#because before it was just stuff that was heavily based on console games i already have so i didnt feel like i was missing anything

[sonknuxadow]

part of me is hoping that if sega sees how many people theyre excluding and how much money they're missing out on by having sonic dream team be an apple arcade exclusive they'll change their mind and make it available on other devices too but i highly doubt they will

[discotenny]

!_MC With a Child_!

!Hallo! So I haven’t played Napoleon and Leonardo’s route asksnfjdjdkd. The only ones I’ve finished are Mozart, Vincent, and Arthur lol. And don’t worry about too much interacting so much , it makes me happy to know people read my stuff 🥺💕💕💕

And yea, I don’t think I can do the new characters justice, no matter how cute Charles is 🥵

Napoleon, Leonardo, Arthur, Theo, Comte

Napoleon

Throughout your entire stay, you had seemed worried or jumpy. The only time you weren’t was when you were with him

He thought you just liked his protection tbh

The time you two spent together meant the world to him

And you’d be lying if you said his presence didn’t distract you from the fact your little girl was stuck in France with her grandparents; wondering if her mom would ever return

But you’d be lying if you thought that leaving the man you had grown so found of would be so easy

Napoleon always wondered why you looked so sad whenever you two walked in the market. Or why you never visited the training school with him. Or how your eyes always seemed vacant when sweeping the halls

The final few grains of sand in the hourglass steadily approached the bottom. He knew it was selfish of him, but the feeling deep in his heart convinced him to ask you anyways.

“Nunuche,” he said when you brought him his meal

You looked at him puzzled, not saying a word. “Have you ever thought about... staying here?”

You turned to the side, placing the blanc down shakily

“No- I,” you had to take a breath, “I have someone waiting for me in my time.”

His heart dropped, a lover?

Looking at him, you knew what he was thinking. “It’s my daughter, not some lover. Lord knows he wouldn’t miss me,” you mumbled that last part bitterly

“Tell me about her,” he said, surprising you

And for once in your time staying in the mansion, you found someone to confide in. You spent the rest of your nights staying in Napoleon’s room, describing your daughter with so much compassion and love

He felt so much guilt basically asking you to leave all of that behind

Napoleon spent an entire night apologizing to you, saying sorry after sorry in hopes you wouldn’t feel any dislike towards him

That night you kissed him, interrupting his apologies and ceasing all of his guilt

You loved him, yes; but your daughter meant the world to you

On your final day, you walked hand in hand with him as you moved towards the rest of the residents

And then Comte surprised you, baring the news that Napoleon had asked for his permission to leave with you

Eyes widening, you turned to face him. “It was rather surprising, but the Comte allowed me. All I’m asking is that I get to spend as much as my life with you.”

You left with him that night. Saying goodbye to all of the residents, saying hello to your new life together

All you had to do was explain to your parents and your daughter why some strange man was with you after you went missing for a month

But that could be dealt with later 🤷‍♀️

Leonardo

He had asked it so casually. With you resting on his side, reading along as he turned the pages at his own pace

“Cara Mia, you should consider staying in this time”

Tracing a finger along your jawline, you didn’t look back at him the love struck way he had anticipated. You looked at him hurt; he didn’t like seeing you that way, especially not because of him

You breathed in heavily, tears threatening to roll down your face. “I have a son needs me back Leo. I can’t abandon him to spend the rest of my life with you.”

You left without a word, leaving the room in a hurry

It seemed as though you went out of your way to avoid him after that. He tried stopping you, attempting to strike casual conversation. It never worked though, and you spent your last few days either holed up in your room, briefly conversing with the other residents of the mansion, or confiding in Sebastian

Leo didn’t know what to say or what to do. When it was time for you to go back, you looked at him one final time and gave him a kiss

As the rest of the residents got their hugs and tear filled goodbyes, he stared at you bewildered

You left without a word to him. No words of goodbye. Just a single kiss and you were off

You belonged in another time with the one who deserves you the most

And maybe that’s what kills him. Maybe if he had thought about what he had said, Leonardo would have ended his time with you on a good not

But you were never his, and now you were gone

Arthur

So like I’m basing some plot points here off Arthur’s route. It’s been a while so some stuff may have been moved around lol

He found out about your son when you told him you weren’t a virgin anymore

With his talk about ruining your innocence and such, you just had to set the record straight

To be short, he was surprised

That didn’t stop him from hanging around you though. You two went around the town solving mysteries, and you genuinely looked like you were having fun

That is until you and Arthur stumbled upon the case with all of the orphans being trafficked by their caretaker

You were in shambles. You cried while Arthur was passed out, worrying for your son, worrying for Arthur

What if the same thing that happened to those orphans happened to your son when you dissappeared, you thought

It was irrational, you knew that. You knew that your son was with your parents at the time, you knew he should be safe. But what if he wasn’t?

When Arthur woke up you weren’t there. Sebastian had told him that you were in your room crying

Then he tells you about his doctor days. How he watched countless people die. How he watched that one little boy die. You two stayed in your room all night crying

Because of this, I genuinely believe Arthur wouldn’t ask the MC to stay with him. Arthur understands the worry someone has towards a child and how heartbreaking it can be to a parent to know you’ll never see your kid again. I cannot imagine him asking MC to stay with him if she has a child

He’ll look at you and your relationship, whatever is was at the time; and accept it. He’ll try and make you happy for the last few days you have in this time

And when it’s time to go?

He’ll send you off with a kiss and a flirtatious remark. When you give him a massive hug for it, that’s enough for him

Whatever Arthur feels for you at the time, any prospect of a continuing relationship dies as he knows he can’t possibly ask you to stay with him in the past

When you comeback, your little boy hears all of the adventures and mysteries that a playboy author and their sidekick solve together

Theodorus

Theo gets so conflicted

On one hand, he loves you too much to just let you slip away like that. You’re the only one besides his brother who he can love purely

On the other hand; Theo knows what it’s like to love someone unconditionally. How could he ever ask you to leave your daughter behind for him? Would he ever do the same for you if he had to decide between Vincent and you?

So despite being your kind of boyfriend but not really in a relationship, he attempts to ignore you on the upcoming days to your departure

It’s Vincent that explains to you what’s going on

You walk into Theo’s room and he tells you to get out

You don’t leave, instead sitting on his bed beside him as you begin to slowly lean your head on his shoulder

“You shouldn’t be doing this.” Theo couldn’t even muster an insulting name in his confliction

You look up at him, “but I want to”

“What about that kid of yours,” it’s your turn to stay quiet now

Theo’s the one that starts up conversation. “I think it’s best that we break up,”

It takes you everything in your soul to agree. With one final night spent together [having sex lol], you two end your relationship then and there

Vincent watches you two drift apart the coming days. He sees the tiredness in Theo’s eyes and your constant aversion to talking to the Van Gogh brothers

He doesn’t know how to fix it, and neither does Theo. So he tries to consol you two separately. Talking with Theo during the day, attempting to casually converse with you while you work

Vincent, the day before you’re supposed to leave, yet again asks you to check up on Theo. This time, he’s in the library

Theo on the other hand, gets a request from Vincent to retrieve a book for him. You and Theo see each other and are about to leave before you realize the doors are locked

With no other choice but to stay together until Sebastian or someone else opens it, you two are forced to talk things out

You explain that you love him, but you can’t possibly stay because of your daughter

Theo understands, and says he loves you too; he just can’t find it within himself to leave Vincent behind

The next day; when you’re supposed to leave, Theo kisses you and gives you a toy for your daughter

Your last words to him are, “Do me a favor. Love yourself just as much as you love Vincent and me”

He tries so hard to fulfill that promise, but his life is just empty without you in it

Comte

Comte already knew lol

He had discussed this with you when you first arrived. How you and your son were visiting the Louvre [is that the one from the game??] on holiday, and how worried you were for his safety

What he didn’t know is that the father was completely missing from you and your child’s life

Sooo

Big daddy Comte being the biggest daddy that he is decides to take you out every day to purchase gifts for your child

If not for them, to take your mind off of the worry

It gets to a point where you two are going out every other day to shop for your son

Is this healthy? Comte asks himself. No, not really. But he doesn’t know how to do anything else because he’s the reason why you can’t see your son

Through his guilt, something else blossoms

When he looks at the way your eyes light up when talking to him, when you happily approach him, something he hasn’t felt in years starts to blossom

He doesn’t ask you to stay with him. Instead, when the time you have to leave comes, you ask him to go with you

Because you bought too many toys and you need help carrying them

Because you want your son to know who’s been taking care of his momma the entire time

Comte almost cries right there

He can’t leave, but he makes a promise with you. Every other time the hourglass flips, he’ll visit you and deliver you and your son one of the toys you and he bought together

When your son asks you about the strange man who’s been giving him toys and playing catch-up with his momma; you tell him it’s a guardian angel

Comte definitely cries right there

I hope this was a good enough thing hshsjskw. I really like reading angst but I’m not that good at writing it lol. I changed up the prompt a bit [ofc I did I’m that bvtch] just do the scenarios wouldn’t be the same. Also I’m not that good at writing for Leonardo dejejsmrkd but my favorite to write was Arthur’s uwu

Enjoy~~

[aegonbeingfakeisracist]

Do you know any good programming books to read? Im not taking a CS class this semester so i need something to feel the void!!!

Ooh, yes, for sure - it obviously depends on what specifically you're looking for, because there are so many areas you could focus on, but here are a few recommendations that I think you'll like. If you want some on a more specific topic, let me know, and I'll see what I can find for you!

1. Algorithmic Puzzles by Anany and Maria Levitin

This one is good because it's fun. 😁 It helps you develop a structured approach to problem solving and algorithm troubleshooting through questions that are game like. So instead of the boring old implementations without context, here you have the problem and work from there. It's also good because algorithms are important no matter what field of computer science you're most interested in!

2. Python Machine Learning by Wei-Meng Lee

If you're interested in data science and machine learning, but haven't done much of it before, this is a good choice - it provides a very good introduction to the topic, with lots of examples. If you have some experience with the topic already, it's a good reference, but you might be better off going with something more in depth.

3. Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courvill

This one is very technical, with a lot of math and in depth explanations of the different tools, concepts, and algorithms. I wouldn't recommend it just yet if you're totally new to this type of CS, but it's really interesting with a lot of cool stuff.

4. Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael T Nygard

One of the things that made me really nervous after graduating and starting work was the seemingly enormous difference between the kind of things I learned in a classroom setting and the applications of computer science in the real world - like, what I did was heavily algorithm and console-application based, which is certainly important, but it struck me as wildly different from the kind of web and mobile application, GUI things that is what's commonly seen by end users. So this was a good book that I thought was helpful for understanding the full scope of what goes into production software.

5. Test Driven Development by Kent Beck

I know it sounds cheesy, but much to my annoyance, TDD and writing tests before writing code actually is very helpful for me - it helps me maintain focus on what specifically I'm trying to do, and even more importantly, the tests can serve as pretty good documentation later. So maybe give this a try.

I think these five are probably good to start with? If you're more interested in a different area of programming, or want more technical recommendations or anything, let me know, I can definitely find you some different recs depending on what you're interested in!

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

I am of the opinion that PQ2 should have been released AFTER P5R

Tbh PQ2 is placed where it is because of the 3DS' life cycle. I'd place it farther but the PQ series working on Switch(+maybe other places) is most likely reliant on the/an EO's switch game (to help adjust the formula). If it wasn't for that, I'd probs slowly remake/port P1-4 while spewing out more/different P5 spinoffs before we get to PQ2. (so I don’t disagree, there’s a couple of ways they could’ve gone about it, but even tho it’s speculation it’s fun, none of it matters cause we probs got the worst timeline ;w; anyway time to just ramble about related stuff 8U) (but I would love to hear your opinion as to why you think that’s the case!)

Word vomit word vomit~! Under the cut cause I can’t reply like a normal person 8U ;x; (don’t mind me the gears started-a-turning aklfjdsakl)

Tho tbh, from what we got with PQ2, I dunno if Adding Sumi and Jose would be good. PQ2 is pretty directionless with it's cast imo, like it has something to say but half the time they feel like mouthpieces and not actually......the characters we know being involved. It already has a handful of b/c/d/f plots and it barely even dives deeper than a kids wadding pool with them orz I'd say what's the harm in adding Sumi/Jose since it already can't handle the cast it's been dealt it won't hurt having two more, but do I WANT Sumi/Jose (and possibly Takuto) to suffer for that? Nah. I'd rather we get a PQ3, were we can focus on the implications of Sumi having just awakened and the team side eyeing Joker/Mona for not telling them and all those implications. Her bonding with the team would probs be drowned out by Hamu and Hikari (when they actually feel like giving them some focus that is), plus Goro's stupid bullshit just.......listen.... PQ1? Chars can be a biiiiit mean at times, and are flanderized, but damn do they all feel involved and still have some remnant of their original personality (they aren't flanderized all the time and not all chars are flanderized) but man did they feel important to the game. DX I’ll take it over the clustered bullshit that is PQ2 orz

Anyway, tbh, now that I think about it, P5R should’ve been released in 2021ish time. For a PS4/PS5 release. Would’ve given the PS5 another flag ship game, and justifying it on another console as well (plus a 4 year gap feels a little more justified than a 3 year gap, esp when there’s a new console involved). It also doesn’t help we got two horrible failures of spinoffs in between P5 and P5R (one is the P3/5D and yes I’m counting them as one game, and PQ2 who is at best a slog and at worst is one of the biggest thorn in my side lore wise since P5 sauntered onto the scene...that being said I mostly blame the failure of that game on the dead console it was on). A remake and/or Scramble honestly should’ve been the next game right then and there (oh hey where have I seen that before? Oh right, P4. And it worked, we had about 3 remakes/enhanced ports before our Arena/sequel but still it worked). Not “cash grab the game” or “let’s just set the poor thing up for failure” the game. Like PQ2 would’ve been ok to fail if we at least got a remake and P5S (and I really don’t give a shit about P5S, but it def should’ve been there early on). 

