[Journey] Blogging based on Income School (Project 24) Philosophy

[Big Ron]

Hello World,

BHW has been helpful to me, maybe my journey will spark ideas for you.

Case Study:

• Can I make a profit following the Project 24 method found at IncomeSchool.com? It is a 60 step process and eludes to being able to replace your full-time job in 24 months.

Background:

• I have been blogging for over ten years but only dabbling. I am familiar with Blogger and WP. I have coded in HTML, PHP, CSS, C++, ...and I'm so old I cut my teeth on Basic, Fortran, and Cobol. This is my first attempt to get serious with blogging in hopes of replacing my 9-5 job.

Timeline:

• April: Establish niche site #1, complete Steps 1-21 of Project 24
• May: Complete Steps 22-40
• June: Complete Steps 41-60
• July: Establish niche site #2, complete Steps 1-21
• Aug: Complete Steps 22-40
• Sept: Complete Steps 41-60

Month 1 - April 2019

Pretty much the same stuff that is on their YT channel. It was very difficult for me to decide on a niche. There is a list from Income School that you can download from their site and it contains dozens of ideas. My first question was "how many are still good if you've been giving this list out for a while?" So I continued until I found my own.

My advice: if you can't decide on a niche, go with what you know. I won't divulge mine but let's just say if I was a plumber... I would create a blog about the plumbing profession.

I used good old FlamingText.com to create a temporary logo.

I dropped around $80 for an annual subscription to Elegant Themes.

Helpful Hint: To learn Divi like a boss, watch Ferdy Korp's 3+ hour tutorial.

Domain Name and Hosting

So I picked a domain name with the words of my profession in it. Example: TheCertifiedPlumber.com or something like that. I went with BlueHost for hosting as suggested by Income School. I bought the annual hosting package for $80 and it came with the domain name free. I set up Word Press and began creating content.

Article Hit List

Writing 10 Response Posts

Knocking these out took me a little over a week. I work full-time and have a large family so I did these mostly at night after everyone had gone to bed. Many nights I stayed up until 2 or 3 am to get the posts done. I started the whole process mid-April and was able to finish with the 10 Response Posts by May 1st.

Resizing the Images

I actually didn't want to do this due to monotony. I skipped it and moved on to the next month's tasks.

Stats:

I saw no traffic this month and didn't even have a hit counter or analytics installed. Project 24 says you won't see your first $5 until month SIX of the process. I was content just blogging my brains out for April.

[Sneak Peek, I'm six weeks in and seeing traffic and income. Nothing great, mind you but it is starting and way ahead of the projected plan. ]

Family duties call. I'll continue with what I did in May with some screenshots as soon as I get more free time.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Fang Yu]

It's a solid plan you got there.
Will be following.
Do you plan to rely only on quality content to rank? is your niche competitive?
You need at least some backlinks imo.

 

[Big Ron]

This method is all about "quality content." They don't believe in building links etc. But I will be linking some.
My niche is competitive but only against the organizations that either provide the licensure for the career field or the organizations that are the "societies" for the career field. There are not a lot of sites doing content on "What is a Plumber", "How do I become a plumber", "How much do plumbers get paid" etc. This niche model should work for any field. I'll be trying a different career niche after this one to verify.

It's a solid plan you got there.
Will be following.
Do you plan to rely only on quality content to rank? is your niche competitive?
You need at least some backlinks imo.

I'm going to try and upload some pics of my stats now. What you'll see is data from StatCounter.com which I've used since 2007. I started tracking my niche around the 3rd week of April but then messed up the code somehow and lost the tracker. I wasn't concerned as I didn't expect any traffic yet. So the first blip you see around April 23rd is actually me being tracked because I hadn't chosen to hide my own footsteps yet. May 3rd is when I fixed the tracker but it was still tracking my hits. I hid myself and the real traffic started around May 8th or so. By that time I had written the 10 Response Posts and started on the next set of ten posts called Staple Posts. Staples are 2500 words, a 1000 word increase over the Response Posts. One of the Staples went quasi-viral, so to speak, and got shared around Facebook around May 16th. I ended up with 1600 pageviews and about 1300 unique visits. Needless to say, I was stoked. (yeah, I said stoked. So what. I'm old.)



May: Complete Steps 22-40

Writing Staple Posts

The key, as they explained it, is to write 2500 words or more. These are no longer responses to Google questions. These are shorter How To posts and 5 Best Things type of posts. Short guides, etc. The method they use it to put a Headline 1 at the top and add another H2 or H3 every 2-3 paragraphs. Keep the paragraphs short and to the point. No extra drivel just to fill space. Keep the wording simple unless you know your audience is going to be highly educated. Make your own graphs and charts to use as images. Take your own pictures to use as thumbnails and post images. If you absolutely have to use someone else's photos, subscribe to a service to have a large library to chose from.

