Income School Philosophy: A Scam?

johnnyboi said:

Dude, you do know at the end of the day they are still marketers trying to convince you to join their course/forum right? why would they outright tell you their secret sauce so you can replicate it and not pay them any $$$? They are marketers, not saints don't expect too much from them. Just because 1 guy is fat and jolly and the other guy likes green curry dont make them any less of a marketer (They also kill bears for fun). I'm sure they already have given you enough free value to the point you are questioning yourself (IS THIS THE MAGICAL COURSE THAT WILL MAKE ME RICH ?) and that if you should buy their course, to the point for you have to stalk their website and check if they have backlinks to call out their bullshit here in hopes its an echo chamber.

Hence, unless you are saying you joined their course and saw their forums and none of them mentioned about backlinking inside, I don't think you should be calling them a scam.
Read in between the lines, take whatever value you can get from them and combine with your own knowledge and know-how and make your own Philosophy and sell it as a course.

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Ha ha...so basically, what you are saying, there's a mixture of BS and value in what they say. We have to be wise enough to know what is right and what is wrong. Fair enough.

But, when you give any value mixed with BS, it becomes a big pile of BS. For instance, someone can spend two years writing response, staple and pillar posts, and waiting for organic links because that's what those two guys talked about, right? And he didn't know any better. Or maybe, he would spend 500 bucks on the course only to find out later that it was not the whole "truth". Should we blame that guy not for being careful enough? You can, perhaps.

Oh, BTW it's funny that you would see all that proof and say that it is just to create a stir in an echo chamber. Why would I bother? Am I creating another niche blogging course? No. Have I burned $499 in their course? No. So, you can say that I was helping out those who need it in their niche blogging.

But anyway, if you see that as seeking attention, I will leave you to your remark.

t2van said:

... all they are saying is to do the same but with topics that answer the questions for the user. The traffic maybe small but that's all you need if you can do that for 30-50 posts with 50-100 searches a month that soon ads up..

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Yes, I totally understand your point. I agree with the strategy too. And yes, we can get results, no doubt. But are they getting those mindblowing results that they talk about with that strategy alone? Nope.

The point is not what they are saying but rather what they are NOT saying. I mean, the "complete" story stays hidden from the masses.

Now as @johnnyboi said, we can take it that they are still marketers at the end of the day. So they are out to take your money no matter what. You have to be wise enough to know what is right and what is wrong.

schttrj said:

Yes, I totally understand your point. I agree with the strategy too. And yes, we can get results, no doubt. But are they getting those mindblowing results that they talk about with that strategy alone? Nope.

The point is not what they are saying but rather what they are NOT saying. I mean, the "complete" story stays hidden from the masses.

Now as @johnnyboi said, we can take it that they are still marketers at the end of the day. So they are out to take your money no matter what. You have to be wise enough to know what is right and what is wrong.

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Dunno.... It's all about scale.

Remember as well they sell a course. The y/tube channel is supposed to suck you and pay the $400 or what ever it is fee to get to the course and find the answers you are looking for. It gives you enough info to try and experiment without paying out, if it works people buy in and buy the course. If they gave it away they have no product to sell.

*make me richer buy my course so that I can buy guns to shoot bears *

hadnerd said:

They don't say it clearly like that.
That's what the OP is talking about. When you take a look at all their vid. They talk about content, content, content.
Even with the best content, if you don't build links you will go nowhere.

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Go and publish 500x 1000-2000 Words articles with keyword research and great quality, and im sure you will earn more than a full month income without backlinks within a year

Thats actually exactly what im doing with a new site right now and expecting it to hit 10k/month within a year without active Link building. Check my journey thread for similar cases.

You can also check on Youtube and you Will find a lot of case studies from project24 when they are just publishing content without link building and getting good traffic.

Sure if you are going to rank for competive keywords you need backlinks, but they will tell you how to find the right keywords/subjects to write about in their project24

I hadn't seen this thread before but that is an interesting find. I do realize that was 5 months ago but it looks like thedailyshep was all pingback links. It looks like in December 2019 a ton of backlinks were lost from what I see using Semrush free. I see many pages from thedailyshep listed but those pages don't have the pingbacks anymore.

it's hard to tell right now as thedailyshep and visualizepicture i don't see as having the backlinks anymore. if anyone has a more recent picture of the backlinks from ahrefs it would be interesting to see the numbers and possibly even a top 100 or something as it'd be look at it here for everyone's knowledge of some secret sauce.

I do like to dig in and see why things work. The two guys do have some good information for structuring posts with H2, etc, so I think they do a decent job of that.

Google may be more capable of sending traffic to sites lately that have good content and I did create a site that has around 40 well-written articles and I am outranking some bigger sites on searches but still you need to be top 3 to get real traffic and I just don't quite see that happening without some links of some kind.

Looking around, I do see a lot of what I believe are images loaded from their site. as in the img src is their wordpress uploads images.

I'm never been really sure, but do those images that point and load from a remote site really count as backlinks that do much?

bartosimpsonio said:

Why don't you outdo what they're doing instead of complaining on a forum?

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How is he complaining? All he's done is make a very good point for discussion.

Get off your high horse my man. Very assholey post.

schttrj said:

Ha ha...so basically, what you are saying, there's a mixture of BS and value in what they say. We have to be wise enough to know what is right and what is wrong. Fair enough.

But, when you give any value mixed with BS, it becomes a big pile of BS. For instance, someone can spend two years writing response, staple and pillar posts, and waiting for organic links because that's what those two guys talked about, right? And he didn't know any better. Or maybe, he would spend 500 bucks on the course only to find out later that it was not the whole "truth". Should we blame that guy not for being careful enough? You can, perhaps.