And an extra bonus with P5S releasing early is that, after P5R released, we could have a P5S re-release with a tweaked storyline maybe involving Goro/Sumi/Jose/yadda yadda on the PS5! Is that a bit cash grabby? Maybe. Is it at least cash grabby with a purpose? Yes. We want purpose. Purpose is good. Purpose, means they have our interests in mind. 8U

*inhales* tbh....the PQ2 we got....could’ve/would’ve worked better without the P5 cast. I KNOW, Silly hates-a-the-P5, but.....at this point it’s not even that. There is one char that really tries hard to relate with Hikari that isn’t the shut in bullshit (yeah sure let’s give Futaba more screen time, it’s not like she didn’t have enough of that, nothing against shut ins, just P5/Q2′s writing). And it’s Hamuko. regardless how you feel about the FeMC, the B plot of “I am all alone, I am separated from my loved ones, the same loved ones I see look the same but aren’t them (oh hey another Tatsuya parallel 8U), and to top it off some stranger is in the role I’m supposed to be in. Am I replaceable? What’s the point of my existence if I’m not the only one who can fulfil this role?” have an entire game based on that existential crisis. We don’t even need the same setting/cast (Hikari/Nagi/Doe), actually I’d keep the Climax Theater but I’d lean HEAVILY into the P2 references/themes and such (Hamu already has a lot in common with Tatsuya, this just adds to it even more!). That B plot with Hamu could probs carry a game itself, or her issues can easily tie into the A plot of that game (like how Rei/Zen’s did with PQ1). Don’t delegated it to a watered down B plot that PQ2 gave us. jfjsadfj hell this probs would’ve been a better time for Sumi to be involved instead. Instead of the P5R new char, she’s the new PQ char and hey they can bond over that (sure we can do that in the current PQ2 game, but we can’t fit it in that well cause we have to tell the P5 cast how cool we think they are! even tho they haven’t really done anything but breathe! >8U)

It’d be a good follow up to PQ1 esp if released not long after, with it being a P3xP4 crossover, it’d 1) feel almost like a direct sequel, 2) riding the coattails of PQ1′s success at the most timely of times, 3) connected with 2 but it’d be at the hype of the 3DS, 4) we don’t have to worry about fans not knowing who they are since that cast is still relevant, 5) it gets Hamu’s thing out of the way so that PQ3 can allow the P5 kids to shine! Cause I’mma be honest, the PQ2 we got doesn’t really make them stand out, outside of the Kamoman dungeon. Plus it’d allow us to give more screen time to juicier B plots that people probably wish for with a P5 involved PQ game (such as Goro, I know y’all thirsty for him, this benefits you guys!)

Ah sorry you probs didn’t want a rant klasdjfalf just tired and the gears started turning and ahhhhh orz Anyway, again, I don’t disagree with you anon, I def think they could’ve done things differently and done it a lot of different ways too. XU And btw I’d love to hear more why you think that! 

[fostersffff]

Can Xbox win next gen?

Thank you for asking me this anon, I’ve been dying for an excuse to talk about console war stuff.

With what we know right now? I don’t think there’s a fucking chance.

To begin, based on what I’ve seen, Sony genuinely internalized their lessons from the PS3′s wack ass cell architecture by talking with developers about what they want out of the system, which has led to people like Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney- a man who could not possibly have less of a reason to pick sides in a console war- praising the PS5 and talking about how incredible it is, whereas Microsoft has made A Very Strong Box... perhaps even History’s Strongest Box.

A Very Strong Box would be perfectly fine, but there’s a problem: because they have said and reconfirmed that the Series X isn’t going to have any first-party exclusives for at least the first few years, every game is going to have to run on an Xbox One, and Microsoft just discontinued the One X, meaning that games are going to have to run on the One S. This will result in one of two things happening: either they’re going to primarily develop for the Series X and downgrade games for the One S, which will almost certainly result in HILARIOUS jank like the PS3 version of Shadow of Mordor, or they’ll develop for the One S and just crank the hell out of the settings for the Series X, which will absolutely result in incredible resolutions and framerates, but model/texture work won’t be nearly as impressive as it could be. Compare the reception of Halo Infinite’s graphics versus the the big-budget stuff on the PS5 showcase like Ratchet & Clank and Miles Morales. Plus, in either situation, first-party games won’t be able to be developed around having a Solid State Drive, the benefits of which are immediately apparent if you go watch that Ratchet & Clank trailer- the only way they can get environmental swapping like that without loading screen is because of an SSD.

Speaking of SSD, there’s another problem: Microsoft has yet to formally announce the Lockhart, which according to leaks is a budget Series X, and we know it exists because there are references to Lockhart in the Windows 10 OS. There’s a possibility that one of the budget cuts Microsoft will make is using a standard optical hard drive instead of a SSD. This would cripple not just Microsoft but possibly the entire industry for the whole generation, because for as good as those PS5 games look now, they’re only going to look better down the line. A possible future is that third-party developers won’t take full advantage of SSDs since they’ll want to make sure their games will run well on everything, and as a result Sony’s first-party output will blow everything else out of the water because they know they always have an SSD. Even if the Lockhart does have an SSD and make cuts elsewhere like the PS5 with no disc drive, a lower spec Xbox Series console almost certainly means that developers are going to be required to make sure it runs on both, which will just cause more issues for them. I guess the positive side to both of these problems is that they are technically consumer friendly- making sure people who don’t want to upgrade to a Xbox Series console will still be able to play games like Halo Infinite, and making sure people are able to afford some kind of upgrade even if they can’t afford the Series X- but I don’t think most people are thinking of it like that, especially when the pomp and circumstance around a new console generation has always been about how much better the new hotness is.

On the subject of new hotness, Microsoft’s marketing strategy is very bad. Xbox has never had the best names, but this holiday Microsoft will have the Xbox One S, the Xbox Series X, and whatever they call the Lockhart, presumably the Xbox Series S or Series L. Maybe you and me can distinguish that with relative ease, but there’s going to be no shortage of tech illiterate parents and grandparents stumbling over themselves to remember what their kids wanted, or kids writing down and asking for the wrong thing, or even people buying for themselves trying to remember if it’s a One X or Series X or Series One or whatever. And we know this kind of thing is a problem because it 100% contributed to the Wii U’s abysmal sales. The other aspect of their marketing strategy is that they really... aren’t doing much to celebrate the Series X being new hotness. They’ve announced the Series X UI is going to be identical to the Xbox One, and just by looking at game boxes you’d have a hard time knowing if the Series X is a brand new console or just an enhancement the One X because of how identical it is:

Same banner, same smaller black banner advertising what console to use, little white text in the top right advertising graphical fidelity. It’s nearly identical. Compared with the reveal of what PS5 boxes will look like:

It’s still blue plastic, but check out what white banner and black text! No more “Only on Playstation” text so there’s less to distract from the box art! Even if you want to argue that no one but turbo nerds really care about the boxes- and you’d be correct to do so- there is something to having them look even slightly different to signal “THIS IS NEW!” Also, going back to marketing, Smart Delivery is a terrible name for Cross Buy/“you own it on the old thing and the new thing”, and they’re not even enforcing that name for consistency despite featuring it heavily in their advertising because EA is calling it “Dual Entitlement”, which is actually still a better name:

Also, the OPTIMIZED FOR SERIES X sticker. Madden 21’s box art is already fucking awful enough without also needing that big ol’ OPTIMIZED FOR SERIES X sticker making it an even bigger mess.

Then there’s all those studios they bought up: your tastes may differ, but the only studio in that bunch that I think can produce worthwhile games is Obsidian. Ninja Theory’s got Hellblade but not much else, Double Fine is going to be a fucking money pit because Tim Schaffer just revealed they were going to CUT ALL OF THE BOSS FIGHTS OUT OF PSYCHONAUTS 2 BECAUSE THEY SPENT ALL THEIR MONEY ON JACK BLACK until they got bought and funded by Microsoft, and the other studios they acquired like inXile and Compulsion are kinda just… fine. Even if they did have an absolute killer’s row of developers, I think about what Rare’s been doing since they were acquired (although people seem to like Sea of Thieves now that it’s had some updates, and I sincerely hope Everwild is as cool as it looks), and I think of this recent quote from the head of Xbox Game Studios:

“It’s kind-of a phased thing. Take Compulsion. They’re working on their next game and have spent the last year on early ideation. I try to keep us as far away from that as possible. And then, as it starts to get exposure within the organisation, feedback will come in and things will start to steer. But it’s important to leave them alone for as long as possible, until they’ve got something that can walk on its own. And then there’s no shortage of feedback within Xbox.” (emphasis mine)

… which makes me think about what happened with Platinum’s Scalebound, a game that somehow transformed from a single-player action RPG to an online multiplayer hunting(?) game and was cancelled because Platinum just couldn’t meet deadlines and am overwhelmed with dread.

The last thing is to think of that really just completely undercuts Microsoft is that fact that all of their Xbox games are also going to be playable on Windows 10. Obviously, gaming PCs are more expensive than consoles- even if both consoles wind up at a super high price point, getting comparable or better performance on a PC will cost just as much, or more- but it still cuts out a portion of people who might otherwise be persuaded to buy an Xbox if they wind up with a lot of good exclusives.

I think the only things Microsoft can claim as an inarguable advantage is the fact that the Series X is A Very Strong Box... perhaps even History’s Strongest Box, and that Xbox Game Pass is an insanely good deal (but again, Windows 10). Right now, they also have the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility baked-in, which is excellent, but Sony could potentially pull out the “PS5 can play PS1-4 games” card, which would nuke Microsoft’s “largest launch line-up in history” from orbit. Their only other possible advantage would be price, which is why despite the fact that we’re roughly four months out from launch, we know nothing about price of either console. I think they’re playing chicken to see who reveals their price first, and how low they can go before it would be suicide for the other company to go lower. And- this is wild, baseless speculation, but fuck it- Sony recently announced they’re increasing production of launch PS5’s up from 6m to 9m. It’s true that gaming sales have actually gone up despite/because of the current state of the world, but who knows what things are going to be like in four months, and either way the average person still probably can’t afford a huge purchase… which could mean that the PS5 isn’t such a huge purchase. I don’t know the cost of the PS5 components, but Sony might be willing to go absurdly low and sell at a loss for a while just to put Microsoft in that position, where they literally can not go lower than them (or they COULD, because Microsoft as a whole has theoretically infinite money, but I can’t imagine them wanting to accept that much of a loss).

tl;dr: Naw, man.

[pokesception]

Whelp, started playing pokemon sword.  Have complained quite a bit here about dexit & related issues, and honestly I would have skipped at least the initial versions of these games entirely, or at least held off on purchasing them until we could see just how egregious pokemon home will be.  But my brother got shield, and my problems with sword and shield are not so severe that I’m going to refuse to play a game with family.

Thoughts so far?  Setting dexit entirely aside it’s... another pokemon game, for better and worse.  Largely for the better.  The new monsters, at least those I’ve encountered so far, are fun and good.  Music is nice.  Tone is bright and cheerful.  I love my team, and my protagonist.  It’s been nice.

As expected going to a more powerful console, it looks better, but it’s not a huge jump from the 3ds games, not least because lot of the visuals of this game are ported over directly from those games, and the stuff that is new has been made so as to not clash aesthetically with the older stuff.  If you’ve seen mods of usum that display the games at higher res and without the black outlines, it’s very much like that.  Closer to that even than to the let’s go games in ways that I find difficult to articulate.  In and of itself that’s not a complaint, really, the game looks plenty good enough for a pokemon tame.  It’s just not a major leap forward in presentation like the leap from gen 5 to gen 6 was.

