There are so many ways you can make money online. The guys at Income School show us how we can create websites that make us money to quit our J.O.B.
They are the owners of Income School, as well as many other businesses.
They make a lot of money showing people how to create websites as well as YouTube channels.
Income School has their course: Project 24
This course will show you how to be successfully unemployed in 24 months with online sites, youtube channels, etc. Check them out here:
How Ricky and Jim Make Money Online with Income School
Jim and Ricky create blogs and YouTube channels to gather an audience in a particular industry. They are in all kinds of industries like pets, knives, photography, RVs, hunting, and guns.
They gather, get traffic, get YouTube subscribers and then they find ways to monetize it. Sometimes it is with an affiliate deal, with info products, or ads on a website.
They do this same thing within the internet marketing space. They gather an audience and teach them how to do this, and that also generates an income stream.
They made $1 million in 2018 and they beat it in 2019.
Take us back to before when you had a job. Talk about what you were doing before and how you got into this business.
Jim recently wrote a book, and in the book there is a chapter that lays out a situation that paints a pretty bleak picture of where he was. Jim, his wife, and his four-week old son were living in a hotel.
They graduated from college in 2009 and he couldn’t get a job anywhere. His car broke down and they were down and out, living on the other side of the country.
Jim finally got a job at the dollar store, and while he was there, he started listening to podcasts to dull the boredom. Some of them were teaching internet marketing, he heard from people who were making real money online.
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise that he had a lot of time to listen to these podcasts. Jim started his first online business called Improve Photography, that he has since sold, and he ran it for many years and earned millions of dollars from it.
Meanwhile, Ricky was working in corporate America as a chemical engineer, and he thought he had it made. He had a good job and was making good money. He was working on an MBA at the same time.
Ricky was living in Dallas, Texas at the time, and he was dying to move back to Idaho. Ricky had to interview an entrepreneur for business school and he chose Jim. Ricky was intrigued by his business.
Later, Jim texted him out of the blue and said he wanted to talk to him. He had just started a new website, Income School. They started working together.
Ricky graduated with his MBA and the next day he was laid off from his job. He was good at the work he did and he was able to get a job in Idaho. It was a good job in corporate America, but it was mind numbing to him most days. Fortunately he had Income School to work on.
Watch the entire income school interview here:
Two and a half years later, Ricky left his job to work online full time.
When Jim and Ricky start something, they don’t tell anybody what or where it is for about six months, until they can prove they can build it from scratch without their followers flooding the site.
About fourteen weeks ago, they started a new YouTube channel and they have about 20 videos on it and it already makes $1,000 a month. It has never been like this, where someone from a cell phone can record themselves and make a fast audience. Maybe half a million people have seen them on the new channel, at this point.
How many websites do you have that make you money like income school?
Jim and Ricky have about six or seven active projects right now.
Their portfolio keeps getting too full and then they need to sell some websites. They are too full right now to do them all justice.
They have built about a dozen or so websites to success and real money.
What is the end goal of creating niche sites?
Normally, they would just own them and keep making money from them.
In their circumstance, they are teaching, and in order to be relevant teachers, they need to be practitioners as well.
If they are not starting something new each year, they are outdated.
There are so many internet marketing people, pillars in the industry, that haven’t started anything from scratch in years.
Jim and Ricky feel like they owe their audience that — to start from scratch, no unfair advantages over and over again, because that is where their audience is.
There was a time when Jim’s business wasn’t doing well. A few years in, Jim had been making a ton of money, but then it started to peter out. He was making $40,000 a month and then it dropped to $10,000 a month. Jim was still new to online marketing, and he didn’t know what he was doing wrong.
Selling websites is something they do, but it isn’t their end goal. If Ricky was doing what they are teaching, he would build a website or YouTube channel, and he would do it with the intent of being an influencer in that space, and just owning it.
Usually when you sell a website, you get two to two and a half years of revenue. If you keep the website, you can earn that income indefinitely.
Why was your website not making money? What did you learn?
Jim had an online course about photography. He had about 300,000 people a month visiting the site.
Each month, he would open up 75 or 100 seats in this course and then he would email each person a lesson for 30 days to jumpstart their photography. He made $10,000 a month from that course.
Eventually, he got up to $40,000 a month. Jim decided to scale, but he was limited to how many seats he could have in the course each month.
He decided to hire an employee and offer an unlimited number of seats. For the first few months, it was going great, but he was only making sales on the first day of each month, because it was only on sale every 15 days.
He made it evergreen, where you could sign up whenever you wanted. Even though he made the courses better, put more into it, and opened more opportunities for people, he no longer had the scarcity.
Before, he would post it to Facebook and say last month the class sold out in 75 seconds and then 75 seconds later it would sell out again. It was the urgency and scarcity of the course that made it so popular. He didn’t see it at the time.
Is scarcity something that everyone should use online? Does that translate to all businesses?
It doesn’t always transfer to every business.
On Income School, the course is open all the time. There is no scarcity and they are selling like crazy.
The photography class was built on social media, when online courses were novel and new. People needed a little prodding to sign up. That was what worked at that time.
The day came where he had to let go of his employees, because the business was no longer profitable. Jim felt like an absolute loser that day.
Jim paid for mentoring sessions from successful entrepreneurs and internet marketers. He had prayed and planned for someone to show him what he did wrong. The day he was supposed to meet with a well-known online entrepreneur, he got an email saying that day was not good and they needed to reschedule.
Jim was broken. He put his back against the wall and started pushing the business.
