About

The ad I ignored

I saw a “make money online” ad in high school. I closed it.

I’d like to say I was above it. The truth is it stayed with me for years. The claim was ridiculous enough to be interesting, and I couldn’t stop poking at the question underneath it – could someone actually do that? From here? From a hill town in Darjeeling, with a laptop and no plan?

I didn’t act on it until college. Then I started digging, and I never really stopped.

Nine years, and most of them were failures

I built sites that went nowhere. I picked niches with plenty of readers and no buyers. I wrote thousands of articles – some of them bad, most of them useful only to me, a few that paid for years.

I’ve watched a site climb to page one over eleven months. I’ve watched one lose most of its traffic in a single core update and never recover.

I didn’t sell those sites. I let them die. Two of them, in astrology and in crypto, went from earning to nothing, and rather than fight for a corpse I closed the laptop on them and started the next one with everything they taught me.

That’s the part nobody puts in an about page. Build, fail, read the data, build again. That’s the whole method.

I watched Google change from the inside

Panda. Penguin. Hummingbird. Mobile-first indexing. Core updates that landed without warning and rearranged a month’s income overnight.

Then E-E-A-T, which asked something nobody had asked before: who are you, and why should anyone trust this page?

And now AI Overviews.

That last one is a different kind of change. The others decided who ranked. This one decides whether ranking still pays. On keywords where an AI Overview appears, click-through to the top organic result has fallen from roughly 7.3% to 1.6%. Same position. A fraction of the traffic.

I’m not saying that to frighten anyone. I’m saying it because most of the marketing advice you’ll find online was written before it happened, and nobody went back to update it.

SEO stopped being SEO

For years, SEO was a thing you could do on its own. Find the keyword, write the page, get the link, collect the traffic. It worked, and it made a lot of people money, and I was one of them.

That’s over.

Search is now one room in a much bigger house. Google answers half the questions itself. People search on YouTube, on Instagram, inside AI chats, in comment sections and group chats you’ll never see. Rankings still matter – but they’re the result of something bigger now, not the cause.

What I teach isn’t SEO. It’s how to market a business online in 2026, across everything at once, as one connected thing.

What that actually looks like

Say I’m marketing a sausage business.

The blog carries the things people search for and Google still sends clicks to – how the sausages are made, what goes in them, recipes, sourcing, the updates worth writing down. That’s the foundation, and it’s mine, on my domain, forever.

YouTube gets the long-form. The full process, start to finish, the parts nobody shows. Shorts cut from the same footage go where the scrolling happens.

Instagram is where a person becomes a regular. Stories, posts, the daily texture of the thing. People check in. They message. They start to feel like they know us before they ever buy.

X handles news and quick updates. Medium takes the serious, longer pieces that deserve a different audience.

No single one of those is the business. Together, they’re a name people recognise. That recognition is the asset.

Brand beats viral

Most advice online is chasing a spike. One video that explodes, a hundred thousand followers in a week, a screenshot to post about.

I’ve watched enough of those to know how the story ends. The numbers arrive, the numbers leave, and there’s nothing underneath them. The audience never came for you. They came for the clip.

What I’m interested in is slower and far less exciting to post about. Showing up in the same places, with the same voice, for long enough that people stop treating you as a stranger. A brand isn’t a logo. It’s the reason someone picks you over the cheaper option.

That takes months. Sometimes years. It also doesn’t disappear when an algorithm changes its mind, which is more than search traffic can promise these days.

What I do here

I run all of this in public.

I own NP Handhelds, a Steam Deck blog and YouTube channel. It’s a live property with real traffic, real rankings and real problems, and it doubles as my lab. When I test something, I test it there first – then I show you what happened, Search Console screenshots included, whether the line went up or down.

You’ll get the failures too. Those are usually the useful ones.

Who this site is for

You’ve got something worth building around. A business, a product, a craft, a hobby you know more about than almost anyone in the room.

You don’t need to know what a backlink is. You don’t need a budget beyond a domain and hosting. You need someone to show you the order of operations – the real one, for 2026 – without pretending it’s still 2019.

That’s what I’m here to do.

Where to start

Start Here – the full system, in order, from nothing.
The Lab – every case study and real number I publish.
YouTube – the same lessons on screen, with my dashboards open.

If you’re stuck on something specific, reply to any email I send. I read them.

I still don’t know who paid for that ad. Whoever they were, they were selling something I never bought – but they asked a question I’m apparently still answering, all these years later.