[Journey] Trying out Income School's "$0 to $4,000 per month in 1 year" strategy

I've been following this video. Since August 2022

Here's my update. I know no one have asked but lemme tell you how i puled it off without spending too much.

2$ Domain
6$ Canva Monthly
5$ Grammerly
100% Scraping with custom Visuals (As myself a visual artist)
Few automations WP to FB to TW to LD to PT


100+ View/Day
1$ /Day Income
5 Articles a day

October Update

The site now has 160 posts live.

Sadly, the site got hit by the update. Rankings: 1 in the top 3 and 6 in the top 10. 9 in the top 30.

I'm going to continue publishing content as planned. I'll publish another 15 articles in November.

I'll post another update in December.

Google Analytics:




YouTube (Lifetime):

There are 20 videos in total on YT. YouTube seems to be doing better than the site. LOL.



Month 9 (November)

Here are the expenses so far:

Domain: $230
160 Posts: $2580
20 YT Videos: $500

Total= $3310
Income= $136 (Total)

yusufxdigital said:

I know no one have asked but lemme tell you how i puled it off without spending too much.

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Your approach is very feasible and cost effective. You will recover your investment pretty soon and start making profits provided you do not receive DMCA take down for scraped content (I am sure you are working on resolving that too). My best wishes mate

warriorsam53 said:

October Update

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Mate, the stats are fine but they stand way too behind the target. Its been 7 months now.

sageshark said:

Your approach is very feasible and cost effective. You will recover your investment pretty soon and start making profits provided you do not receive DMCA take down for scraped content (I am sure you are working on resolving that too). My best wishes mate

Mate, the stats are fine but they stand way too behind the target. Its been 7 months now.

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Yeah I agree. Not much I can do though. A lot of legit sites got hit in the last update and this was one of them.

Surprisingly, my AI sites are doing great.

Where do you outsource your YT videos for your blog OP? Good luck with your journey!

webmasterbd said:

Where do you outsource your YT videos for your blog OP? Good luck with your journey!

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I use a freelancer that I've worked with before. They are presentation style faceless videos.

warriorsam53 said:

Surprisingly, my AI sites are doing great.

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This is a good news.

warriorsam53 said:

A lot of legit sites got hit in the last update and this was one of them.

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Ok, but what made you think that your site got hit in Oct update? I see that the Oct pageviews are well within under 100 on an average.

We say our site got hit when there is a sudden drop in views or keyword rankings. But I can see that the traffic has been almost constant except couple of spikes in Oct. What were the traffic stats for last 3 months?

sageshark said:

Your approach is very feasible and cost effective. You will recover your investment pretty soon and start making profits provided you do not receive DMCA take down for scraped content (I am sure you are working on resolving that too). My best wishes mate

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Thank you for your best wishes. As you've asked from 2300 Articles only 5 of them got hit by the DMCA strange but i deleted them right away. I'm totally noob in this field just good with graphics and asthetics whats keeping my things alive.

Also i do Automation to get my content spread all over social media handles pretty useless as i don't usually get more users from SM but still trying my best.

yusufxdigital said:

Thank you for your best wishes. As you've asked from 2300 Articles only 5 of them got hit by the DMCA strange but i deleted them right away. I'm totally noob in this field just good with graphics and asthetics whats keeping my things alive.

Also i do Automation to get my content spread all over social media handles pretty useless as i don't usually get more users from SM but still trying my best.

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Yes, it is good to delete the pages those received DMCA and apply 301 redirect if they have been crawled and indexed.

I am doing a journey where I am scraping content from other sites. I recently received a request to remove content by one site owner and I removed those pages. Fortunately those pages were yet to be crawled and indexed so I didn't have to apply a 301. You can see my progress in my thread below - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/j...logging-lets-see-how-many-can-i-make.1450934/

warriorsam53 said:

I use a freelancer that I've worked with before. They are presentation style faceless videos.

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How much do you pay your freelancer for a video?

sageshark said:

Ok, but what made you think that your site got hit in Oct update? I see that the Oct pageviews are well within under 100 on an average.

We say our site got hit when there is a sudden drop in views or keyword rankings. But I can see that the traffic has been almost constant except couple of spikes in Oct. What were the traffic stats for last 3 months?

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It's based on the rankings. A lot of keywords that were on page 1 and the top 3 just disappeared and aren't ranking anywhere. Even based on search console, the clicks and impressions just crashed in September. I believe I was hit by the helpful content update.

Feaboduc said:

How much do you pay your freelancer for a video?

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I pay around 20 bucks on average.

warriorsam53 said:

I pay around 20 bucks on average.

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Well, I think you got a good deal.

Good luck with your journey

November Update

The site now has 175 posts live.

The traffic has continued to decline.

