated technology spending. It is significantly faster than manually searching Yellow Pages and contains information those sources do not have.

Can you run a web design business and a niche site business at the same time?

Alston was running both when he made this video. He had multiple niche sites at different stages through Income School’s method and was also doing web design and hosting work through Revolt Web Services. Managing both is possible but creates real competition for the same limited hours. He acknowledged toward the end of the video that he was losing motivation on his two younger niche sites, which is an honest signal that splitting attention across too many active projects creates a genuine cost over time.

Sources

Alston Godbolt YouTube channel — original video transcript (EHL79S85vXY)
Income School / Project 24 — incomeschool.com
Reference USA business database — referenceusa.com (free with US library card)
Revolt Web Services — revoltwebservices.com