IS REVERSE ENGINEERING INCOME SCHOOL’S PROJECT 24 – A GREAT IDEA?

At the reduced price of $449 for the first year, Project 24 is a steal for many people. But, it still represents half my salary for this month – not a great idea. Ricky, Jim and their followers certainly have made many YouTube videos on Project 24 and I believe that I can apply my marketing and website design skills to reverse engineer the program for free.

Reverse engineering project 24 is a great idea if you want to truly understand the mechanics of Ricky and Jim’s approach and if you need to save the subscription fee.

Reverse engineering does come with many potential pitfalls. While Ricky, Jim and their community certainly have been more than generous with their knowledge, there appear to me many gaps in the process.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

There are many great programs out there, most of which will yield results if adhered to. But, to me, they pale in comparison to what Project 24 has to offer. If you want to read more on my thought of Project 24, please use this link.

In the end, my decision to reverse engineer Project 24 stems from 2 viewpoints:

1. I need to understand their approach and tinkering with something, really wrestling it to the ground does allow me to get to grips with the topic.
2. At the same time $449 is a lot of money for me right now. In 6-9 months, if this project is successful, I will join Project 24 – after all, I strongly believe that creators need to be rewarded for their hard work and Jim and Ricky have been pioneers in this field.

What do I know about Project 24 that will help in reverse-engineering their process?

• Ricky and Jim have built and sold several sites.
  Most people are happy to strike it lucky one. Ricky and Jim seem to be doing this over and over again, roughly once every quarter. This shows that the system works and that they have faith that it will not fail them.
• The sites are eventually revealed.
  Normally, SEO experts and marketing gurus do not like to reveal their sites, to avoid artificially inflating their traffic numbers. They tend to develop 1 site and then milk it dry. Ricky and Jim have a slightly different approach, where they either renovate a site and show the results or they start a new site from scratch. Many, if not all sites, are announced by Ricky and Jim once they have had some time to mature. This means that I can compare the YouTube video and the sites to see just how close my assumptions and practices are. I can also check with the new owner if the site performed at least as well under his or her direction.
• Massive YouTube channel.
  The sheer size of their channel attests to the value people derive from this program. It would be crazy to reinvent the wheel blind, so why not take advantage of all the videos and extract out all of the meat? Oh, and do you know how much easier it is to reverse engineer a program when most of the components are available at all times, for free?
• No keyword tools.
  This is big. Keywords tools can be very confusing, often not reporting the right data in a timely fashion. Keyword tools are nice if you use the free versions to supplement your keyword research, though traffic volumes are a bit hit-and-miss. Keyword tools do become a rabbit warren where each mouse click exposes more of a topic and before you know it, you have lost 5 hours.
• No link building.
  Nearly every site mentions the importance of link building, to the point where Neil Patel of Ubersuggest may spend 1 hour making a post and 3 days promoting it. This will yield more links in the short term, but are they great quality? Project 24 sites do gain links, but naturally, which is what Google wants.
• 3 types of posts, each with their own purpose.
  • Response posts. These are brief, 1,200 – 1,500 word posts that cover a specific topic. You might be in the gardening space, perhaps in the vegetable garden space specifically. A response post could be the answer to “can I grow strawberries in a pot?”. For a response post to be successful, it has to be specific enough to answer 1 question that has a bit of traffic, say 2,000 queries a month and easy enough for you to rank on the first page, ideally in the top 2. These will target 1 or 2 long tail keywords. They are short, so you cannot cover too much.
  • Staple posts. These are intermediate length, around 1,500 to 3,000 words long filled with cool, shareable content such as “15 tips to…” or “the 21 best …”. Basically, use the headlines that you see on magazines at the checkout counter of your local store. Not quite “7 ways to tell if he is into you”, but the same style. This is the type of post that you can use on Instagram or Pinterest or even Twitter to get traffic flow, get some social love, maybe some shares and definitely some natural backlinks. These may target a few long tail keywords as a table or an infographic can easily cover many aspects of a topic. In the vegetable gardening theme, you could talk about “15 things to do in spring before the first thaw”.
  • Pillar Posts. These are the ultimate posts, with 3,000 words or so and are basically a massive data-dump of all that you know of a specific topic. Using the vegetable gardening example, this is the type of post where you talk about the benefits of growing your own vegetables, form health to mental health to cost savings. These will add the gravitas required to your website, though it will take a long time for Google to rank them.
• Develop a schedule. This is important. Google rewards regularity. Posting now and then does little to trigger the algorithm.
  • Posting routinely lets Google know that it is worth investing resources in you. You may be small now, but each week you put out 2-3 posts. That means that you are serious about the stuff you are posting, You are invested and are investing resources into developing an accurate product.
  • Posting routinely also lets you develop the required depth of keywords so that Google knows you exist. There are billions of posts out there. Think of it like background noise. Every post that you put out is like increasing your voice a tiny fraction. Do it often enough and your voice may start to break through the background noise.
  • Posting routinely also improves your game. A writer is not born, he is made. A journalist takes years to develop the right instincts. Sure, anyone can strike it lucky and stumble onto the story of the century, but practice makes perfect and by writing every day, you get better at it and you can refine the headline, the opening paragraph and the snippet winning section.
• Reputation is everything. Reputation is big, if not everything. E.A.T. (Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness), as Ricky and Jim so often say on Project 24 videos really does matter. Whether this is a reputation earned through a degree or profession or simply by living and acknowledging experiences, your reputation will help Google to rank you. After all, would you read about the “top 10 ways to improve your cycling time” from an actual biker or from a surgeon? Sure a surgeon is trustworthy, but does he necessarily have the required expertise?
• Forget about looking pretty. Looking pretty is nice but you want to apply the 80:20 principle. Spend your time doing the bits that get you 80% of the way there. The most stunning post will attract no-one until it is published and while you develop this 1 perfect post, I can generate 10 of my own 80% posts that will rank for 10-15 keywords each and bring me thousands of visitors. This means that I get more opportunities to close my sale.
• Speed, speed and more speed. This is a big one. It is nice to develop massive posts with dozens of super high quality 4K pictures. If the site is slow though, people will leave before your site has had a chance to load. So, less is more and focus on user experience. Deliver the best quality post that is concise and quick to read while also blisteringly fast to open. If you can answer a question in 1 sentence – do it – maybe put the question into a FAQ list so that it develops more weight, but do it.

How will I measure success?

As mentioned, I do not actually make use of Project 24. I do not currently have a subscription. My goal is to follow the route I believe is outlined in the project and get to their milestones, as far as I can determine them, according to the following schedule:

What are the Project 24 Milestones?

That is a great question, right? How do I know what these milestones are in the first place if I have not paid for access to the course? Google – it does help to understand how these algorithms work and to be able to do some basic research. As luck would have it, Ricky and Jim were kind enough to provide me with this information on their website. There were no direct links, but Google is a beast when it comes to indexing posts.

From the link, this process is like a funnel, with most course attendees in the first few tiers, thus making it to the middle of the road is an achievement indeed.