He listened to a podcast about flash sales, especially on Black Friday, and he made a bunch of photography courses, presets, and digital products and put it in one bundle. Separately, it would be $2,000, but he sold it in a bundle for $40. It took him a month to create, and it was the best product he could possibly put together.
On Black Friday, he launched it through Instagram, a blog post, an email, a YouTube video, a podcast, and he plastered it everywhere.
Jim made $150,000 in four days. He started doing this every year and one year he made $250,000. That was when he realized that he needed to figure this out on his own.
If someone wanted to use online marketing for barbecuing, walk us through step by step to where we can start generating income.
When Jim Googled Best Barbecue Grill, many well known sites pulled up. What most people do is they make a site and start writing about grills. This is a recipe for years of frustration. There is a better way.
Jim and Ricky would go to Google and type in search terms related to barbecue. He typed “barbecue a”, then “barbecue b”, then “barbecue c”, etc. Now they can write about finding a barbecue cleaning service or find a canopy to put over their grill.
Most people are skipping this step and going for the easy topics, like Best Barbecue of 2019.
Jim and Ricky find out what people are searching for and create content based off that. If you talk about how to set up a barbecue canopy, it is not a far stretch to recommend your favorite canopy.
People are going straight to Amazon and reading reviews there. Amazon is trying to cut bloggers out. Jim and Ricky create content that everyone else is ignoring.
If you wanted to start writing about smoking, Ricky would start with smoking as the main content for the site and would pick a domain name that is one step bigger. It allows you flexibility.
As far as a topic being too specific, if there is a tribe that exists, like a magazine or a subreddit, it is not too small.
Once you decide your topic, Google barbecue a, b, c, etc., define some specific topics you want to write about, then start writing blog posts. Start with the oddball ones and keep them around 1,000 words.
When you get to the more competitive topics, like best barbecue of 2019, write a 3,500 word, best effort post. This comes after you’ve established some credibility with Google.
There is also the side step method. Go to YouTube and do the same search as barbecue a, b, c, etc. You will not find it. You will find stock photos with voice overs. It is so easy to stick out on YouTube right now.
If you have experience in grilling and smoking for years, go on a video and talk about what you know from actual experience. It comes across easier on a video when you can show it.
Give us a high level of other things we should be doing to build up these websites.
Select your topic
Buy your domain and put a logo on it. Don’t go crazy on it, because it is hard to do the design without content.
Make a list of articles you want to write about and order them from the most oddball question to the most searched topic.
Start with the most oddball, because it is probably the least competitive in Google, like How Much Does a Barbecue Weigh.
Write ten 1,000 word posts, then write ten 2,500 word staple posts, then write ten 3,500 word more popular posts.
Do some promotion.
Start a YouTube channel to send some traffic to the blog, and maybe spend some time on Pinterest. Spend 90 percent of your time creating content and 10 percent of your time doing design and promotion.
Have 30 articles of varying lengths. You need this to get any sort of organic links. If you spread them out over the course of a year, there is a good chance your site will not take off. Put your head down and don’t lift it up again, until you have 30 posts.
Then you can get into a schedule of one or two posts per week.
With Income School, you have Project 24, which means in 24 months you will hopefully be able to replace your income. Give use the broad overview of Project 24.
Join Project 24 Here: Project 24
No one gives you 60 steps to anything, they give you three. No one says you will get something awesome in two years.
Jim and Ricky want to be real with people. They have people in their program who have done this in 24 months, but for someone starting out, they are going to make a lot of mistakes.
Twenty four months is a reasonable goal, but not everyone is going to make.
In Project 24, they give you four things to help you get there:
- A library of online courses
- Tools
- A forum
- A podcast with up-to-date information
With having more time, and wanting to stay busy, how are you giving back to make the world or the people around you better?
They try to give the best value possible. Jim and Ricky go to great personal expense to do things that other people aren’t willing to do and share things others aren’t willing to share.
Ricky is a scout master, and they both donate to non profits and serve in their communities and churches.
They spend a lot of time with people who are down and out to help get them on track, even if they aren’t paid.
If you were to go back to your younger self and give yourself advice, what would it be?
Don’t worry about the expectations that were set before you. Jim grew up with a mentality that he would go to school and get a degree and then work a job for 30 years. He ended up at a dollar store with $90,000 in debt.
Ricky would say the same thing about other expectations. He would worry so much less about saying the wrong thing or dressing the wrong way. People who are confident and are not afraid are who decides what’s cool.
Don’t be afraid to step outside of your comfort zone and do the things that make you happy.
Don’t be afraid to fail.
What is the first step someone should do to get on the path of successful unemployment?
You need to select a niche before you can take a meaningful step, but the very first thing you need to do is commit to making it work. Commit to one path you are going to make work. For 2020, Jim says the clearest path to success in a reasonable timeframe is YouTube.
Set an objective for yourself and put a time limit on it. Commit to following through until you make it work. Most people quit right before they learn enough to finally succeed.
What tools do you use in your business or life that make you better or more successful?
Ricky uses the Notes app on his iPhone to record anything he is thinking. He uses the Reminders app so he doesn’t need to think about it anymore. He also uses a calendar app.
Jim uses a Tascam DR-10L. It is a simple lavalier microphone and it is a lifesaver for him. He also uses a Rodecaster Pro, for podcasting.
What is one non-fiction book that has helped you in your life or business that you would recommend to others?
Jim recommends his book, Work Energy, by Jim Harmer.
Ricky recommends The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey.
How can listeners find you?
YouTube: Income School
Website: www.IncomeSchool.com
Online Income School Membership: Project 24