Gameplay is mostly what you might expect.  Tall grass battles are an interesting mix of pokemon you can see on the field and engage or avoid as you wish and random battles that appear in the grass.  The random fights appear as a rustling in the grass that again can be pursued or avoided, you just can’t tell what they’ll be before you bump into them.  Finding rarer pokemon in a route is often a matter of sneaking or dashing between the new pokemon to get to the random fight, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the pokemon you want.  I’m not sure if there’s deeper levels to it, like chaining or whatever.  At the surface level it’s engaging enough.

The new pokemon are great so far.  There’s a bunch early on that you won’t have seen if you avoided leaks, and that was really excited.  I went into gen 7 knowing every new pokemon and with a particular desired team all worked out in advance.  This time around I’ve avoided spoilers, and gamefreaks official previews have kept a lot more hidden, so it’s been really fun to meet a lot of cool new faces early on.

The game does let you skip some early tutorials, but still frustrates to no end by stopping you every three seconds for another unnecessary explanation or detour, so it’s still pokemon in that unfortunate regard.  Routes are, if anything, more linear than ever before, at least early on, with the exception of an early expedition through the wild area which... I’ll talk about later.

Experience share is always on and cannot be turned off.  It scales shared xp based on the level of the pokemon, with lower level pokemon getting a higher portion, but not by enough so it’s still a pain to keep everything in the same level range, and you’ll still probably be wildly over leveled from very early on with nary a challenge to be seen even if you try to avoid grinding.

You can access the box from anywhere, which can be used to help overcome both the maintaining-a-level-range and over leveling problems of the experience share, but it’s a hassle to do, and wouldn’t be necessary if you could just toggle off shared exp in the options menu.  And on another level it makes the game even easier, since attrition is much less of a problem when you can swap in fresh pokemon whenever you feel like.

The online functionality is... kind of bad.  Maybe it’s just my internet, but being online in the wild area causes all sorts of slowdown.  Worse, there’s no equivalent to the pss functionality from gen 6.  No way to just see which of your switch friends are online and directly offer to trade or battle with them.  No instead you have to contact them *outside of the game* to share a 4 digit password, and then hope that nobody else happens to be using the same password as you when you try to connect with each other.  Raid battles are neat, but infuriatingly use the same password hassle.  You can’t just have easy friend-only raids from within the game itself.

It’s marginally better then gen 7′s festival plaza, but it remains miles and miles behind gen 6′s pss system that was simple and intuitive, and just centuries ahead of anything that came before or after.

Apart from raid battles, the wild area is... interesting?  Not all that different from having just a really big route with subareas of various level ranges.  Not bad, but not as big a departure as I had made it out to be in my head.  An idea with some potential that future games might expand into something great but that, knowing this series, will just be dropped after a single generation instead.  I’m still pretty early in the game, so my opinion on it might change after returning to it later.

The biggest frustration of the wild area, and something that brings it down tremendously, is that while you can encounter, and with some effort defeat, pokemon there, you cannot catch them at all if they’re above an arbitrary level range set by your number of gym badges.  This runs so completely counter to everything almost good about the wild area that I basically swore the whole thing off until I get to the end of the game, and frankly they might as well have just made it a post game area at that rate.

It’s extra frustrating because the problem of a player getting access to a pokemon too strong for the game too early on is one that the pokemon games already solved infinitely more elegantly all the way back in gen 1!  Just make pokemon that you acquire at too high a level uncontrollable, exactly like traded pokemon, so you can catch that over leveled onyx or whatever, but can’t use it until you’ve progressed far enough in the game for it not to be over leveled anymore.  How hard is that?  And who cares if a player gets an over powered pokemon early and steam rolls the game?  If that’s how the player wants to play, why is it a problem?  It’s not like the main game is challenging to begin with, thanks to always on exp share its almost impossible not to have over leveled pokemon anyway, what does it matter if it’s because you caught them that way or because they just outleveled the game curve?  A better exp scaling system would fix all those problems anyway.

Pokemon games not only failing to progress and solve problems that return game after game, but also repeatedly forgetting solutions that the series has already implemented is the longest running and most frustrating and most justified complaint to level at the entire series.  Of course, in the past pokemon as a series always had one core feature that none of the other - often more innovative - monster hunting games that sprang up in its shadow could replicate.  Backwards compatibility, the ability to maintain your collection in full going forward from generation to generation in a chain unbroken since gen 3 on game boy advance.  And that’s where dexit puts a sour note on the whole business.

The last several pokemon generations have failed to significantly improve on the core gameplay of a nearly two decade old franchise, but for many that has been largely forgiven because each new generation could easily be viewed not as stand alone games but rather as major expansions to the same existing game.  Dexit breaks from that, and forces the new games to be viewed as stand alone games and... well they aren’t pad at all.  They’re still cute.  I’m having fun so far.  Sword and Shield is no Anthem, no Fallout 76, no singular disaster to turn an otherwise largely positive track record on its head, and the extreme negativity directed against the game has been way overstated, even probably by myself.  In particular any vitriol directed at the devs is almost certainly unwarranted, the problems that have been growing in the pokemon series generation after generation almost certainly come down to corporate decisionmaking way above the heads of anyone who actually *worked* on the game.

Still, now that gamefreak’s pattern of cutting progressively more and more corners has reached the point of cutting actual pokemon, it’s shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people who had been giving all those issues a pass suddenly aren’t anymore.

And while pokemon sword and shield isn’t a bad game, it’s hard to compare it to something like oras or usum and say it’s worth 50% more up front cost AND an added monthly subscription to access features like GTS that used to be just part of the game to begin with.

The dex cuts would have been more forgivable if the games had been a major leap forward, whether in graphics or gameplay.  Monster Hunter World, for instance, had /dramatically/ less content in terms of sheer quantity than the games that came right before it, but it also completely overhauled the visuals, heavily revised and updated the core gameplay, and completely changed how the area maps worked.

Alternatively, I think all the people currently complaining about models and trees and balance would have been fine with ‘just another pokemon game’ if it had maintained the backwards compatibility, just as they’ve been alright with ‘just another pokemon game’ for game after game after game until now.  Imagine if gamefreak had announced sword and shield as the last main line games to maintain all previous pokemon instead of the first games not to.  Then at least everybody’s personal faves would have had the chance to see play on a home system, and sword and shield could advertise themselves as the biggest pokemon games ever and actually mean it, and players would have time to adjust to what was coming.

I’m reminded of a scene from the Gravity Falls Halloween episode in season one.  Mabel & Dipper had always trick or treated together, but this year dipper decided to ditch mabel to try and go to a teen party, arguing that they were getting too old for trick or treating.  To which Mabel says something along the lines of “I knew some Halloween would be our last, but I didn’t realize it had already happened.”

And that’s the feeling I have with pokemon right now, the wet blanket draped over all the bright colors and fun new characters and monsters in sword and shield.  I knew eventually pokemon games wouldn’t be able to keep supporting all the pokemon, I knew eventually my collection would be left behind.  But I didn’t think it had already happened.  And to find out that gen 7 of all games was the last ‘complete’ pokemon?  That’s just kind of sad to realize.  And while I am on balance enjoying sword and shield, it’s a realization that keeps coming back uninvited to sour the experience.

[aldmerii-blog]

hey it’s a tutorial on how i make gifs

its a long one

carly, what programs do i need? 

what a good question! basically, you need a program to record video (if you’re making gifs of video games), a program to take frames of the video you recorded (or the movie or show you’re giffing because you can do that too, obviously), and a graphic processing program (it’s photoshop, you need photoshop)

also if you’re recording your own game footage you need a computer capable of running that game well. ideally you want medium to high settings at 60fps (this varies; like you want to record, say, skyrim at high settings and probably modded, but newer games like mass effect andromeda, just medium-high settings should be fine!)

for video recording, i strongly recommend: 

nvidia shadowplay

i think you can only use this if you have an nvidia graphics card. it’s very good because it automatically records at 60fps and at up to 4k (so like it’s good for taking regular video for video purposes also) and it starts up very quickly (so when you hit record, it’s only a few seconds before it starts recording). in-game, you hit alt+f9 to start recording. 

xbox game dvr

i used this for a long time and it’s perfectly satisfactory, and great if you don’t have an nvidia graphics card. it comes with windows 10. you need to go into windows settings and set the quality to High and the framerate to 60fps. the only drawback is that it takes a hot minute to start up the first time you use it in a gaming session (like 10-30 seconds) and there are some games it won’t open over (i had issues with both assassin’s creed odyssey and far cry 5). in-game, you hit ctrl+alt+r to start recording. 

for frame-taking:

gomplayer

has a slightly imprecise method of screenshotting, that is you have to time your “burst capture” while the video is playing - you can’t find the spot you want, pause it, start your capturing, and then play the video to have it start at an exact moment. however it really captures every frame and i’ve never had any issues with it. best advice is to record more frames than you need to and delete the ones you don’t need in windows explorer or photoshop. to open the screen-capture window, you hit ctrl+g

potplayer

i used this one for a long time, too! it does what i said gomplayer doesn’t do, which means you can pause it and start screencapturing and it’ll start from where you paused it when you hit play. i’ve had a few issues with it not actually capturing every frame even when i have it set to do so. but that might be just me. to open the screen capture window, you hit ctrl+g

for graphic handing:

photoshop. specifically cs5 -- that’s what i’ve used for about half a decade. i’m sure a lot of the steps are similar in cs6 and cc but i’ve never used either of them and i can’t help you learn those. 

that’s it. no other options.

okay great!!!!!!! you got ur software set up. now what???

if you want to make gifs of video games where you use your own footage, read this bit. if not skip down to the next header. 

at the most basic level, with creative cropping, you don’t really have to do anything more than record the screen of the game you’re playing. for a lot of games, this is what you have to do (dragon age origins and 2, stardew valley, etc). HOWEVER. there are ways to get different shots in some games and i’ll take you through skyrim/fallout 4 and dragon age inquisition (and i think other frostbite engine games?) if you have questions about other games you’re welcome to ask!

bethesda products (skyrim and fallout 4 mainly)

bethesda is very nice and includes console commands that let you get some good cinematic shots in their base games. these are the same for both skyrim and fallout 4 because they’re the same engine. 

tfc

your bread and butter, baby. this is “toggle free camera” or “toggle fly camera” -- it detaches you from your character basically, and you can fly around. if you are in third person when you enter the console command, your character will remain visible and you can take pictures of them. in first person, theyre not. (also, drawn weapons will disappear in first person). note that in fallout 4 third person, your character will continue to rotate/strafe as you move the camera. 

you can add a 1 to the end of the command (tfc 1) and it will also freeze time. this is good for taking screenshots, not gifs

entering tfc again will turn it off

tm

‘toggle menu’ -- this turns off the hud, including the crosshair. this is. very important. you don’t want the menu in ur gifs ok. 

it also hides the console window! so it may be a little confusing. but generally if the grass/water/dust is moving, the console window isn’t open.

typing tm again will reenable the menus

sucsm #

the default free cam is very fast and imprecise. i usually use sucsm 1 to slow down the speed at which the camera moves. 

sgtm #

set global time multiplier. this one isn’t hugely necessary but i still find myself using it sometimes. default is 1. you can set it to, like sgtm .01 to basically freeze the game while you get the camera into position if you’re trying to capture an action. also sometimes if i think things are moving too fast or too slow i’ll change the timescale. MAKE SURE you set it back to 1 when you’re done!

i Heavily suggest, especially for skyrim, that you use an ENB if your computer can handle it. it makes the game look nice, but it also usually includes depth of field which i am an absolute slut for. if not, use the mod dynavision for a DoF effect (available for both skyrim and fo4!)

and then you just have fun with it. getting good shots takes some practice. play with it. i tend to record long sessions (~5-10 minutes) with a LOT of different shots to pick from when i watch it back. 

frostbite engine (dragon age inquisition and mass effect andromeda, notably)

here’s where we use the Cinematic Tools, lads! these are a little more difficult. note that there are ct for a lot of games that i don’t play but i’m assuming they work the same. i’ve also never used CT in andromeda but it’s the same engine so they also probably work the same. so i’m mainly talking about DA:Inquisition.