I'm going to continue publishing content as planned. I'll publish another 15 articles in December.

I'll post another update in Jan.

Google Analytics:



YouTube (Lifetime):



There are 25 videos in total on YT. One of the videos from November seems to be doing really well.

Month 10 (November)

Here are the expenses so far:

Domain: $230
175 Posts: $2850
25 YT Videos: $605

Total= $3850
Income= $150 (Total)

warriorsam53 said:

I bought an expired domain in Feb in the finance niche. That's the domain I'm going to go with for this journey. I'm going to follow their exact steps and see if I can get the same results.

Tbh, I expect the site to make less than $500 a month after a year.

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Remember what kind of income you were expecting after a year - don't give up and please keep posting your reports: it is very inspiring.

How are you finding the niche now that you have spent some time and effort on it? Was it worth it despite it being a hard niche to rank in? What, if anything, would you do differently?

Looking forward to the January update.

Ludwic said:

Remember what kind of income you were expecting after a year - don't give up and please keep posting your reports: it is very inspiring.

How are you finding the niche now that you have spent some time and effort on it? Was it worth it despite it being a hard niche to rank in? What, if anything, would you do differently?

Looking forward to the January update.

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Thanks a lot. I'm not going to give up anyway. Can't do much about google updates.

Tbh, I'm not sure what I would do differently.

I don't think the niche is the problem. I have other sites in the finance niche and they're ranking fine. Everything was ranking great until the updates.

The keyword research was not the problem. A lot of keywords were on page 1. They had good volume.

Here's a screenshot the rankings sorted by best:



There are 5 at #10 (best). So even though a lot of keywords were on page 1 initially, they're nowhere to be found after the update.

I don't think the content is an issue. It's simple info content and does a great job in satisfying the search intent. One the journey is complete, I'll go back and try to update some of the articles and see if that helps.

So I'm not really sure what I would change. lol.

All is possible mate . But you should have many skills and experience to gain which you want .
Good luck on your goals and journeys .

warriorsam53 said:

Thanks a lot. I'm not going to give up anyway. Can't do much about google updates.

Tbh, I'm not sure what I would do differently.

I don't think the niche is the problem. I have other sites in the finance niche and they're ranking fine. Everything was ranking great until the updates.

The keyword research was not the problem. A lot of keywords were on page 1. They had good volume.

Here's a screenshot the rankings sorted by best:

View attachment 236138

There are 5 at #10 (best). So even though a lot of keywords were on page 1 initially, they're nowhere to be found after the update.

I don't think the content is an issue. It's simple info content and does a great job in satisfying the search intent. One the journey is complete, I'll go back and try to update some of the articles and see if that helps.

So I'm not really sure what I would change. lol.

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Links are what is missing.

Links are more important than ever.

Think about it.

With all the AI mess out there, google has no other way but to count on quality links to judge a website.

This is a competitor of mine.

The content on the site is shit, worse than that of AI, but it does satisfy search intent, and the site is getting tons of backlinks naturally due to its informative nature.

These income school people discourage link building, they know it takes technical skills to build links and their target audience is moms looking for a part time income, their goal is to sell courses to these people rather than webmasters.

No wonder your journey failed miserably by following their advice.

mirrorer said:

Links are what is missing.

Links are more important than ever.

Think about it.

With all the AI mess out there, google has no other way but to count on quality links to judge a website.

This is a competitor of mine.

The content on the site is shit, worse than that of AI, but it does satisfy search intent, and the site is getting tons of backlinks naturally due to its informative nature.

View attachment 236141

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Whether or not you need links depends on the keywords you target. I target low competition keywords. I'm positive they don't need links to rank.

As you can see from the screenshot in my previous post, a lot of keywords were on page 1 without any links. The site got hit in the update for some reason. I don't know for sure but I don't think it's because of links. Thousands of sites got hit. Even the ones that had links.

If you see my other journey, the site went up to 50,000 pageviews a month without any links. Links aren't that important for low competition keywords.

VAT said:

These income school people discourage link building, they know it takes technical skills to build links and their target audience is moms looking for a part time income, their goal is to sell courses to these people rather than webmasters.

No wonder your journey failed miserably by following their advice.

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I'm not sure why you think that it takes technical skills to build links. You can just buy them. The problem with links is that 70-80% of them don't work. You can use all sorts of metrics (most are BS) but eventually, it's hit or miss.

As far as the journey failing, it's okay. I more or less expected it to fail because of the time limit. But I did expect the site to generate around 500 bucks a month by now. I've done it multiple times so I know that it's possible. But Google had other plans.

I'll continue adding content to the site. I'm confident that it'll recover and make money at some point. I've spent just under 4 grand so it's not a big deal. It won't be hard to get a good ROI.