When you are online and playing keep your tax rate above 50 and compensate loyalty with comforting. Ideally set it to 90% and comfort every 15 minutes.
You can earn great amount of gold by keeping your tax rate above or equal to 50%. Keeping tax rates high will decrease the loyalty (100-tax rate=loyalty), so increase loyalty regularly by applying "disaster relief" or "praying" comforting.
Every time you do disaster relief it will consume some food based on your current population and boost the loyalty by 5.
Remember to change the tax rate back to 20% when you are going to be offline.