OKAY SO. start the game. load ‘er up. you want to run origin and DAI as admin, and then once you’re in game, start the CT as admin, too. the controls window will open, and then another command prompt type window will open and hack into the matrix. you don’t have to do anything with it, but note that if you close the command prompt window, it will close the game. 

okay! party time. there are lots of other tutorials on using the CT, btw, so if i don’t explain it sufficiently you can either ask me or look up other tutorials. 

first, i usually take gifs of characters in DAI, which means i wait until cutscenes so we can see them talking or making faces or whatever. you can also do scenery gifs or whatever! 

so we’re in a cutscene. first and foremost check “freeze time” and then “enable”. set up your shots. start recording. THEN uncheck “freeze time”. that’s all in the “free camera” tab of the CT and technically all you need. But wait, there’s more. we’ve got two other tabs!

in this tab, I most often use “depth of field” because we’ve already established that i love a strong DoF. all these things are a little hard to understand and mostly require a lot of messing around.

focus distance

pretty self explanatory -- it’s the distance from the camera that objects will be in focus. for portraits, i usually have it at 1.125.

blur factor

how blurry the stuff that’s out of focus will be. i usually set it somewhere between 4 and 7, though you can go higher or lower. dealer’s choice. 

blur add

makes everything blurry regardless of focus. don’t use it. 

blur filter

i almost always set it to gaussian 9 but it doesn’t make that much of a difference. 

dof type

always set it to sprite

max blur

i absolutely do not know what this does and don’t use it. 

near start/end

with this you can kind of expand “focus distance” to include more varied distances. i usually don’t mess with this and i suggest you don’t. 

far start/end

most useful in outdoor scenes. usually it’ll be set to like 100, meaning that there’s a gradient way out to the most blurred parts. if you bring it lower, the gradient distance gets shorter, so the background gets blurrier closer to your focus. what i set it to depends entirely on the scene. just try messing with it and see what it does for you. 

make sure you hit the green enable button on the left and Also tick “enable” on the DOF screen to use it. 

this tab is a little more useful for screenshotting but i’ll include it since i’m going over the CT anyway. i have never messed with global fov or timescale BUT

shadowmap resolution

i usually set it down to 512 for smooth, soft, realistic shadows. otherwise they look kinda stripey. 

resolution scale

NOT FOR GIFS. do not use this for gifs. but DEFINITELY do use it for screencaps. set it to two (i’ve had my computer freeze from trying to set it to 4, so like, be careful). it basically doubles the resolution of everything on screen and makes it very pretty but it’ll ruin your framerate so don’t try to record with it. 

okay, I’ve got my footage, now what!

now we’re gonna open it in whichever player you picked. 

GOMPLAYER:

for gomplayer, you’re going to press ctrl + g to bring up the screencapture window. i Don’t remember what the original settings are, but you wanna make sure your quality is set to 255 (highest) and that it’s set to original resolution. 

now the slightly hard part. you gotta hit “burst capture” while the video is playing, so it’s slightly imprecise. for that reason i have the number (burst capture images) set much higher than i’ll use, so that i make up for the imprecision. after you capture, go in and delete the frames you don’t need, either in windows explorer or after you’ve loaded them into photoshop.

POTPLAYER:

just pause your video, hit ctrl+g, copy my settings, click start, and then play your video. potplayer will capture every frame. 

i should have mentioned this earlier but you have to have a folder to save your screencaps in. i usually organize by GIFS>game name># what its a gif of>a numbered folder for each gif in the set. but it’s up to you. just probably don’t save to your desktop or wherever the default location is. 

AND NOW THE FUN PART!!

open photoshop!!! if it’s your first time here, go to window>animation so that you’ll. have the animation window open. 

now go file > load files into stack > browse, and find the frames we just took. select em all. click ok. 

you’re probably going to start off in timeline view. we don’t want that yet. click the box in the bottom right corner that looks like multiple little boxes to switch to frame view. 

in frame view, click the menu box thing. and click “make frames from layers” and then “reverse frames”

now select all your frames, and on any one of them, select the arrow next to “0.0 sec” (this is the frame delay). select “other”

what you set the frame delay to depends on what your footage frame delay originally was. if you’re using game footage, it was probably 60fps, in which case you should set the delay to 0.04 sec. if it was 30 fps, I usually go 0.06 to 0.08. play around with it and decide which you like best. there’s a play button so you can see how the delay looks before you continue.

now we switch back over to timeline view. so click the same button as we used to get to frame view. 

now select all your layers, in the layer panel. right click on them and click “convert to smart object” 

here is usually where I do my scaling/cropping. tumblr photoset sizes are 540px for full width, 268 for 2 wide, and 177 for 3 wide. KEEP IN MIND when making especially 540px gifs that the size limit is 3mb. so you can’t make them super tall or super long (time-wise). 

the gif of calcifer i’m making is going to be 540x250. make use of set image size (ctrl + alt + i) and canvas size (ctrl + alt +c). set the width of 540 with image size and then crop the canvas to your desired height with canvas size.

okay! technically we can be done. this is what my gif looks like right now:

however i like to color and edit mine. yknow. here are my sharpening settings. I cannot help you with coloring because i’m bad at it. at best i will suggest you look at and download resource colorings from blogs like itsphotoshop

anyway, to sharpen: filter>sharpen>smart sharpen

and then apply your coloring. and save with ctrl + alt + shift + s, or just file > save for web and devices. set your file type to GIF. two things to look at:

1) MAKE SURE YOU SET THE LOOPING OPTIONS TO “FOREVER”. i put this in caps because I am an idiot who messed this up all the time when i first started. 

2) keep an eye on your file size!! if it’s over 3mb (mine, down in the left corner, says it’s 2.697, so it’s fine) then you can try to reduce the number of colors. but don’t go below 128 colors, because then it starts to look bad. instead you can try reducing the height or going back and cutting down the number of frames (so basically remaking the gif again :( ). 

okay great, click save. save it. you’re done. here’s our calcifer. 

and that’s it! i hope this made sense and like. absolutely ask if you have questions. 

[mistabonbon]

I’m kinda torn when it comes to Warframe.

I’ve had it on my PS4 since the PS4 first launched and a lot of it I used to enjoy so much.

It was a game that was heavy on Co-op that I could still play on my own and just be paired with random people who, for the most part, knew what they were doing. 

It was a game where if I wanted something extra cool, I could put aside a day or two and work on getting it, and by the end I’d feel satisfied in the effort I put into it.

But then we got to Archwing. 

Archwing was interesting at first, still kinda is, but to get more Archwing gear? 

That day or two of doing one thing became a whole damn week. The items were put behind game modes that were annoying to play, took forever to complete, and no-one liked playing them, so you hardly ever found a full squad for it. On top of that horrible experience, the drop chance for the item you’d need were stuck behind playing the game mode for an absurd amount of time, and even after you played it for that long there was a HUGE chance you STILL wouldn’t get the items you need. You would instead get some stupid thing you don’t even care about in the slightest.

I wasn’t too insanely bothered by this at first. I could just play everything else the game had to offer that WASN’T Archwing. 

Then we got Nidus, Vauban Prime, Valkyr Prime, etc.

Warframes, base Warframes that you could get an use ANYWHERE. One of which is a Prime variant of my personal favorite, Valkyr.

Nidus alone is a fucking mess to work towards. 

You play a game mode kind of like a mix of Survival and Defense where you’re swarmed by hive of increasing difficulty over time and you need to pick up special drop items to put into consoles that will decrypt information over time as long as you keep putting these items into it. 

A fine understandable and, to some small degree enjoyable mode at first.

But then you see that you need to play it for 20 minutes in a single run for just one chance at getting a piece of Nidus that you need, and ALL THREE PARTS OF THE BLUEPRINT ARE BEHIND THE 20 MINUTE WALL. 

“That’s fair/understandable” you say, but then you see there’s five other items in that same loot pool after you play for 20 minutes that have MUCH higher drop rates. We’re talking 20%-30% drop rates while Nidus is nowhere close. You can play that mode for a whole damn day and not get a single part of Nidus’ components. To make things even worse, most of the people playing that mode either have no fucking clue what they’re doing, or they do, but they leave the game before you’re done 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile with Primes, that’s a whole new shit pile.

The way acquiring Prime stuff USED to work: Play specific missions within the Void for a chance at getting items that you need to make X Prime thing. 

This was great because you would always go into these missions with other people who were farming for things that were ALSO behind the same wall that the items you needed were behind. You’d go into a Void survival, everyone would decide on 20, 40, 60 minutes, etc. and you four would go that long. No one would leave, people knew what to do, it was great. Sure the drop rates were still rather shit, but it was a lot more tolerable.

The way acquiring Primes works NOW: You play specific modes/missions to acquire Relics, specific relics have the ability to drop specific prime parts when you use those relics to play a Void mission. You can increase the chance of the drop for the item you need by using a specific resource and “charging” the relic with it.

This sounds fine, and on paper it is, but in the actual implementation into the game itself? THIS IS ABSOLUTE SHIT. Why? Because the drops you need are not tied to the specific missions anymore. Obviously that’s the case. But on top of that, they’re tied to a thing you need to farm. ON TOP OF THAT. You COULD have a higher chance of getting the thing you need when multiple people have the same relic. A group of four people with charged relics that have say a 10% chance of dropping a Valkyr Prime part EACH, that’s a 40% chance of getting that Valkyr Prime part. BUT. If you ever want that kind of chance, not only do people need to have that relic and have it charged to the max, you need to organize the use of four of it with a group.

No longer can people just go play the game, do what missions they want to, and get things done within a reasonable time frame.

If you can’t organize a farming session with a group of people, then you’re stuck playing a handful of things for fucking WEEKS because you play X thing and use X resource trying to get X item and then you run out of that resource you need to get that item so you need to play a DIFFERENT thing to try and get more of that resource to try and get that item again. 

It’s not fucking fun. At all. Now more than ever the game feels like it’s Pay to Win because if you want to keep enjoying the game and NOT be stuck doing one bullshit thing for an entire damn month to the point you can’t stand even just looking at the damn title screen of the game? Fork up the dough, buy platinum, skip the fucking bullshit grind, ACTUALLY ENJOY THE GAME.

But over the past few months, Warframe has gotten some huge updates. And I mean HUGE. The Plains of Eidolon a while ago. An “Open World” space where you can involve yourself in hunts, psuedo-events, missions, and you can fight giant ancient robot monsters at night. Plus there’s a settlement of friendly NPCs with stores, factions, bounties, etc. PLUS YOU CAN FISH. A lot of people were surprisingly hyped for that. 

They had just recently release The Sacrifice, which I played, and while it was a bit annoying since it focused to heavily on using your Operator in combat, it was honestly one of the more satisfying quests in the game, and it had probably the MOST satisfying way to get a Warframe.

In the Sacrifice, Umbra is added to the game. You play through the Quest to get him of course, but you don’t just get a blueprint then need to do a million other things to get his components and the resources needed. No no no.

In the first mission you get his blueprint, but it’s incomplete. You have it in your Foundry but it needs more data. 

The next mission you run, you get more of that needed data, and then you can build Umbra. No components, no extra blueprints, just the one and a couple resources. 

Once you build him, Umbra is max level, with a catalyst, and it’s own Warframe slot added into your inventory, and are tasked with equipping it. However, once you do, Umbra comes to life. It reacts violently to being alive again, and threatens to kill your Operator. But you manage to do Transference with Umbra and you see a memory. One that shows a bit of what Umbra remembers from it’s life BEFORE being a Warframe. When you come out of the memory, you learn from Ordis that Umbra has escaped from your ship and has gone somewhere else. Your Operator decides to chase down Umbra, do transference with it, and learn more about the memory with the goal of helping it come to terms with and move on from that moment in their original life.

Over the course of the quest you learn about the origin of the Warframes, of how they were first made, of the dark, horrible truth to it all, and you lose something, as the name “The Sacrifice” suggests. Thankfully it’s not one of your own frames, that’d have just been stupid, but what you do lose is HUGE.

But by the end of the quest line, you come to understand the torment Umbra had been going through ever since they became the Warframe they are. The painful memory that runs through their mind over, and over, and over again for who knows how long. Not only do you understand, you help Umbra. You support Umbra, and work with them through that torment so they can move past it, and work toward the future. To stopping the insane prick that started everything.

Once it’s done, Umbra stays with you. Umbra doesn’t just run away and disappear, not at all. They recognize you as a Tenno, as their Tenno, and stay so that they can now help you. 

A lot of the fandom/community jokes about Umbra now being your Operator’s dad, because they certainly do kind of become a father figure on some ways.

But Umbra is now one of your Warframes that you can use whenever you want, and Umbra’s pretty damn great, not only is it a pretty well buffed up Excalibur, it’s and Anti-Sentient Warframe. It’s second ability is an AOE stun that will REMOVE all the resistances that a Sentient has built up! Add on the exalted weapon it has already being great against Sentients and the fact it has 720 HEALTH, Umbra’s a FANTASTIC Warframe for the Void.

Also, Digital Extremes recently had Tennocon, and during Tennocon they showed off a half-dozen new skins coming to the game for various Warframes, two NEW Warframes, AND a NEW OPEN SPACE. 

They also showed off a new game mode where you and three other players operate an entire ship, flying it around, using it’s canons in battle, and you can send someone to fly to the enemy ship via Archwing and do things on the ship as if it’s a normal mission, while someone who’s still on your friendly ship can hack into the enemy one and help the person who boarded it!

The game type is pretty damn interesting, I gotta be honest, but it also makes me worry that it’s going to be EXTREMELY anti-solo. 

What I mean by that: I’m worried you’re not going to be able to play it alone and have any chance at succeeding, and that even with a random group of people, unless EVERYONE knows what they’re doing, you’re going to have a VERY hard/messy time playing it.

