Passive Income Pathways Review (PIPs)

Is blogging dead? It all depends on who you ask! As Mark Twain said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” It’s just like blogging!

The recent Google HCU (helpful content update) has sent some bloggers into a tizzy. It seems that the ones who are most vocal about it are the ones who have seen the biggest nosedive in their site traffic, which leads to a nosedive in their ad income.

But, according to Sadie Smiley of Passive Income Pathways (PIPS), if you think about who you’re serving rather than how much money you can make, you can get traffic and make money as well.

What is Passive Income Pathways? PIPS is a blog by Sadie Smiley where she teaches not only how to blog and eventually make passive income, but also how to earn some active online income while you’re nurturing your blog.

The PIPS Facebook group is an active community of bloggers and others who want to escape the 9-to-5 grind and start earning money from home.

I first started following PIPS well over a year ago and loved the encouragement and support from Sadie and everyone else in the group.

At that time, I didn’t want to be a blogger. I was looking for a way to make online income and was interested in creating and selling digital products. I found lots of great free information in the group and on Sadie’s blog.

I took Sadie’s blogging course and realized that I could use my real passion, which is web design, to create a blog about WordPress that would help others who were struggling with building their websites, and also to set my blog up for monetization.

The beauty of PIPS is that the foundation course is free. Back when I took it, it was called Blogging 101. It has morphed into Blogging Foundations, which is a comprehensive course that you can follow at your own pace.

The PIPS Lite membership goes above and beyond the free course. PIPS Lite includes blogging foundations plus a wide range of specialized training.

The best part of this membership is the monthly Zoom call where Sadie answers questions, gives feedback, and teaches the path. The course platform is Subtrio, which is Sadie’s white-label version of Go High Level.

It is very easy to navigate, and all courses are clearly labeled and divided into separate sections. Each section has a video with a transcript or a text document, with all relevant workbooks attached, so there’s no need to go searching for downloads.

The PIPS Lite membership has just increased to $27/month. Along with the price increase, Sadie is adding more courses and even more value.

Blogging Foundations alone is worth more than $27, and remember, that course is free. The monthly membership, including access to Sadie in the Zoom calls, is well worth the price.

I would say that the only con to this membership is the fact that it has so much content that it can be overwhelming to a new user. If you don’t start at the beginning and follow the path, you can quickly become frustrated. Don’t skip ahead!

The pros of the membership include having everything at your fingertips to become a serious, professional blogger. You don’t have to search YouTube for courses and then try to figure out if they’re legit. Sadie has the background and the experience to guide you through the process.

I’ve taken courses and joined memberships that cost a lot more money, and I always felt like the instructor was holding back essential pieces of information.

PIPS Lite has all of the information that you need, and if you can’t find something, the monthly Zoom calls are great for getting 1:1 attention. Sadie also answers questions in the PIPS Facebook Group, or she refers the questions to her coaches.

Another aspect of the membership is that it is geared toward women, although men are welcome to join. There is an atmosphere of inclusivity that I have not found anywhere else.

I’m in the tech world, and as an older woman, I get a lot of pushback and “mansplaining” about WordPress and coding. That doesn’t happen in PIPS, and if it does, you’re out.

Who is the membership best suited for? The membership is best for people who are not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme. You have to be willing to put in the work to succeed. There is a lot of material to go through and digest, and it’s going to take some time.

The good news is that the Facebook group is very supportive and encouraging. In this type of membership, where there is so much information to absorb, you have to be accountable to yourself, and buckle down and do the work.

Some members have full-time jobs, are raising families, or are suffering from chronic illnesses, and they are succeeding because they don’t use these situations as excuses.

When I started going through the course, I thought I could just skip ahead. I was already a WordPress expert, so why would I need to go through the modules on how to set up a WordPress site?

I skipped around, did the modules that I enjoyed, and ignored the rest. My first blog was a local travel blog. Even though I didn’t follow Sadie’s path, I started making some money within 4 months.

Not a lot, but I could see that this method could work. The problem was that I didn’t work through the modules, and I realized that the travel blog was not going to be my passion project. That’s when I decided to choose WordPress as my niche and start my blog.