Oh, BTW it's funny that you would see all that proof and say that it is just to create a stir in an echo chamber. Why would I bother? Am I creating another niche blogging course? No. Have I burned $499 in their course? No. So, you can say that I was helping out those who need it in their niche blogging.

But anyway, if you see that as seeking attention, I will leave you to your remark.

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I agree with schttri. BS on any level is BS.
I
understand why income school would do it of course (they got info products to sell). But hiding info in a method is gonna leave those who follow it frustrated.

Very cool thread.

For me, the issues are:

• IS is charging for a product (the course) on the basis that following it will achieve an outcome that most course participants are unlikely to achieve
• many of the course participants are what I would call "vulnerable" in that they aren't rich enough to lose not only the course fee, but also the time put into creating a blogging site

An analogy is being charged for a course to learn to farm rice. All the course does is tell you to scatter grains of rice on the ground and they will grow, and from the beginning of the next year, you'll have enough rice to feed your family and to sow again. What the course doesn't tell you is what sort of ground to sow the grains on, or how to cultivate them.

There is nothing wrong with the information that to grow rice, you need to plant grains in the ground. But there is something wrong with leading people to believe that they will be able to feed their families simply by doing this and nothing else.

IS should be selling the message that they teach an important part of the overall requirements (and it seems they teach it well), but that their students should also look elsewhere for the other parts.

Many IS participants seem to be people in need to money quickly. The false impression that money can be made quickly by blogging (even if quick means 24 months) is propagated. And because it takes 24 months and a lot of time, people only realise that it isn't the whole story once they have invested themselves in it. By then it is too late.

Ranking a website is expensive (in time or money or both) and risky (you can't guarantee that any particular action will lead to the results you want).

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who are daunted by the technical aspect of SEO (or computing in general) and who just want to earn money from writing about something they love. The reality is that its much harder to make money from just writing about what you love than IS or other proponents of similar no link building methodologies lead them on to think.

For any Income School subscriber who is interested in possibly getting more eyes on their blog I'd suggest reading some of the journeys on this forum - particularly those by @Shaunm and @Big Ron and I'd also ask questions on the forum. We're a community willing to help any marketer - and not just with blackhat techniques.

dabax said:

How is he complaining? All he's done is make a very good point for discussion.

Get off your high horse my man. Very assholey post.

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Stop complaining too mate. Go cry somewhere else.

My guess is they followed Neil Patel seminar

bartosimpsonio said:

Stop complaining too mate. Go cry somewhere else.

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You sound bitter mate. Let's cry together

I agree with OP, i never did that deep research on them but whenever while scrolling i saw there videos they were all like SEO is not at all hard in real world and everyone can just fly a plain without a license.

I see there is a transparency layer missing.

Apart from that they also say that KGR is a myth and they have proved also in their videos. But still, here Lots of people have gained a lot from the KGR method which works pretty well. Anyways it's just a point out from my side. It may work and may not. It depends on the niche and other various things I think.

Thanks!

dabax said:

You sound bitter mate. Let's cry together

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You posted 38 turds in 2 years.

What's your real official BHW account?

Commoner said:

My guess is they followed Neil Patel seminar

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Neil Patel followers are a little different, they tend to use a lot of his fluff lines like

• Are you as excited as I am?
• Isn’t it amazing?
  
• Trust me, you can do it too, and I’ll show you exactly how.
  
• Really cool, yeah?

I've seen Income Schools videos on YouTube but never joined their course. Out of all the affiliate "teachers" online they seem to be the most straightforward. They show you the framework, but their no building links approach is BS in any competitive niche. Building links is very profitable for me and I can see the results in just a few weeks. Sadly some of their viewers don't ever get to see that.

schttrj said:

Everyone knows they talk about building no links, right? Loads of content? Loads of B.S.

Here's the website they have been working on for the last year.

emborapets.com

Two relevant referring domains: the dailyshep.com (2000+ do-follow links), visualizepicture.com (80 do-follow links but not relevant), and snakeowner.com (350+ do-follow links, which was the actual domain it was 301-redirected from)

So, they don't build links, right? What's more... look at the growth of their links.

I don't think they are being honest at all.

There are many people here who would disagree with this, perhaps.

But I have a very strong suspicion that something sinister is going on.

They are not as "honest" as we believe them to be.

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Exactly, they are not honest AT ALL! They may sing song, brag about how they are honest and transparent, but if you find their source to download, you can see that they actually do link building

I looked through emborapets in Ahrefs quickly and I can't say it looks overly suspicious. Considering they have only 139 do-follow links and 1130 pages indexed in Google, I'd say it looks kinda normal. With that many articles, surely they'll get lucky with a good link once in a while - which is what their whole doctrine is about.

However, I never trust marketers and "entrepreneurs". I always took for granted that these guys do some link building in the shadows.

hadnerd said:

They don't say it clearly like that.
That's what the OP is talking about. When you take a look at all their vid. They talk about content, content, content.
Even with the best content, if you don't build links you will go nowhere.

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I think they are extremely clear on what their philosophy is.

Zbigniew said:

I looked through emborapets in Ahrefs quickly and I can't say it looks overly suspicious. Considering they have only 139 do-follow links and 1130 pages indexed in Google, I'd say it looks kinda normal. With that many articles, surely they'll get lucky with a good link once in a while - which is what their whole doctrine is about.

However, I never trust marketers and "entrepreneurs". I always took for granted that these guys do some link building in the shadows.


I think they are extremely clear on what their philosophy is.

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Yes, rank with content only. No link-building needed.
On the other side, they do use backlinks.