“One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO.

A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month ."“

“I created my first solitaire game 15 years back. It was an that I made for the Mac App Store. I created the app as a fun little project that would allow me to learn a new programming language with the hope that it would generate some income on the side. And I didn’t do anything special when I released the first app. I simply went through the review process, the app got released, and then I hoped for the best.

I didn’t have too high hopes, so the day after, when I saw that 100 people had downloaded it and it had generated $20, I was thrilled. That doesn’t seem like much, but for a young man who was just doing a fun little project on the side, it felt great!”

I’ve worked in a lot of different places, but I’ve always had my solitaire game as a side hustle. I ended up traveling to New York to co-found a startup, a marketplace for sneakers and streetwear, where I had the role of CTO. I ran that company for three years, but in the end, we got beaten by our competitors.

After that, I was kind of burned out, and that’s when I decided to focus on my solitaire game for a while. So I designed and programmed my games again from scratch and that’s how Online Solitaire was born.

“I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them.

One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month ."

“Search has, by far, been the best way to get people to visit my site. Search from Google, search from people in the Google Play Store, the Chrome Store and other places.”

“Adding SERP features is a smart way to get boosted to the top of Google for certain search terms and to draw more attention to your site in search results. Going through the different SERP features and implementing whichever makes sense for your site is an easy win.”

“I spend most of my time these days on SEO-related stuff and the most difficult part of SEO for me is link-building. One of my best strategies so far is to reach out to people and hear if they'd want a custom solitaire game on their site: https://online-solitaire.com/embed. But it's definitely hit and miss.”

“Moz's on-page ranker is a life-saver when it comes to keyword optimization.

I use it every time I want to optimize my site for certain keywords. I find the keywords I want to try and rank for on Ahrefs, and then I use Moz to optimize my pages for those keywords.

The on-page grader gives you all kinds of great suggestions on what you can improve, what you're missing and what you're doing wrong.”

“I ended up integrating Stripe to let people remove the ads. For a blog that might not make sense, but for a solitaire website where some people play an hour or two a day, it makes sense.

I think the lowest pricing I had was a one-time fee of $5 and basically no-one uses it. I'm super surpriced how few people use it. But if you won't pay for playing, you're gonna get ads . And from what I can see, people are fine with this arrangement.”

“If you can start your business as a side hustle, that’ll be a much safer path. I’ve tried to both quit my job and gone all-in on my business and run a business as a side hustle until it could sustain itself.

There’s no right or wrong, but in my experience, it’s financially less stressful to start your business as a side hustle and then go all in once you’ve reached a certain level.”

“The best advice I can give is to try and make success happen when you still have room to fail. If you have a day job, then making $30 extra a day feels like a bonus and not a disappointing daily revenue.”

“One more thing. I've recently purchased World of Card Games, where people can play classic multiplayer card games such as Hearts, Spades, Euchreand many more with each other.”