I’ve always been interested in websites and games, so I created this website to satisfy both those interests, plus I’ve created this article that will, hopefully, help you create a website like this and help earn you some money too. If you’re interested in earning passive income on the Internet and want to supplement, or even replace your income, then Income School is a great way achieve that goal. My Loner Strategy Games site is not a “pristine” site, meaning it’s not set up exactly the way Income School recommends, but it is a great example of what it can do for a struggling website.
By following advice from the other Internet “gurus” I successfully grew this website from zero pageviews a day to two pageviews a day in almost exactly a year, and most of that advice was not free. In the short span of two months after implementing a few of Income School’s free suggestions on YouTube pageviews increased to around 400 per day. I’m currently up to over 20,000 page views per month and still climbing.
Here’s a disclaimer I try to run on all my affiliate pages. Yes, I’m an affiliate for this product. However, I could be an affiliate for many different products, but I specifically chose this one because it is the product I actually like, recommend and use every day. By using my links, you help support this website.
I’ve tinkered with websites and affiliate programs for years, ever since the Internet first became popular but never succeeded due to various reasons. Primarily it was a combination of things, a lack of time, not knowing what to do, and the poor training resources that I found online.
Since “failure is not an option” I decided to dedicate as much time as I could to getting some passive income from my website. It’s not actually all about the money, it’s just the feeling I get from helping people out by solving problems and creating a product, with money as an added bonus! Plus, I like a challenge! I enjoy writing, and especially enjoy creating websites, and I like playing PC games, so this website was a natural step for me to take.
Here are six problems Income School (paid link) solved for me.
Keyword Research
I was discouraged by the keyword tools I tried, both paid and free. Keyword phrases with a high search volume (according to the tool) were just too competitive for a new site like mine to break through and rank well on, plus they mostly focused on paid terms so they are inaccurate for the organic, free traffic from a search engine like Google. Keyword phrases that looked like I had a chance to win showed zero traffic, again according to all the keyword tools (and I used several, both paid and free).
I started questioning the validity of the keyword tools. Obviously, the search volume wasn’t completely zero or those terms wouldn’t appear in the keyword tool results, so I started tinkering with making pages around some of those keyword phrases but still had little to no luck, but at least I was starting to get on the right track. Income School taught me the right way to approach it.
One keyword research technique Income School teaches is called “alphabet soup,” it’s simple and obvious but everyone overlooks it. Although Income School now has another, more effective approach due to the evolving Internet the “Alphabet Soup” approach still works very well. You can see what it is by using this link to their video. You can learn the newer technique at Income School.
Competition Analysis
One area where this program really stands out in is teaching proper competition analysis, so my posts don’t get buried by more well-established sites. Phrases with a high search volume usually have high competition as well. A new website has almost no chance of beating a heavyweight for most of those popular phrases.
It was around early January of 2020 when I found Income School (paid link) while researching videos on YouTube and they were talking about some of the very stuff I was starting to believe about SEO (more on that later), but they seemed to have it all figured out! I started using some of the suggestions on their YouTube channel and, unbelievably to me, started seeing some moderate success. I finally signed up for their Project 24 program on March 13, 2020 and have not been disappointed. When I signed up for their courses, I tried out their processes by writing about 15 pages on this site about one particular game (Stellaris) and had great success. I followed their competition analysis process in particular, which was one of my weaknesses.
My continued writing and efforts paid off, currently this site has jumped from two pageviews a day in March of 2021 to over 20,000 per month. More progress, by a very wide margin, in less than 2 years than with all the other programs I tried combined! And I didn’t spend one second on a backlinking strategy, which is extremely time consuming and non-productive, it’s better to spend that time adding content to your site.
Writing Good Content
I think I was already a decent writer but writing for the web is a little different. I look back at some of my first articles and am always tempted to take them down, I consider them that bad, plus I struggled mightily to write enough good content to make them relevant. It took a lot of time, and my article format was not very good.
Income School has a course that will improve and speed up your writing. After taking this course I realized my entire approach to writing for the web was wrong. I learned how to write an article that interested my visitors, how to write that critical first sentence, how to divide the article up to make writing it faster and easier to both read as a visitor and write as an author, and how to avoid common mistakes.
Website Set Up
I’ve messed with WordPress websites but always took a haphazard approach because I really just didn’t know any better way to do it. Besides, for the most part, I was just having fun and gaining experience. I really didn’t have any idea about the best way to structure a website, what the best hosting service was or even what the best basic settings were for WordPress.
Income School’s Blogging Course solved all that. This is currently a 53-lesson program of videos that gives you step-by-step instruction on how to solve all the problems I mentioned. It also teaches you about logos and how to get them created inexpensively, the best way to install a WordPress theme, the best way to perform search and competition analysis, how much traffic to expect from your posts and much more. This is the best and most comprehensive course I’ve ever taken about how to make passive income on the Internet.
Snippets
Have you ever noticed the subtle difference the number one post has on Google sometimes? Chances are it’s a snippet from a website. This was an option I wasn’t even aware of and by learning about snippets and how to beat the competition I gained a lot of traffic.