On top of all of that, ALL of these big new things coming to the game, it’s being released for Nintendo’s Switch console.

Warframe. 

A game with a future that looks very promising, but at the same time, very unfriendly for solo-players and console players.

[jimmyjohnsmnm]

How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously)

You all know SEO is a long-term game… at least when it comes to Google.

And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.

So then, what should you do?

Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?

Seriously.

So, what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?

Well, this story will help explain it…

The old days

When I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.

Getting rankings!

Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).

Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.

You could literally see results in less than a month.

SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.

I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.

In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.

So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.

I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.

I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.

In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.

Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.

So, what’s the strategy?

Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.

These days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.

But you know what, most of the sites that rank on Google are content-based sites. Over 56% of a website’s organic traffic is typically going to their blog or articles.

So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?

I know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.

Here are the stats for the last month:

Rental fees: $24,592

Outreach costs: $3,000

Legal costs: $580

Copywriting and monetization costs: $1,500

Total monthly cost: $29,672 

Now guess what my monthly income was?

It was $79,283.58.

Not too bad.

Now your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t need a lawyer.

And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.

Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.

Here are the exact steps you need to follow:

Step #1: Find the terms you want to rank for

If you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.

If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.

Head over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.

Now click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of keywords that each page ranks for.

I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.

Keywords with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.

When you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t be able to monetize the traffic.

Step #2: Search for the term

It’s time to do some Google searches.

Look for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to rank for.

Don’t waste your time with page 2.

What I want you to look for is:

Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.

A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)

A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).

Step #3: Hit up the website

Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.

If you can’t find their details, you can do a whois lookup to see if you can find their phone number.

What’ll you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.

It just doesn’t work well over email.

If you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes something like this…

Subject: [their website name]

Hey [insert first name],

Do you have time for a quick call this week?

We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.

Let me know what works for you.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

[insert your company]

[insert your phone number]

You want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more calls.

Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.

Point out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need some more information before you can make your offer.

At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).

Once you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next few days after you run some numbers.

Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?

You’ll want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too heavily or else you may lose rankings.

Once you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.

Typically, most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page in the first place.

Step #4: Monetize the page

If you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the products you are selling.

For example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add links from the article to your site.

Just like this article.

The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.

Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.

As for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people can fill out their lead information is great.

Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.

I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.

When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page.

Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.

I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out with a 30-day notice.

The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.

And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.

Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.

The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to scale.

If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.

The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.

So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?

The post How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously) appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://ift.tt/2YAiXx3 via https://neilpatel.com The post, How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously), has been shared from https://ift.tt/38okGtP via https://ift.tt/2r0Go64

[marketingcomcaio]

How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously)

You all know SEO is a long-term game… at least when it comes to Google.

And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.

So then, what should you do?

Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?

Seriously.

So, what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?

Well, this story will help explain it…

The old days

When I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.

Getting rankings!

Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).

Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.

You could literally see results in less than a month.

SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.

I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.

In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.

So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.

I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.

I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.

In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.

Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.

So, what’s the strategy?

Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.

These days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.

But you know what, most of the sites that rank on Google are content-based sites. Over 56% of a website’s organic traffic is typically going to their blog or articles.

So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?

I know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.

Here are the stats for the last month:

Rental fees: $24,592

Outreach costs: $3,000

Legal costs: $580

Copywriting and monetization costs: $1,500

Total monthly cost: $29,672 

Now guess what my monthly income was?

It was $79,283.58.

Not too bad.

Now your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t need a lawyer.

And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.

Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.

Here are the exact steps you need to follow:

Step #1: Find the terms you want to rank for

If you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.

If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.

Head over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.

Now click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of keywords that each page ranks for.

I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.

Keywords with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.

When you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t be able to monetize the traffic.

Step #2: Search for the term

It’s time to do some Google searches.

Look for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to rank for.

Don’t waste your time with page 2.

What I want you to look for is:

Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.

A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)

A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).

Step #3: Hit up the website

Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.

If you can’t find their details, you can do a whois lookup to see if you can find their phone number.

What’ll you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.

It just doesn’t work well over email.

If you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes something like this…

Subject: [their website name]

Hey [insert first name],

Do you have time for a quick call this week?

We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.

Let me know what works for you.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

[insert your company]

[insert your phone number]

You want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more calls.

Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.

Point out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need some more information before you can make your offer.

At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).

Once you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next few days after you run some numbers.

Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?

You’ll want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too heavily or else you may lose rankings.

Once you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.

Typically, most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page in the first place.

Step #4: Monetize the page

If you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the products you are selling.

For example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add links from the article to your site.

Just like this article.

The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.

Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.

As for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people can fill out their lead information is great.

Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.

I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.

When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page.

Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.

I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out with a 30-day notice.

The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.

And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.

Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.

The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to scale.

If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.

The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.

So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?

The post How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously) appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously) Publicado primeiro em https://neilpatel.com

[jjpocketbook]

How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously)

You all know SEO is a long-term game… at least when it comes to Google.

And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.

So then, what should you do?

Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?

Seriously.

So, what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?

Well, this story will help explain it…

The old days

When I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.

Getting rankings!

Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).

Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.

You could literally see results in less than a month.

SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.

I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.

In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.

So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.

I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.

I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.

In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.

Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.

So, what’s the strategy?

Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.

These days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.

But you know what, most of the sites that rank on Google are content-based sites. Over 56% of a website’s organic traffic is typically going to their blog or articles.

So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?

I know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.

Here are the stats for the last month:

Rental fees: $24,592

Outreach costs: $3,000

Legal costs: $580

Copywriting and monetization costs: $1,500

Total monthly cost: $29,672 

Now guess what my monthly income was?

It was $79,283.58.

Not too bad.

Now your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t need a lawyer.

And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.

Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.

Here are the exact steps you need to follow:

Step #1: Find the terms you want to rank for

If you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.

If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.

Head over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.

Now click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of keywords that each page ranks for.

I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.

Keywords with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.

When you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t be able to monetize the traffic.

Step #2: Search for the term

It’s time to do some Google searches.

Look for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to rank for.

Don’t waste your time with page 2.

What I want you to look for is:

Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.

A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)

A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).

Step #3: Hit up the website

Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.

If you can’t find their details, you can do a whois lookup to see if you can find their phone number.

What’ll you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.

It just doesn’t work well over email.

If you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes something like this…

Subject: [their website name]

Hey [insert first name],

Do you have time for a quick call this week?

We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.

Let me know what works for you.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

[insert your company]

[insert your phone number]

You want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more calls.

Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.

Point out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need some more information before you can make your offer.

At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).

Once you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next few days after you run some numbers.

Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?

You’ll want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too heavily or else you may lose rankings.

Once you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.

Typically, most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page in the first place.

Step #4: Monetize the page

If you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the products you are selling.

For example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add links from the article to your site.

Just like this article.

The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.

Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.

As for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people can fill out their lead information is great.

Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.

I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.

When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page.

Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.

I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out with a 30-day notice.

The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.

And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.

Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.

The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to scale.

If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.

The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.

So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?

The post How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously) appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/organic-traffic-without-seo/ via https://neilpatel.com

The original post, How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously), has been shared from https://imtrainingparadise.wordpress.com/2019/12/10/how-to-get-more-organic-traffic-without-doing-any-seo-seriously/ via https://imtrainingparadise.wordpress.com

[crystalnet]

My Top 10 Video Gamesss

I'm really bored so I'm just gonna do this, fuck it. Top 10 from a guy whose genre of choice is the action-(J)RPG, of which makes up about half this list. I'm gonna try to keep it pretty short and sweet, cuz like who cares, like why am I even doing this who cares. (Digibro says text-blogging is dead, like I need to make videos but like who would want to watch the video of some rando listing things either? Idk, like I don't really get any motivation for anything anymore. But I do like games/JRPGS soooo.... without further ado...). Also I'm doing a 1-game-per-franchise rule 'cuz otherwise it'd be largely Zelda and Final Fantasy because I have good taste, am sheepish and bland, and overly-content with the same 2 franchises. But yeah, I'm digging a little deeper here. 

1. Zelda Breath of the Wild-

This may seem risky, audacious and possibly even sacrilege to put a game that is only like 5 months old on this list, but really this is the only game that I could really confidently put on my top spot. I think this game is just about perfect, and even though its not technically my genre of choice, it comes pretty close to a JRPG, and yet feels more pure than that, and somehow even deeper in a way. I'm just astounded by everything from the mechanics, to the presentation to the flow of this game and more. But especially those things probably. The "flow" of this game for example feels so fucking organic and open-ended that it essentially feels like no other game I've ever encountered. You can wander for hours semi-aimlessly and still have an amazing time and work towards progress. 

The climbing/paragliding thing is just about the coolest mechanic I've ever seen or played in a game and works as a really amazing foundation for one of the underlying aspects of this game, which is sheer unadulterated exploration. And I was saying it somehow reminds of a JRPG even tho it's Zelda and that has everything to do with the deep item-management and collecting, the deep cooking/crafting system, and the huge array of weapons which all transform the combat from being vanilla-as-fuck as it was in previous console Zeldas (barring Skyward I suppose) to really cool, challenging and pretty dang deep, for a Zelda game at least. And that, along with so much of this, including the incredible different experimental non-linearity of it, make this unlike any other than Zelda save the first, revolutionary entry. A lot of the depth also has to do with the crazy deep physics. Did I mention the physics?? And though there's only like 5 dungeons (I easily count Hyrule castle, and this is not including 120 shrines and the various fortresses/mazes), they're really ace and easily rival my favorite Zelda dungeons in the way in which the structure of the dungeons must themselves be manipulated in order to solve their puzzles (my next top 5 is gonna be Top Zelda Dungeons btw..). 

So yeah, this game is just freakin' incredible and this iteration of Hyrule is probably my favorite game world of all time. Every inch of it is beautifully lit, realized, and filled to the brim with little puzzles, shrines, formidable foes and questing galore. Also the horses. The horses are sick. And yeah, climbing to the tops of mountains and paragliding down (or later using Revali's Gale to ascend rapidly) is the most free I've felt in a game since the weirdly amazing web-slinging in Spider-Man 2 (PS2). Also the difference between how weak and basic you feel at first to how you feel toward the end when you have the Master Sword, a crazy good arsenal of weapons that you've curated, all the spells and Shiekah slate magic and all the amiibo-dropped gear attained from an illegal/frowned-upon amiibo deck is freakin awesome and even cooler than the dynamic progression of something like Dark Souls. And the whole first 10-20 hours or so of a new file are especially “special” to me. Not that it gets less fun-- in many ways it gets more fun as you get more capable and experienced-- but the Plateau segment is a master class in tutorial segment design, and the way you learn to live off the land is kind of incredible... There’s this whole Buddhist-esque anti-attachment thing the game forces you to accept regarding early weapons breaking all the time that help make you depend so heavily on scavenging and exploring and always looking for more loot just so that you can survive. You really learn to live off the land, and well that’s beautiful. And everything about all the various mechanics and the world feel so holistic and cohesive and unified in a way that I just haven’t really seen before.  Anyway, yeah I could go on but I think that mostly sums it up. This is the only game where it feels like your actually exploring an amazing natural environment, but without like sore feet and bugs and being sweaty and stuff. It's just all the good stuff involved in taking in a crazy beautiful environ. I already said that but yeah. This game feels restorative, peaceful, meditative. And I never get sick of those lonely little piano chords. It's good. Perfect even. Really a masterwork for me. And the DLC is sweet to boot and still incoming, so yeah. Me likey.  2. Final Fantasy XV-

Where I feel really good picking BotW as my #1, and can do it without hesitation, and it's not even a tough call to make as my favorite entry of its respective franchise, this one is a bit more complex. And like a lot of FF fans would probably rightfully scoff and write me off right away, whereas Zelda fans would probably be more accepting of BotW as the top pick. Because it involves a shit ton of caveats. For one thing, deep deep down, FFXI will actually always be my favorite video game experience of all time. Always. Forever. Sorry not sorry BotW. But I'm not putting that one, because I feel like there's something weird about listing an MMO that I only played for 3 years as a child and can't really revisit in a real capacity. Its sealed in time and perhaps that's what makes it special. Sure I could get on one of the couple of PC servers still going but it wouldn't be the same. Another caveat is FFVII, IX, and XII (Zodiac Age!!) are all, to me, way classier and probably on a technical level "better" than XV. And yet, I'm kind of have this disease where 64-bit games have aged worse for me than any other gen, and while XII is fucking awesome (Zodiac!! ^.^;;), I don't have quite as much fun playing that as XV (though its pretty close...). Somehow, despite all its short-comings, FFXV almost perfectly captures the charm and joy of this series, and all my memories of it, while containing them within a fucking gorgeous-- immaculately so at that-- package that is super freakin' playable compared to older turn-based titles. Like, ATB/turn-based FF will always be more "legit" in a sense, but I can't deny I am an action-JRPG addict and this game hits the sweet-spot for me.