I had to realize that even though I knew my way around WordPress, I still had to go through the modules about setting up my site. There are aspects of the setup that are specific to blogging.

I never blogged before, and all of my client work was website and eCommerce work. I never set up a blog. I never thought about having a membership. Once I realized this, the whole path became clear.

I now have a blog, courses, affiliates, a Facebook group, and a membership. I’m 10 months into the process, and I am starting to gain members and affiliate money.

It’s slow going, but this is a marathon, not a sprint. Sadie teaches that the work you do today will pay you back in a year. It looks like she is right.

I joined PIPs Lite for $7/ month in August 2022. I was able to use that set of courses to start a new blog and restart an old blog with plugins and things that made the sites run much faster than what I was using.

After several months I found out that the recommended settings in the course creator’s blogging course actually block you from getting onto Google and only one of the other people in the group figured out why.

Not sure if that was ever changed in the training. So that defeats the entire SEO of the course.

Then I was promised that if I created a course on a specific subject and gave it to her to review she would promote it, only to be told once I was done that her audience doesn’t listen to men and she wouldn’t promote it at all.

The last straw was her pushing everyone to a new platform (AGAIN) that she was an affiliate for.

That platform couldn’t do half of what the other platform could. It was 5x the cost but she got more money in commissions on it.

After I left I heard that she changed platforms again.

I started Passive Income Pathways hoping to make money from my blog. While I have learned a lot about how to build a website and write articles I have not made any money.

The courses are bits and pieces of information. Think mini-course with information you can google.

Sadie is all over the place and jumps around from one thing to another. She distracts people with whatever new ideas she has that will make her money, not you.

Sadie’s constantly promoting her stuff and guilts people who don’t share her links to courses and memberships. She’s even said if VIPs don’t promote other VIPs she won’t help them. I’m all for helping people out and collaborating but sometimes a business doesn’t go with my business so it’s not a good fit.

She always talks about how easy it is but when you try to ask her questions she doesn’t have time to help you. She’s ignored my posts in the group asking for help on multiple occasions and I’ve seen her do the same to many other people.

After over a year of being in this group, I have yet to make any money… like zero. It seems that people that Sadie favors had their businesses featured in weekly newsletters, in her courses, and on weekly coaching calls, so the rest of us in the group never get a shout-out.

There has also been quite a bit of conflicting information over the last year. I’ve seen Sadie give advice to people and then turn around and give conflicting advice to someone else. Some were niche ideas that were great one month and terrible the next, etc. That’s huge when people depend on someone to be their business coach and guide them on a path toward success.

All-in-all there’s not a lot of real coaching going on in this membership. It’s a one-size-fits-all group model where the members are encouraged to buy Sadie’s products and use her affiliate links, as well as buy other VIP members’ products.

The PIPs program is one of the best decisions I have ever made! Outside of the low-ticket membership price, which is amazing, the community I am now a part of is like family. The support in the PIPs group and the VIP group is unheard of in other coaching memberships. I love that Sadie promotes programs and platforms that are cost-effective and truly the best on the market rather than pushing high-paying affiliates like most other blogging coaches. She is a down-to-earth coach who isn’t afraid to tell you how it is. I respond well to direct instructions, and that’s why I do so well with Sadie. She has a path – one that’s proven to work – and she will do her best to keep you on that path.

This program has helped me set up my main blog, create an active Facebook Group, syndicate my blog posts, set up web stories, sell courses and printables, and grow my email list. Recently, I set up a new blog that has already gained traction on Google, as well as sold courses and templates. I’ve been included in summits for both brands, as well as bundles. The information and guidance from the PIPs program have led to the success that I see today and it will only get better!

I have been a member of the VIP program for almost a year now. While I am starting to see money from the multiple sources of income that PIPs recommends, I haven’t reached a steady income yet. I am a stay-at-home-mum who blogs as a way to focus on “work” rather than my kids all the time. If I needed to have the additional income, and if I put more effort into the PIPs path, I do not doubt that I would already be making a steady income from blogging at this point. But as a mom, I took some time off due to the seasons we were in. The path that Sadie and her team lay out is both achievable and profitable.