YouTube Video

They recommend using your phone camera to record and not overcomplicate this part. Just 5-10 minutes talking about something relevant to the blog. I already had one video made on this niche topic prior to starting the blog so I just plugged that video into a page on my blog. Month 3 I'm supposed to have ten videos total.

They also say you can create a podcast to have a similar effect. I'm guessing we're just going for an alternate method of driving traffic to our niche site. I kind of like the podcast idea better. They show a video on how to record a YouTube video using a screenshare / screen record just in case you absolutely don't want your own ugly mug on video.

Marketing

After getting a taste of that 1600 pageview day, I became hooked on watching my hit counter like a Hoes on Santa. So to keep the hits coming I went out and found a few groups in the niche genre on Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Luckily, they all accepted me and my gentle spamming in their groups. So, in Reddit for example, I joined the Plumbing subreddit. When someone would post a question about "How do I get into Plumbing" or "How much does a Plumber make per hour" I would write a sentence or two of small talk and then link to my niche post that answered the question. I repeated this on all three social networks. I've been doing this since the last week of May and have had terrific results.

But it isn't organic traffic. It's all marketing traffic. Which is fine but it means I have to do stuff every day to stay engaged in each group. The days I have content to post, it is pretty easy to get traffic. But the days I don't crank out content, it is a bit more of a struggle. My saving grace here was that I had already been making memes in my field for about six months just for fun. But I had only been posting them on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not the greatest place to wrangle traffic. I mean, I'm hitting the niche of people who don't know what they want to be for a career and they are asking questions. LinkedIn is built for people that HAVE a career and are networking. Facebook and Reddit ended up being MUCH better.

But I grabbed all my memes and recycled them through FB and Reddit. They were widely accepted to the point where I created a meme page on my website as a library. The trick here is to create your own memes with your own pictures, then you can paste your own URL on the picture. Now, when people download my memes and share them somewhere else on the internet, they are advertising my site for me. Memes are easy to make. I doubt I need to tell anyone how to make them but just in case, I simply downloaded the phone app Photo Director and used that. $4.99 to buy the app and I was ready to go. The droid version is WAY better than the iPhone version.

I'm not sure how accurate it is but I enjoy visiting CuteStat.com and running my domain name through it. The outcome, among other things, is your Alexa ranking and dollar value of your website. At two weeks old, I had no Alexa ranking at all. By four weeks my Alexa ranking was 4,292,170. I think the value went from $8 to $240 during this 4th week but has remained unchanged. I'm now at 3.7M on Alexa. Further down on the page it shows you your average daily unique views and daily average page views. This thing may be total crap, I don't know. YYMV.

I have continued the same marketing strategy through today. My traffic dips if I don't have time to engage in social media for a day. But I'm hoping, in time, I'll have enough Return Visitors and new people interested in the career field that traffic will continue without my input. I do intend to return to make this an "authority" site with more content after I finish the second niche site.

I'll post my June actions in the next post and include my Pre-Launch Go Live Contest.

My Adsense, in my opinion, is pathetic. I'm around $16.28 for the last 30 days, but I didn't get serious about loading up on Adsense ads until the end of May. Now every page has 3-5 ads on it. Never more than 5, even on the 4000+ Pillar Posts.

Amazon is at $5.74 for May 11-June 11. However, Income School teaches that you shouldn't see your first $5 until your sixth month and I'm there in six weeks so I shouldn't complain. I am linking to Amazon products on a few pages and on the sidebar of every page.

The third income producer that I haven't tackled yet is selling info products. Income School teaches to do (1) ads (Adsense, then Ezoic when at 4 months old and 10,000 page views each month, then Thrive if you can hit 100,000 pageviews each month), (2) Amazon affiliate links and (3) info products.



June Action Plan

Complete Steps 41-60

Now, I clearly jumped the gun on Amazon Associates. But I already had one from my previous hobby blog. I have set up an account/page on Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I added the social share buttons on my niche site hoping folks will share my content.

I even tried to jump the gun to join Ezoic and dump Adsense. I signed up and they contacted me. They liked my stats but you have to be at least four months established AND have 10,000 pageviews each month. I'm not even half that old yet.