Did I mention how beautiful it is? While some might see the new fixation on open-worlds as kind of redundant-- and BotW has now kind of revealed the flaws in the old triple-A formula for them--, I think this is just a reeeeally good rendition of the "open-world" concept, which is something I always wanted in FF. And while you can't join in with other players like in XI and carve your own path in the world (multiplayer is coming though...), there is a certain feeling of freedom felt in this game that makes so many other FF titles seem so limited (lookin at you XIII). Also, pretty. It's pretttttty. And if BotW's Hyrule is my favorite game-map, Eos is my favorite world in terms of like lore, look, and design. It's freakin cool. It looks real and there are cars and there are modern-looking people like us but there's also crazy monsters, magic, teleportation, robots and evil empires (well those are real). And the monsters seem like something out of an otherworldly Nat. Geo. the way everything is so wonderfully detailed. Its freakin cool Dinotopia shit in this bitch. So yeah, while there are flaws-- notably of which are the lack of customization in character-progression that I love in games like XII Zodiac Age and with the kind of unrealized story which is spread mercilessly across an anime mini-series and OVA-- this game feels like a perfect monument to my favorite series of all time. And like you can play all Nobuo songs while exploring this amazing world. Like seriously that tiny little feature is what puts this over-the-top. Otherwise I might have honestly chosen IX or XII Zodiac Age 'cause they're classy AF and the RPG mechanics are deeper. But fuck it, when I play this, it's basically the best visualizer for an endless Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack I could imagine. And like Shimumura's new stuff is great on top of that. This point falls apart 'cuz I could just play an FF actually composed by Nobuo, but like this way it's like an endless loop of my personal favorite Nobuo. Nobuo... 

But anyway... Yeah I like the look, combat, magic, world, characters, chocobos, and the look again. Also the potential... I think multiplayer could be really, really cool honestly. So while it bears some of the issues all post-Enix-merger FF games have (like weirdly dropping parts of the plot which is like...why???, or the fact that they're having to patch it all year, and are adding stuff (can you say DLC $$$$)), it's still a minor masterpiece for me. And while not as deep, or even as charming as old PS1 FF or 16-bit FF, its just so damn playable. I'm not a good retro-gamer like other people-- I like my games new and bright/shiny, and this game is shiny AF. So yeah. I clearly have to defend the hell out of this, but fuck it, it's great. Like seriously the design of everything? Just walk around and like look at it. LOOK AT IT. Character models!!! Lighting!!! Facial animation and movement!!! Omg. Okay, yeah I'll leave it at that. Don't hate me. 3. Super Smash Bros Wii-

I feel like I don't even have to explain this one. This is quite simply the perfect multiplayer game. And as with BotW and FFXV, I like these latest iterations a lot, which may seem sheepish and like plebian-core but fuck it. Melee was reeeeally fun back in like 2008, but I'm not trying to play that rn. Robin all day. And Cloud?? So yeah, there's just something kind of endlessly sweet about a game where the likes of Mario, Pac-Man, Sonic, Megaman, Cloud, Ryu and... Bayonetta (??) all collide in a game with amazing physics, awesome platform-y freedom-of-movement and a deep competitive scene which almost make this seem like some kind of weird master-game. Like the Master Sword of games. An Einherjar/Valhalla of all videogame character of fame and fortune. So yeah, its great. I can't speak about it to it to the length I did with FF and BotW because I feel like it speaks for itself. Its just pure, unadulterated Nintendo/pan-franchise world-colliding fun. 4. Nier Automata-

Nier/Drakengard lore is fucking crazy, deep as hell, and multi-faceted AF and Yoko Taro is freeeeakin cool and the best game director this side of Hideo Kojima. And where the first Nier is an amazing, lovably imperfect game-- clunky combat, and weird genre-hopping and all-- this one is like freakin' awesome to play front-to-back. Unless you like don't like abruptly inserted bullet-hell segments. But the main combat is irrefutably sick, which is crazy. Platinum games took a reeeeally weird game-world and made it feel super slick despite all the amazing quirks that are inherent to Yoko Taro's games. Also this is one of my like top 5 maybe 3 game soundtracks of all time. It's amazing and reminds me of my favorite Yuki Kajiura soundtrack for .Hack//Sign. Is there a term for awesome vaguely medieval-ish female-vocal heavy mystic-sounding music? 'Cause this game has it in spades and it's freakin sweeeet. Alongside some like soulful adult-contemporary R'n'B ballads? Buy yeah, amazing-feeling combat, a plethora of combos and weapons, a solid amount of depth to character progression, and really fun bullet-hell segments make this game sooooo playable and maybe my favorite action-RPG of all time (FFXV doesn't quite feel like a true action-RPG?)

But then, on top of that it has an amazingly evocative story, with wonderfully dynamic characters who are lovingly revealed over the course of multiple play-through, in a an epic struggle that revels in the philosophy of Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Marx among others. That in itself is freakin' crazy. Games/anime/movies with AI characters or like androids can be so cliche in their exploration of existentialism, and this game can seem like its gonna be like that at first, but it ends up making good on its promises, and functions as just a really cool exploration of a rich philosophical tapestry. And it's all beautifully told, in these really nice semi-muted colors and with these super lovely character models. Plus the open-world is surprisingly great to run around. I love the over-grown human city thing, and the super atmospheric music come together with the aesthetic to make this game so emotional. Like honestly, along with other aspects of the story, this game is sooooo feels-heavy for me. It can be really sad, and there's this amazing dichotomy/friction between how fun it is to play, and how like strait-up bad it can make you feel sometimes. To like even play it. Getting into that would be spoiler-y and stuff, but yeah I'll kind of leave it to there. The story is awesome. 2B and 9S are amazing. The concepts and way this game actually effect you are super unique, and all the presentation-aspects bring it together so beautifully. It's just like... wow. Like play this game. then play it 5 times to get all the endings. 5. Metal Gear Solid V-

I almost have to make the same caveats I did for FFXV for this game as well. Yes, I know, it's not perfect. It partly represents like the downfall of this whole series, and the darker side of video-games in general. There's a pachinko-level pay-wall type thing inserted right into this and there's some behind-the-scene drama involved that strait-up led to Kojima's departure from Konami? (firing??) Idk, idc, I don't have the energy for that, honestly. So maybe I'm a horrible MGS fan, but I'll be damned if I don't love this game unabashedly. I first played it during a time when I had basically spent 5 years not playing any video games besides Smash, and it was an amazing reintroduction into the world of triple-A titles. Emergent gameplay. Openness. The most handsome character model of all time (Big Boss is my daddy). And that Asia song "Only Time Will Tell". Seriously-- something about the way that song synchs up with the feel of sneaking into an Afghani military outpost in the early 1980's any damn way you please is like the story of this game for me, and part of why it's on this list. That song is everything. Like in the context of this game that is. But also outside of it too? But yeah the sheer openness is just incredible. Not open in the same way like Skyrim or BotW is, but in terms of how you complete each and every mission. It feels like your writing the script to your own big action movie every time you set out. Like the game doesn't force anything on you. Did I mention Big Boss is fucking hot. 

And yeah, great music, gameplay and overall presentation, and the cool base-management stuff adds this really cool RTS-ish depth that fleshes out the game wonderfully. Add some solid online PVP, a sweet mech and the gatdamn coolest most open-ended stealth gameplay I'm aware of, and you have yrself a winner. Sorry old, classic MGS, I gotta go with the new model. It's just so damn playable. Like yeah, I know, Konami is like really bad, and fucked up, and like if I really respected Kojima maybe I wouldn't chose this one? But like man I can't help it. I love it soooo much, contemporary triple-AAA-developer-dysfunction and all. Oh and Asia. And the Pere Ubu "Man Who Saved the World". And "Take On Me". Honestly without the tape-collecting/playing this might not be included. But yeah, its clearly great.

6. Dark Souls- Idk, I'm not even a huge Souls guy but this game is kind of breathtaking. I got it for cheap and went in a skeptic, and remained that way for a decent chunk of it, but around the time I was getting to Sen's Fortress things started to click like crazy. This game is undeniable and I'll leave it to the plethora of well-made YouTube analyzers to really get into why. But for me, as far as action-RPGs go, this feels like it has some of the most legit customization and progression of any RPG I've played. It's got an amazing world, with the vertical-nature of the map and way that inter-locking various paths slowly reveal themselves is an amazing thing to behold as the game unfolds. I also just really love the online aspects of this game. I played this game when Dark Souls III was just about to come out and it gave it this kind of spooky feeling. Like I still got invaded a good bit and had help when I wanted it from others, but I could tell it wasn't as busy as it might have been during its initial hey-day. Like playing a weird culty Dreamcast game online in like 2005 (Phantasy Star Online anyone?). This spooky feeling of people being there but not at the same time fits the lore and the world itself really well and that aspect is probably even more exaggerated now (plus the fact that I fuck co-op proves im a n00b). But the fact people were still playing it at all, and still do to this day, speak to how singular and amazing it is. For me, this is just the end-all be-all as far as  archetypal high fantasy worlds go-- at least as far as the darker side of things go. Its a bit heavy metal and dreary for me as far as fantasy goes (I like my shit kinda twee and anime-core), but if I want dark and bleak, with an underlying sense of old-world scenic beauty, this game is unbeatable. Like literally, I can't beat it. That's my one complaint: too hard! I'm a noob, maybe one day I'll git gud and stop getting wrecked-- one can hope... 7. Persona 5

This is weird to put after Dark Souls 'cuz if I'm honest I feel like this game has so much more charm and character and like personality than Dark Souls? Idk, I guess I can make that claim. Like Dark Souls has tons of personality, but like Persona 5? I guess it has to do with my slight preference for action-RPG over turn-based, but this game almost seems like one long ass 100 hour+ trek through sheer charm and personality. Hm, PERSONA-lity? Wow genius. But really, this game is just dripping with unique style and charisma. And I'll be honest, I wen't in expecting a lot and for a solid like 20 hours initially I wasn't all that into it. I'm still kinda an SMT noob so I think I'm just impatient for how long this game takes to reveal itself. It's just freakin big and deep that it literally takes that long and then some to truly get going. But once it does... oh boy does it. I think it might be the coolest turn-based game I've ever played in terms of just the sheer combat itself (sorry all pre FFXI Final Fantasy games???). Equal parts FF at its deepest and classiest and Pokemon at its um. Well idk, it's not as Pokemon as Ni No Kuni, but the Persona-collecting system is freakin great. And the level of challenge the combat/dungeons have seem almost pitch-perfect in a way RPGs rarely do. And then add in all the social links/dating sim components, and the open world, and the weird Sly Cooper-inspired stealthy dungeon-crawling and you have like one of the craziest, coolest most legit JRPGs of all time.

But yeah the saving grace for me is the actual turn-based system/combat itself. For a turn-based, its bizarre how kinetic and speedy it can feel. You have all the time you need to strategize if you so chose, but once you know what your doing it can be like lightning, right up until the point where your arguing with a demon to either fork over some loot or join your party, or else your moving fluidly back into great dungeon-crawling action. And then yeah all the crazy super-Japanese high-school student simulation stuff rounds things out delightfully. Like, I admit I like my RPGs to either be high fantasy or else cyber-punky and this is neither of those. Like I'm not even sure what aesthetic so much of this is... smooth jazz and sassy r'n'b moodiness, and like Japanese high-school-attending outcasts who moonlight as stylish treasure-hunting demon-slaying thieves and fight against the inner-world manifestations of corrupt adults-- like what is that vibe? I really don’t know, but I suppose its something all true otakus understand on some inherent level, even if it does remain mysterious and ever allusive in its charms to me. 

But the story is cool and huge (Seriously, 100+ hours! What?!!?) and plumbs psychological depths and doesn’t pull punches when it comes to getting a little dark, if maybe in a somewhat simplistic way. But yeah, this game oozes charm, like in the way Mona is so undeniable as a side-kick. I mean they’re almost annoying too but then like, no, Mona’s pretty great though. There are things I can almost imagine it doing that would make me like it even more (like the whole day-cycle thing never quite feels as open as I want it to? But like if it was it'd be like 300 hours. Just that thing where you speed through yr day and almost skip right to one scene in-class and then BAM its after-school), but yeah like this nitpick doesn't even fully make sense. It's just that this game is open-ended af and yet it can also sometimes feel kind of like your spending a lot of time clicking through text without a ton of control. But really that's just the like first 20-30 hours. And again the combat is just undeniably solid. So yeah, it's lite-novel-y and when yr not in dungeons it can seem like yr clicking through an anime almost, but I mean that's kind of also what makes it amazing.