Sadie is easily accessible with her live coaching calls and the VIP Facebook Group. Still, she is a “no excuses” and “do the thing” type of coach. That means that she is only interested in what you have been working on, not your life situations that might get in the way. While she empathizes with you when things come up, ultimately, she wants to know if you got the work done. After all, she’s our coach, not our therapist.

The information and guidance from the PIPs program are unseen anywhere else. Sadie will shoot it to you straight and cheer you on simultaneously. I am so glad I found this program at the beginning of my blogging career rather than at the end.

PIPs has been a great investment. I have tried many other programs before, but within months or just a few days I would stop. PIPs has provided me with the framework to succeed and created a foundation to build upon my future success.

Sadie teaches ‘outside of the box’ and that is how I learn. She invested a lot of time into getting to know my niche to help me succeed, as well as to teach me how to make money doing it.

I started PIPs in April 2022 and in June 2022 I started making money. It has been steady ever since as I’ve set up different streams of income along the way. Sadie gives a lot of ideas on how to do that. You can take them or leave them, but they are there to use when I’m ready to add another layer.

Over the year I’ve seen her revamp and streamline her training. She helped so many even for free. I appreciate and respect her transparency. The Publish not Perfect program has helped me move past many roadblocks to get my words, products, and message out there. Thanks to Sadie, my son and I were featured in the New York Times! That wouldn’t have happened without her group, membership, and coaching.

I signed up to learn how to make active money right now and set up a passive income for later. The web copy at the time said “We’ll help you figure out how to make money NOW so you’re not worrying about your bills while you work on your passive income streams.”

The membership didn’t include an order like the copy said it would — whether you should start with a digital Etsy shop or PLR shop. Almost every single video or tutorial in the courses included in the membership was already published to her blog, free FB group, or YouTube, so what you’re paying for is the curation of that content.

And you don’t get much new content, either. It’s the same content for continued course access.

Unless you’re in the top tier of her membership, she doesn’t care about you. She replied to one comment that she mostly hangs out in the exclusive FB group for the top tier, so students should join that if they want the real community. That didn’t sit right with me, but I dismissed it because I couldn’t believe it. Still, it was proven true when I would comment, ask questions and share my stuff.

I cringe now at everything I wrote, but I was trying to participate and put in the work. I gave it my all.

The conditions for being a cult leader instead of an actual coach include insisting people do it your way to a T, which she is guilty of. If you’re struggling and did anything in your way to be unique instead of a clone, the failure is blamed on you.

There are also no excuses allowed at all. I have a disability that makes planning and setting goals difficult because every single day is extremely different. I told her what it was, and she now makes “No Excuses” posts/quotes where top-tier members comment with traits of that disability.

I expected a neurodivergent course creator to be accessible and not able-ist, but she is not friendly to neurodivergent disabled people who struggle. You’re not allowed to have different opinions about something. If you don’t think the same way as her about something, she asks you why you’re there and tells you that “you should have known” when it’s nowhere on the copy.

I recently left altogether because I realized she tells members what to do when she doesn’t even do it herself. I didn’t want to be her guinea pig anymore. I didn’t want to be sharing my ideas and successes from my strategies only for her to keep taking it without any credit and then profiting from it — only to tell me that I have “no excuses” now to “do the thing”.

For someone who also has ADHD, it’s ironic to use that as a slogan when executive dysfunction is the inability to “do the thing”.

It just felt very icky and as if I couldn’t be myself while starting a business. I’ve since learned otherwise and escaped her cult. That’s exactly what it is, and I wish I knew sooner before giving her any of my money. I’ve wasted the last year on her teachings and am right back where I started.

Hands down this is one of the most influential programs I’ve ever been a part of. PIPs isn’t just a course, but a framework that requires careful planning and execution to bring in a high-earning passive income.

If you own a blog that hasn’t been monetized, this is the space for you. Once I learned that ads weren’t the only way to monetize a blog, my entire outlook on running a digital business changed.

Since I took the course in December, I’ve created 5 additional streams of passive income. I also passed the 5k mark on one of the courses I created 3 years ago but wasn’t selling. The framework inside of PIPs helped me create a customer journey that allowed me to find my people and sell to them.