I have subbed out my articles to IWriter.com and have had mixed results. The $66 Premium service for 4000 words is stellar. The $33 Premium service for 2000 words sucked. I have paid for two of each. That is who Income School recommended if you are going to pay someone else for content. The only good part is that you can send the article back for a rewrite up to three times or ask for a different writer all together if the article is bad enough. I did both on the lower tier. Both upper tiers got praise from professionals in the career field that was written about.

I have three Pillar Posts left to write. Those are 4000 words or more. There are YouTube videos from Income School if you have questions about that part. I need to do 9 more YT videos. Then, according to Income School, I can stop if I want. That would conclude the makings of a niche site. Let it ride for six months and the organic traffic should start to build at that point and income should start to be realized. I kicked off a pre-Go Live contest today to both drum up more traffic AND build an email marketing list. That is not part of the Project 24 outline but I know the value of a good email list so I'm giving it a shot.

Wish me luck! I'll post back early July and let you know how June turned out. Oh, I did start to see organic traffic from Google yesterday. Fingers crossed!

 

[davids355]

Good luck.

Thread moved.

 

[Yarharharharhar]

Niche selection is definitely the hardest part. Would you say the niche you went with is one you are experienced with or an expert in? I went through their stuff recently too. The idea of pillar, staple, and response posts is interesting.

So you started in April and already getting traffic from google? That's pretty good.

 

[Big Ron]

Niche selection is definitely the hardest part. Would you say the niche you went with is one you are experienced with or an expert in? I went through their stuff recently too. The idea of pillar, staple, and response posts is interesting.

So you started in April and already getting traffic from google? That's pretty good.

It's a niche I'm an expert in. But the writing can still be exhaustive. I've found that when I can afford to hire a writer, then I can just add in personalized blurbs about what I know and make the article more personal. Some of these writers are spot on...some, not so much.

I looked today and see search engine hits from Google, Bing and Yahoo but it is only a few referrals each. I'm hoping this means they'll open the flood gates soon.

 

[NoExcuses]

I’ve watched their YouTube videos about SEO but never really payed attention to their program. I’m interested in seeing how it’ll turn out for you, goodluck!

 

[Big Ron]

I saw a major lag in traffic today so I thought I would share an idea I came up with that boosted them temporarily.

Since I have had good success with creating Memes in my niche what I did was put them all on one page on my website and create a meme gallery.

Then I went to my social media accounts and posted a quick blurb saying “I went back through the last year of my meme posts and gathered them all into one page on my website. If you need a good giggle, pay it a visit." and then I linked to my page. On Reddit I put another blurb below that saying if this is too close to self-promotion please delete.

I received over 100 unique visits in one hour from Facebook already. I do not think the mods have released my post on Reddit yet. Linkin is pointless for this kind of thing.

I'm on track to have my second highest page view day thanks to thus dumb meme idea. What started out as a desperate attempt to drum up some traffic had done great. I clearly didn't understand the value of memes. Now I how to figure out how to capitalize on memes better.

 

[Big Ron]

June 14th, I've started making my obligatory 10 videos. I already had one made previously and am using that as #1. I made the second video this morning. I used my iPhone XS and the animal emoticon thing to mask my face. I did a 3-minute video on something that happens in my career field a lot since I'm blogging about my career field. So, in this journey, I have been using the example of being a plumber. In that case, my video today would have been of me talking about what I do as a plumber and the stigma of plumber's butt. I made a joke and kept it light-hearted while still explaining what I do with a little seriousness.

I made a thumbnail for the youtube post. Used the Slice iPhone app to crop, add text and sound effects. UPloaded it to youtube and embedded the youtube URL in a new page I created on my blog. When I posted to social media about my video, I linked to my site so I would get the pageview first, then hope they hit the second click to view the video. I still need 1000 subscribers to monetize my YT account so views there are not as critical. However, it is sending traffic to my YT channel so I added the words (Please Subscribe) in the title. I have over 4000 hours watched which I bought from a service here a while back (and it stuck).

Not really getting much action on my Reddit or FB posts about this video. At least, nothing like yesterday's post about a meme page. I ended up with 715 pageviews for that one. Come on organic traffic! I'm going to knock out the rest of my ten videos tomorrow and post them on YT. Then I should be about done. I'm waiting on one more post from iWriter and my 30 posts are done. Then it's time to move on to niche site #2. I still haven't thought of a topic yet.

 

[Dark Sky]

Damn, wish I could use this strategy, follow these guys everyday on youtube but their course is too damn expensive X)

 

[Big Ron]

Damn, wish I could use this strategy, follow these guys everyday on youtube but their course is too damn expensive X)

I haven't bought their membership yet. Everything I'm doing is off the free stuff they put on YouTube. I'm practically listing it for you here too.