And I'll just touch lightly on presentation stuff like the amazing soundtrack and the f a b u l o u s  style of all the menu's and just over-all visual flair of this game, 'cause literally everyone notices that instantly. The dungeons also seem kinda weirdly PS2-looking to me, but like it doesn't matter. This game has a crazy amount of depth and charm that make more immaculate looking triple-A's seem soulless. Plus, yeah like all the menu stuff and like visual segues make it seem so much more stylish than them too even though its clearly not on the same level technically. So yeah, this game’s a lot of win. I was skeptical of the hype honestly, and aspects of Persona 4's world are a little cooler to me still, but man this game is just like... yeah it's good. It's soo long and so written and chock full of a very distinct kind of charm that it seems comparable to having some kind of weird virtual pal inside my ps4 (Does that sound sad ^.^;;). Like it's just cool to know I can always pop it in and hang out with my old pals Ryuji, Ann and Morgana. And Makoto.  For like 100 more hours now. How long is this? Where am I, I've been playing it for 3 days, help!? 8. Odin Sphere Leifthrasir-

I'll have less to say to this 'cuz I'm pretty new to the hype-train and thank god 'cuz I wrote way too much about P5? But yeah, this game is the addictively-awesome side-scrolling action-RPG/Beat-'em-up I didn't know I needed in my life. At first I thought the over-all look was kind of not really my thing, but I've done a full 180, and while its not the like more traditional anime/FF-esque style I'm used to, I've come to see just how beautiful and fresh its style is. And then the combat itself is sweeeeeeet. Endlessly playable and as deep as you'd want a still kinda light-feeling action-RPG to be. Plus there's a deep cooking system which just always takes good action-RPGs or any game over-the-top for me. Most of the game is done exploring these really fun combat-filled levels but some respite is found in the mini-farming and cooking mechanics. And the crafting adds an extra dimension as well. Soooo deep. I also love that it scores you on how stylishly your playing by tracking yr combos. This is one of the more fluid and engagings JRPGs I’ve played, and the hand-drawn look is to die for. So yeah, I'll keep it short and sweet, but the action is great, the characters' various play-styles are wonderfully varied, and the overall presentation is just so unique and cool. Oh and the story ends up being like really legit? Caught me by surprise. It's mostly just good old fashioned sprite-based fun, with a really sick Norse-inspired fantasy aesthetic. A video game's video game (what does that mean?? (you get it)).

9. Dark Cloud-

The true OG "Dark" action-RPG of my dreams and heart-- sorry Dark Souls, you were a decade late. This game encapsulate the joy of PS2-era action-RPGs, a high-point for the genre. The kind of vaguely bland-but-still-unique fantasy look of it (a successful "Ocarina-killer" for my money, on a visual level at least), the procedurally-generated dungeon crawling, and the freakin’ awesome city-building and NPC-interacting make this game pure win. Like yeah, its a bit clunky with its combat, but charmingly so for me. Its mostly just got this really nice sustained vibe of like sheer pleasantness all throughout, and I just can't get enough of its over-all vibe after all these years. Harder to put this one into words... but yeah the city-building and little tiny touches with all the NPC-helping and questing is what make it special for me. Especially the city-building (you get to restore these little towns that have been ravaged and you have to make everyone happy with the way you set things up. So Japanese and so fun..) Like what a cool, weird feature that ends up being great. Idk, its great. I like the vaguely arabian-ish vibe too. It's just...  really good. It's just sheer PS2-style win. So yeah this one is mostly a lot on inarticulate nostalgia but fuck it. 10. .Hack//Infection-

Speaking of inarticulate nostalgia...Now I can't quite say this game is like truly a "good" game? All the way through at least. In some ways its part of a big cash-grab for Bandai-Namco. I'll go with the first one in the series, but its really just a piece of a whole along with 3 other games, that may have been a bit padded and intentionally designed to leach a whopping 200 US from a true dreamer back in the day, who just couldn't help themselves. BUT it's also kind of amazing. Like the combat and dungeon-crawling is a bit cut-and-dry (is it just me or are procedurally generated PS2 dungeons kind of sick?) but its enough. You have tons of party members to choose from, a plethora of magic scrolls to use if you so choose, and your 2 trusty little twin blades with which you can press X to slash with until the cows come home. A game like Kingdom Hearts as an action-RPG seems so much more fluid and kinetic and yet? Well KH is ridic, and if I'm gonna die on some hill for a goofy anime-core action-RPG it'll be this one any day. It combines my favorite aesthetics (mysterious celtic-y high fantasy AND cyber-punk) by way of being a game-within-a-game, and by being about a fictional MMO while not actually being an MMO it's kind of meta AF also. Also, the stuff with the emailing the other party members you meet and the system that has you increasing your bond through these simulated conversations with other players just reeeally gets to me, and seems cooler than Persona confidant-developing honestly. I'm a huge sucker for the original anime, and you got these really sick OVA anime discs with each entry which were set in the real world that the game existed in and even though that shouldn't factor in really, I admit it does. It all comes together as this kind of cool, weird, slightly-trashy anime wet-dream from my childhood at the end of the day. Also, some sick music, sick AF character designs, and an overall concept (that I'll actually defend to the death despite some of the superficial anime plotting/characters) round things out very nicely. Just the fact that this is a game about an MMO... like what a concept (and a decade before that SAO garbage fire shit). Plus Grunty raising. And the G.U. Last Recode remaster is right around the corner, OMG!!!!!!

also rans/runner ups: 11. SSX 3

12. Resident Evil 4

13. Katamari Damacy

14. Super Mario Galaxy

15. No More Heroes

16. Spider-Man 2

17. Catherine

18. Bomberman '93

19. Tekken 4

20. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2

[sacha616gaming-blog]

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This (Blog) is where you can study every thing I know. Find out about the ideal board games for game nights in original critiques, get ideas on every little thing from organizing to snack and drinks, and read up on inclusivity and diversity in gaming communities. There is stuff right here for person players trying to chip in on game night, to hosts who want to (ahem) up their game, to organizations interested in hosting typical board game nights.

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Susan distinguishes herself as a gaming blogger simply because she emphasizes bringing positivity to the gaming sphere. As the Senior Editor for Escapist Magazine,” Susan also has an influence that some of the other gamers do not have because she has the chance to encourage and influence some of the best up-and-coming minds of the gaming world.

[mandysimo13]

Where is My Gallant Knight - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is up and running! You can read it here! Thanks to those of you who have started reading it and I hope you enjoy the next installment. 

The journey to Sherlock’s tower was suspiciously free of hardships. The weather was lovely and warm with the sun shining long into the day. The game was plentiful and Greg had no trouble catching their dinners. Fresh water was plentiful in their packs and on the road. The path was clear and free of bandits. Everything went perfectly and John distrusted their good fortune immensely.

Quests were never so easy. Every challenge he had ever faced had at least one tiny, little, baby hiccup and the lack of any on their journey had John on edge.

What got him really disgruntled was being robbed of the opportunity to train on the road. He left his village in such a hurry that he had no time to properly get himself back in shape and he felt it every time he tried to mount his horse. First time he tried, he got one leg up, grunted, then promptly fell from the stirrups like a rolly-poly child. Greg hid a chuckle in a cough and offered to help him up. It took three days of riding but he finally got the hang of getting back into the saddle, literally.

One step at a time, Watson, he consoled himself.

The journey to Sherlock’s tower took ten days and by the end of it John was itching for a hot meal, hot bath, and some action. Not necessarily in that order.

The two men rode into a large clearing. In the center of the clearing, an impeccable looking tower shot up from the ground like a beanstalk. The tower rose tall and proud and perfect. Not even a single branch of ivy gracing it’s exterior.. It was painfully idyllic for a rescue and John knew then and there that Mycroft was right; Sherlock certainly had a flair for the dramatic.

Dismounting heavily, rubbing his chaffing thighs and groaning, John tried to stretch his limbs.

“Having a hard time breaking it all in again, are we,” Greg snickered.

“Oh fuck off, Greg.” John shook off the numbing ache from his limbs by bouncing on the tips of his toes and shaking his hands.

Greg watched him as he began to unload and make camp at the base of the tower. “You look like a chicken about ready to take off.”

“Oi, what’d I say? You’re not supposed to mock the hero,” John complained.

“Well, you’ve yet to save the damsel in distress.”

“I’ve save hundreds of damsels,” John defended.

“You forget, I’m your squire, John.”

John rolled his eyes and spread his arms in surrender. “Okay, fine, fifty damsels.” He pointed a finger in Greg’s direction. “Still impressive, though. How many damsels have you saved?”

“Well, there was that one gal back in-”

“Oh shut up,” John said, humor finding its way back in his voice. “Set up the camp while I look for a way into this infernal thing,” John said, gesturing to the tall as fuck tower.

“Should be easy to find, wouldn’t you think? I mean, you did say he had sent other adventurers on this quest. They must have found a way in.”

“Come on, Greg,” John chuckled, rounding the side of the tower. “Things are never that-”

He stopped short as he came face to face with a very plain, and very obvious, door built into the side of the tower. “Obvious,” John finished, under his breath.

He tried the door and found it opened easily. Quirking an eyebrow in confusion he peeked his head inside and found a dusty staircase. He stepped back out and closed the door, and looked all around him, sure that it was a trick. Seeing no one in the woods surrounding them he pinched himself, convinced he wasn’t awake. When a pinch failed to wake him he slapped his own face eliciting a hiss of pain.

Well. Clearly awake then.

He opened the door more confidently, then, and checked to see if there were any booby traps waiting for them in the immediate entryway. Finding none he closed the door once more and went back to find Greg with camp already laid out.

“Find anything promising,” Greg asked as he pulled their bedrolls from his horse.

“Door’s open. And very much not hidden.”

“So, easy peasy, then?”

“Don’t know yet,” John said, grunting as he pulled his pack down from his own horse. “What I do know is that I’m starving.”

“Starving?”

“Yup. Famished.”

Greg pointed to the tower. “When you have a rescue to do?”

John waved his hand dismissively. “He’s been sleeping for two years. He can wait ten more minutes for me to eat something.”

“Not afraid of bad breath? You are going to have to kiss him.”

John bit into a piece of mutton jerky and talked with his mouth full. “Listen, I could eat a five course meal of garlic and probably have better breath than that guy. Hasn’t brushed his teeth in two years, my god, how am I going to survive?”

Greg rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically. “Spoken like a true hero.”

“Damn straight,” John said, taking a large swig from their waterskin. “Now that we’ve got a comfy place to sit you might as well join me.” He held out a strip of jerky and waved it tantalizingly. “You know you want to,” he sing-songed.

Conceding, Greg took the jerky and dropped heavily onto his bedroll to eat. Together they ate, speculating on what their potential travel companion might be like. Mycroft had said nothing other than dramatic and opinionated. Not much to go on.

“You think he knows how to handle a sword,” Greg asked.

John shrugged. “Who knows. Mycroft said he’s got magic. Might not need to know the sword. Not like he’ll need it anyway, if the trip to Posh-ville is as smooth as the trek here was.”

“You know better than that, John. Things are never as easy as they seem.”

“Have been so far. What could possibly go wrong now?”

                                                      \~*~/

Not long later, the two men made their way up the dusty, stone stairwell of Sherlock’s tower. Periodically they checked for booby traps but if there ever were any they had long been tripped by the many sets of feet that came before them.

“Shit I’m out of shape,” John groaned, clutching the stitch in his side, gulping down air once they got to the top landing. He leaned heavily on one hand against a door that would let them into the top of the tower.

“You’ve got to be kidding. That was nothing. You’ve climbed stairs twice that height! You’ve climbed mountains just for fun!”

“I’m well aware of my accomplishments, Greg!”

“Then quit your belly-achin’!”

“Oh Christ, my belly aches,” John complained, doubling over while trying to rub out the stitch in his ribs.

“Why did I insist on remaining your squire,” Greg asked rhetorically.

“Because you love me.”

“So sure about that are you?”

John straightened and opened the door to find exactly what he was expecting. And still, he found himself surprised.

A room lit only by the daylight coming in from the only window in the tower greeted them. Inside was a fireplace, a desk covered with writing utensils and equipment used for practicing alchemy, and a bed draped in a deep blue, velvet curtain.. The pair stepped inside to investigate the room, taking in all the non-details. Aside from the little desk and the bed there was nothing. Less of a bedroom and more of a large closet with a bed in it. A quick perusal of the contents of the fireplace showed the remnants of an ancient fire and a long dried potion in the bottom of a cauldron.

John made a contemplative noise, unsure what to make of the sparse room.

“What’re you thinking, John?”

“I was just wondering where all the theatrics are. I mean, we’re greeted with an impressive tower in an impeccably kept lawn. And I want to know how he managed that because let me tell you, weeds and grass go faster than warts on a toad. And then we get inside and,” John swept his hand over the room, “nothing. Not a booby trap, not a dragon, not even a yippy little palace dog to distract with a steak.”

“You brought a steak?”

“Shut up, the point is...it’s odd isn’t it? For someone so bent on making an impression, you’d think he’d have his bedroom decorated to the gills.”

“Why don’t you wake him up and ask him.”

“Oh, I intend to,” John promised.