Google will often pull a paragraph directly from a website page if it thinks it answers the question correctly and concisely and is the best answer available. If your page gets selected to have a snippet appear in the Google search results it will boost your page to the number 1 position, even if it would ordinarily rank 5th, 6th, or even lower.
Income School (paid link) has a 15-lesson video course that gives you the best chance possible for getting a snippet win. I’ve won about a dozen of them based on this course and it increases traffic considerably.
Here’s a link to their snippet video on their YouTube channel that shows you what I mean.
Making Money
If your goal is to make money with your website the easiest ways are with ads and affiliates. When you’re a newbie like I was I started with Google ads but had no idea where to place them for optimum effect, how big or small they should be, or even what kinds of ads to run. Add to that the fact that Google AdSense pays very little and your dreams of making a decent amount of money go out the window.
Income School has two primary courses (there are more) aimed at solving that. The one I started with was their 12 lesson “Monetize With Ads” course. They teach you some basic ad terminology and how ads work. They teach you how to maximize revenue from Ads and introduce an ad company, Ezoic, that works with medium sized websites like yours and mine, plus they pay a lot more than AdSense. Their literature says they can increase your ad revenue by up to 60% versus AdSense but I found that to be a very conservative estimate since my earning increased 10-fold shortly after I put Ezoic ads on my website.
For a long time, I was lost when it came to affiliates. While it’s true the primary purpose of my website is to offer friendly advice about games and related products, it would be great if the website paid for itself plus produced a profit. Income School now has a new course teaching how to find good affiliate programs for any site, running disclaimers on the page so people don’t feel “tricked” into using your links, and how to use tools, especially the ones at Amazon.
Income School On YouTube
If you’re not already familiar with Income School check out their YouTube channel and get to know their processes and the people behind the program. They give a lot of their techniques away for free on this channel too!
What Income School Did For Me
I wanted to implement everything Income School suggested in their courses but wanted to see what kind of results I could get on a more established site like my game site by reworking it. I didn’t want to abandon this website since I had already put so much effort into it. Liking what I was doing was a big factor too, so I kept the site alive instead of starting a new one from scratch.
Currently I’m at over 20,000 pageviews per month but honestly, I should be much further along and be hitting well over 30,000 per month. My problem? My biggest holdback is that I’ve taken long periods of time where I haven’t written anything, mostly due to personal issues and working full-time for a while, leaving little time to write. Besides, this is really a fun-time project for me that allows me to pay for my gaming habit. There are a lot of people who make some seriously good income from a site like this, and some even earn a full-time income.
What Income School Does
Income School (paid link) doesn’t just give you the basics and then let you try to figure out the rest on your own, like every single other program I’ve ever been a part of does. They have step-by-step instructions that walk you through creating your first site (or YouTube channel) with examples and videos. They also have instructions on how to place ads on your site, how to write articles that draw visitors to your site, plus they tell you how to write them easily and quickly.
They also have courses about how to effectively use affiliates, how to win the Google snippet battles, how to make money with ads and teach effective SEO techniques.
There’s a lot more but the point I’m trying to make is that this is a very deep and excellent program, one that has a lot of supporting videos and not just some dry documentation and is one that I wish I had found years ago. This program will virtually walk you through everything you need to know, and even offer you some stuff you might not be ready for yet (but you know it’s ready and waiting for you when you are), for no additional cost. And they continually keep adding courses.
This link takes you to a video they recently released that does an excellent job of explaining what Income School (paid link) does and how they can help you succeed. I highly recommend watching it.
Past Approaches I’ve Taken
When I first launched this game website in on March 6, 2019, I was in another program that taught the same old thing I had heard before, use keyword tools to find search terms for your niche, try to find the “long-tail” version of them that had good traffic, and go after them. The emphasis was on promotion through social media, guest blogging, and essentially begging people to link to my site with “backlinks.”
As I mentioned earlier, by following that advice and training I successfully grew this website from zero pageviews a day to two pageviews a day in almost exactly a year. Pretty pathetic really, but fortunately I’m not the type who gives up easily.
I continued to take courses about how to make money on-line, with the latest one (prior to Income School) showcasing a website that hadn’t been updated in almost ten years. Sure, the guy was getting traffic, and a substantial amount of traffic at that, but he established his site in the early days of the internet and was, and still is, a well-known authority on his subject. Tactics used back then are ineffective today.
No Backlinking Efforts Recommended By Income School
Backlinking is another strategy strongly encouraged by almost everyone in the industry. One guru I watched on YouTube for a while even suggested a PPC campaign was a good way to get backlinks. I tried it and ended up with the same number of backlinks as I had before, zero, and a little bit poorer!
By the way, Income School trains you to write great content so websites will backlink to you on their own, no need to send numerous emails out requesting links from other sites. It’s better to spend that time making great content for your website. I have several posts that average well over 1,000 pageviews per month and I made absolutely no backlinking efforts to gain that much traffic.
Loner Strategy Games Website Administration
To create and administer a website like this you don’t need to be a genius (I’m certainly not) or need to be a website guru who knows websites inside out and who can write code (I can’t, at least not very well). All you really need is to have an interest in what you do, be able to write decently and let your research write the website for you. If you’re serious about making passive income on-line and frustrated like I was take a look at this program (paid link), you won’t be sorry!