 

[Big Ron]

 

[Big Ron]

I'm attempting to get my monthly pageviews to 10,000/mo. That will allow to get off of Adsense and over to Ezoic. Income should take a big boost from that.

I made $30 in Adsense in June.

The part I'm stuck on is creating three digital "e-products" needed to stick to the Income School program.





Trying to get to 10,000 page views per month by month 4. That is the requirement to get onboard with Ezoic ads. Dropping Adsense and switching to Ezoic should increase income 200-300%. But you have to be four months old and get 10,000 page views per month.

If I can get some organic traffic of decent volume, I should be fine. But Google sure is taking their sweet time sending more than a dozen referrals each week.

 

[seocrab]

Thanks for the updates. Are you still driving traffic via social at the moment? It's not unusual to be low on organic traffic after only 2 months.

How much content is on your site now?

 

[thegoldeneye]

It was a pleasure to follow your journey. Please continue updating us and good luck!

 

[Big Ron]

Thanks for the updates. Are you still driving traffic via social at the moment? It's not unusual to be low on organic traffic after only 2 months.

How much content is on your site now?

30 articles, yes it is

I have learned that posting to FB groups really helps. I have one main group that I target. When someone asks a question about plumbing, I respond with a link to the article on my site that answers it. The Mods of that group ended up saying something like "we've talked about you and we've been noticing that you are doing an increasing amount of self-promoting and that isn't what this group is for. Please refrain." or something along those lines. Since I can't afford to lose that pot of potential views, I backed off and it showed in my numbers.

But there is still some residual traffic coming from that group. Eventually, though, I imagine it will get buried. I did find a second group that appears to have no real moderation. So I started pounding that one with links to all my articles. Researching the mods and seeing when they last posted tell me they aren't active. I cranked up just under 1000 pageviews yesterday by posting links to articles on group #2. Turns out, Group #1 has about 15,000 members. Group #2 has almost 35,000 members. So I'm seeing better results now.

The problem, of course, is that I can't just keep spamming them over and over. They'll get sick of my repeated posts. So I'll focus on new memes as they do drive some traffic to the blog. Then weekly, I post a "the meme page has been updated with dozens of new meme images and videos." That will get a big influx of views for 24 hours.

So I have to keep watching for more FB groups. LinkedIn is just about worthless for this sort of thing. Since my site is kind of centered around people looking into plumbing, there's no real traffic from LinkedIn for that. I did find one Reddit group that works and I post there.

I also started my own FB group and dump all my stuff there. I put a disclaimer at the top that says "groups are requesting that I stop self-promoting with my helpful articles so I opened my own group where you can see everything." Income school says don't bother with Facebook. They don't like FB because they say you don't truly own your group. I can understand that. But I'm also driving quite a bit of traffic so until organic traffic shows up, I'm going to keep after social media.

When I started the journey, I created a FB page. Now I have a FB group. I don't fully understand the reason for a page. It seems to distract from the group because people sign up for one or the other. I'm thinking about either deleting the page or just placing one post saying "go to the group page."

Also keeping my eyes out for other social media outlets to post on....

 

[thegoldeneye]

@Big Ron can you confirm this link have all files and videos before I download it? It seems like it does.

https://mega.nz/#F!K6ZS1aoT!HShWJmwRfZtjwYxF3ZbIcQ

 

[porewezifa]

Hi Ron, I'm starting this same journey (project 24) and will keep an eye on this post. I chose a niche that i know nothing (dont do this mistake guys)!
I think you are doing very very well, hope i get half of your numbers! lol

Here are my two cents.
Maybe you are trying too hard to drive traffic through marketing? The project philosophy is "content is king", they say nothing you can do to boost your traffic is as good as writing new valuable content.

I would keep pushing till get accepted by ezoic ads to boost your earnings. but after that I would wait for organic traffic kicks in.... writing more posts every week and maybe starting the second niche site.

 

[Big Ron]

@Big Ron can you confirm this link have all files and videos before I download it? It seems like it does.

https://mega.nz/#F!K6ZS1aoT!HShWJmwRfZtjwYxF3ZbIcQ

Yes, that appears to be all of it. Same set I saw here months ago that got me started but it was on a Google shared drive and the "share" expired I guess. Are you starting the program?

 

[Ninja Turtles]

I got their tutorial and will watch it for sure. Looks like a solid plan. I will follow your journey to watch how it will work for you. All the best and please keep updating us.