He walked over to the bed and gently grasped the velvet and stopped short, suddenly terrified. Greg noticed his hesitation and asked him what was wrong. “What if he’s ugly?”

“For fuck’s sake, Watson, really?”

“It’s a legitimate concern!”

“You’re a prick.”

“Not disputing that, ta. But seriously, what if he’s a troll?”

“Then Mycroft can stuff him back under a bridge after he’s paid us for delivering him home. Get on with it!”

“If you’re so keen to see it done why don’t you do it, hmm?”

Greg crossed his arms, eyeing John with undisguised humor.  “I’m not the hero in this story. Besides, you've slayed dragons. What’s one ugly bloke got on a dragon?”

“More scales, knowing my luck.”

“Oh, just get on with it!”

“Fine!” With more energy than he meant to exert, John pulled the curtain back and was floored by what greeted him. “Oh thank god,” John breathed in relief.

Sherlock was beautiful. Ethereal. Skin the color of polished marble, lips the palest pink, hair and lashes a rich ebony. The man laid perfectly flat on his back, one hand resting gracefully above his head, the other draped across his chest. His long legs stretched out for miles in front of him and John followed them until they ended at his feet. He smiled to see Sherlock still wore his boots while he slept. The blue and silver clothes he wore matched the sheets perfectly, making him seem like a doll in a play set.

Suddenly, John couldn’t wait to kiss him.

Tags under the cut!                                                             Continued on AO3: (X)

@ellipsicalelle @sweeter-than-cynicism @benedictgingerbatch00 @thedownfaller@readermagnifique @soldierjhwatson @fuck-off-watson @salve-regina-mills 

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #483

Top Ten Non-Predictions About Not-Quite E3

So E3 is upon is at last! Nearly. Almost. Sort of. A bit. But after a year in which the world-famous videogame trailer convention and Keanu Reeves meme factory was sidelined by this virus thing (Google it), it’s nice to have a major entertainment landmark back in the calendar.

Last year was a bit frustrating, but also interesting. For a long time I’ve wondered about the need – as a consumer – for huge conventions such as E3. It makes sense for the industry, sure, the same way Sundance or something does for film: it’s a way for creators to showcase their wares and hopefully secure deals or employment. But as a way of showing to the public games that are in development, or announcing new things, it’s seemed old-fashioned for quite a while. It requires developers and executives to turn into PT Barnum or something, hawking their wares on elaborate stages, titivating their offerings with dances and celebrity appearances. Sure, sometimes it’s genuinely excellent and entertaining, but most often it’s memorable for all the wrong reasons. With many companies now engaging directly with fans by releasing curated videos that announce their games in their own way, in their own time, would that not have been better? If last year is anything to go by, then no, not really. What we got – and this may have been in large part due to 2020’s unique circumstances – was a long, long summer and autumn filled with rumour and conjecture, and occasional, uninspiring videos, often featuring CG trailers, often for games that were literally years away. On the one hand, lots was announced; on the other, it all felt vague and woolly, and the slow drip-feed did nothing but build anticipation to unrealistic proportions. Without E3 serving as some kind of anchor point – in time, if nothing else – then the spray-gun smattering of videos, trailers, and announcements felt disparate and a little disappointing.

And so it’s back! But not quite. Because, understandably, the huge convention aspect is gone, replaced by a wholly online event. And whilst this may be detrimental to people who want to secure a distribution deal for their game, it might actually make for better showcases for us, the unwashed masses. Instead of a ninety-minute stagebound light entertainment extravaganza that ends up feeling like a ten million dollar school play, we’ll (hopefully) get tightly edited videos that highlight the games, alongside trimmed-down and relevant talking head interviews from developers explaining what we can expect and just how many bumps they’ve managed to map this year. At least, that’s what I hope will happen.

Of course, exactly what E3 is nowadays is a bit weird anyway, and this year exacerbates that. Loads of companies seem to shun the show itself but schedule their presentations for the same week or thereabouts, giving us, what, a fortnight (with a “gh”) or so of things to look forward to. I mean, it feels a bit weird putting this list out a full week before E3 formally kicks off, but I wanted to try to pre-empt any interesting amusing reveals that might occur in the days preceding (at the time of writing, Nintendo haven’t announced a new Switch, despite everyone on Twitter saying it was due any minute now). To be honest, I always like to look for the random stuff anyway, as the huge games tend to be known about or heavily rumoured well in advance (it felt like an open secret for at least a year that Playground Games were developing a new Fable, for instance, and we were just waiting to see when Microsoft would announce that). So I’ve tried to make these predictions daft, wish-fulfilment, or at least offer some kind of personal spin on the sort of thing we might expect. And, of course, as someone who tends to prefer to play on Xbox or Nintendo, there will be a skew towards those companies (anyway, Sony don’t really have a presence at E3 nowadays). And like I’ve said before, the really personal wish-fulfilment stuff I always used to “predict” in these things have started to come true – we’ve got Fable and Perfect Dark on the way, and we had Crackdown 3 a couple of years ago. If it goes on like this I’m just going to have to start wishing for loads of old Amiga games to get rebooted.

You heard it here first: E3 2022 is when we get the third-person open world Ruff ‘n’ Tumble reboot we’ve all asked for.

Anyway, here are ten predictions for E3 that probably won’t happen.

Halo Infinite multiplayer beta: we know Halo will be there, because it’s front and centre of Microsoft’s little announcement picture thing (along with what appears to be a bit of the Starfield logo). As the image also seems to show multiplayer Spartans, I imagine this will be the focus rather than more campaign gameplay. I actually think this is a big risk, as the main criticism of Halo last year was that its graphics weren’t good enough; typically, I’d say, the campaign visuals are stronger than the multiplayer portion, which tends to focus on elegantly designed levels and fast-moving gameplay. I wonder if there’ll be another, longer look at the campaign sometime later in the summer, in a dedicated Halo presentation. Anyway, one thing I think MS will do to curry favour is announce an imminent multiplayer beta. Maybe there’ll be a sign-up, but I think it would be cool if it was available for anyone in Game Pass Ultimate. It’s a way to get people to sign up for the service, and that seems to be Microsoft’s main goal right now.

Games ready to play RIGHT NOW: Psychonauts 2, Age of Empire IV, and the Xbox version of Flight Simulator have all been given age ratings recently, something that only happens relatively close to a game’s release. I think that at least one of these – maybe all three! – will be shown at the Xbox presentation, and then declared to be available immediately on Game Pass. Again, it bigs up Microsoft’s service, and would also be a cool mic drop moment for games that might be anticipated but aren’t quite the triple-A behemoths of Halo, Fallout, or Gears.

All the rays, nicely traced: one thing that’s been a bit frustrating as an Xbox Series X owner is the lack of genuine next-gen feeling experiences. I’ve really enjoyed the upgrade from a base Xbox One, and playing a game like Gears 5 feels like a huge improvement (and it’s gorgeous too). But I want to see crazy stuff that the old box couldn’t do, and not just in higher resomolutions. One of the things that I’d love to see is more ray-tracing; this is a next-gen graphical treat that, to me, feels like when I first saw games with dynamic coloured lighting twenty-five years ago. So I hope we get a proper reveal/release date for the ray-traced Minecraft expansion, but I’d also love it – now that Xbox owns everything – if the ray-traced version of Quake 2 was announced for the console. Give me them rays, Microsoft!

Quaking: speaking of the Quake series, it’s the first game’s twenty-fifth anniversary this year, and I think it needs some love. Now, id are working on their Doom reboot trilogy thing, so I don’t expect to see a fully-fledged reimagining for a few years yet, but how about re-releasing the original game on modern consoles? Doesn’t need anything fancy, just like the ports of the first Doom that are ten a penny. Quake is a bit more complex to port, it’s true, but I still think it’d be amazing to see it on consoles before the end of its anniversary year.

Nothing but Star Wars: outside of the Xbox-Bethesda conference, I hope we see some lovely, lovely Star Wars goodies. There are a few projects in development, but I’m gonna stick my neck out and say that we’ll get a fairly long look at the Knights of the Old Republic remake/reboot, a very vague teaser trailer for Fallen Order 2 (maybe even just a title reveal), and a teaser for the open-world game from Ubisoft. I don’t, unfortunately, think we’ll see anything of Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga until the Lego livestream later this summer, but for what it’s worth I’m not expecting that game till Christmas now.

Old games on Switch: I think one of the things Nintendo is going to announce is a bunch of older games coming to the Switch. We already have Skyward Sword coming, but I think we’ll hear about other classic Zelda games coming in the anniversary year. Maybe remastered Metroid Prime games too? And I think they’ll do another one of those battle royale-style versions of their classics, maybe the first Donkey Kong?

New games on a new Switch: the sheer weight of “New Switch” rumours seems to suggest it is real, but when are they announcing it if their E3-ish Direct is all about software? I wonder if we’ll see some new games for Christmas ’21 going into ’22 that are then revealed to be enhanced by this mythical Super Switch. We’ll probably see a bit more of Breath of the Wild 2 (although I think there’ll be a bigger Zelda-focused Nintendo Direct later this year). I’m gonna predict Pikmin 4. And vague teasers for both a brand new Metroid Prime game, and also for Mario Kart 9. And all of these will be designed to run better on Switchy McSwitchface. Whenever that comes out.

Microsoft buys more companies: I just think this is inevitable, and I reckon we’ll get another announcement next week. Which companies? God knows. The Flight Sim guys maybe, or The Medium developers. Or, I dunno, Team 17. Probably not Sega, as funny as that would be. Maybe a medium-sized Japanese developer. So, yeah; Microsoft’s spending spree isn’t quite over.

Sony’s not-E3 announcements: Sony appears to be skipping E3 altogether, again. So when will they have their next big video presentation? I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long personally. So what will they talk about? I’d have thought we’d see the next Spider-Man revealed this year, but the big chitter-chatter at the moment is the whole “cross-gen” conversation (my opinion is: who cares?), and also when their games will come out. well, call me pessimistic, but I think Horizon: Forbidden West will end up being early 2022, with the new God of War and Gran Turismo ending up as late 2022 releases.

Crazy talk: I think this has ended up being a relatively straight and rational list, which just won’t do. So let’s get some wild ones out of the way here at the end. Sony announces remastered versions of Lemmings and Lemmings 2 for PC! Microsoft is making new games starring their Avatars! Double Fine release a PC version of Scurvy Scallywags for Game Pass! A brand new Duke Nukem! Lucasfilm bring Ron Gilbert back to oversee a reboot of Monkey Island! Nintendo announces Switch Sports! Gabe Newell announces VR support for Xbox Series X with an exclusive port of Half-Life: Alyx! Peggle 3! Phew, glad to get that out of my system.

[reputationiseverything]

How to Get More Organic Traffic Without Doing Any SEO (Seriously)

email marketing free software

You all know SEO is a long-term game… at least when it comes to Google.

And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.

So then, what should you do?

Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?

Seriously.

So, what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?

Well, this story will help explain it…

The old days

When I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.

Getting rankings!

Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).

Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.

You could literally see results in less than a month.

SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.

I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.

In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.

So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.

I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.

I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.

In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.

Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.

So, what’s the strategy?

Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.

These days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.

But you know what, most of the sites that rank on Google are content-based sites. Over 56% of a website’s organic traffic is typically going to their blog or articles.

So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?

I know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.

Here are the stats for the last month:

Rental fees: $24,592

Outreach costs: $3,000

Legal costs: $580

Copywriting and monetization costs: $1,500

Total monthly cost: $29,672 

Now guess what my monthly income was?

It was $79,283.58.

Not too bad.

Now your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t need a lawyer.

And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.

Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.

Here are the exact steps you need to follow:

Step #1: Find the terms you want to rank for

If you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.

If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.

Head over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.

Now click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of keywords that each page ranks for.

I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.

Keywords with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.

When you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t be able to monetize the traffic.

Step #2: Search for the term

It’s time to do some Google searches.

Look for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to rank for.

Don’t waste your time with page 2.

What I want you to look for is:

Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.

A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)

A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).

Step #3: Hit up the website

Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.

If you can’t find their details, you can do a whois lookup to see if you can find their phone number.

What’ll you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.

It just doesn’t work well over email.

If you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes something like this…

Subject: [their website name]

Hey [insert first name],

Do you have time for a quick call this week?

We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.

Let me know what works for you.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

[insert your company]

[insert your phone number]

You want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more calls.

Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.

Point out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need some more information before you can make your offer.

At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).

Once you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next few days after you run some numbers.

Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?

You’ll want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too heavily or else you may lose rankings.

Once you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.

Typically, most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page in the first place.

Step #4: Monetize the page

If you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the products you are selling.

For example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add links from the article to your site.

Just like this article.

The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.

Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.

As for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people can fill out their lead information is great.

Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.

I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.

When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page and nofollow the links.

Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.

I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out with a 30-day notice.

The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.

And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.

Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.

The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to scale.

If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.

The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.

So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?

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