May 14, 2026 May 14, 2026 2026-05-14

In April 2009 I wrote a series introduction about what the first six months of serious blogging had taught me. At that time I’d just made my first exit for an online publishing company I set up almost a decade before, and I wanted to pivot to something more flexible. I was confident enough, after just 6 months of assumed blogging, to write my findings up as a series. At the time I thought I had enough data to draw conclusions.

I did not. Here’s why.

The Original Advice Was Right, But for the Wrong Reasons

The 2009 post emphasized three things: persistence, trust, and a professional attitude. All three held up. But none of them held the meaning I thought they did.

Persistence I understood as “keep posting.” What it actually means, over the long run, is keep showing up through the phases where nothing seems to be working — and there will be many such phases, some lasting years. I went through a period of near-silence on this blog. But eventually I came back.

Trust I understood as “trust the process.” What it really means is trust that the right people will find it even when you can’t see them finding it. The readers who’ve been here for fifteen years found the blog through posts written in 2009 and 2010. I had no idea they existed for years. They were there anyway.

Professional attitude I understood as discipline and consistency. What it really means is treating your readers’ time as worth something. Respect their time. That touches two paths: don’t publish noise, and don’t disappear without reason.

Making Money: Then vs Now

In 2009, the monetization path was: build traffic, sell advertising, add affiliate links, sell ebooks. Technically, this still works. But t dynamics and the economics are completely different.

Organic search traffic is way harder to build and way easier to lose than it was in 2009. Ad revenues per reader are a fraction of what they were. The ebook market consolidated and commoditized – almost impossible to reach a relevant market without powerful and expensive marketing efforts. What works better now — and what I should have done more of earlier — is building a direct relationship with readers via email. The blog is the engine; the email list is the survival layer. If Google SEO algorithm changes, the email list will still be there tomorrow. That wasn’t obvious to me in 2009 and it’s the clearest thing I know in 2026.

Apps also evolved in a very interesting direction. At the moment of writing I have eight apps published in AppStore, with 3 more in the making. All of them are making money either by mobile ads or in-app purchases. But it’s the blog that is still what brings people to them. The content and the products are connected in ways that took years to figure out and couldn’t have been planned from a six-month vantage point.

The Biggest Surprise

The staying power of specific posts, far beyond anything I would have predicted. Not just the 100 ways post — many others that I wrote quickly, almost casually, and then forgot about are still pulling traffic fifteen years later. Two (almost) random examples: 33 questions for an interview with yourself and action versus reaction. This taught me something about what “useful” actually means online: it has almost nothing to do with how much effort you put into the writing and almost everything to do with whether it answers a question someone is genuinely asking.

The other surprise is the relationships. People have reached out who read something here in 2010 and came back a decade later to say it mattered. You have no idea, writing a post, which one will do that. You write it anyway.

Who the Reader Actually Is

In 2009 I imagined the reader as someone a few years behind me on the same path — building a business, figuring out productivity, interested in personal development. That was accurate. For a while.

Now the readership is harder to generalize. There are people who have been reading since 2008 and are navigating the same mid-life territory I am. There are people who found the blog through a search and are encountering it for the first time. There are readers who come for the AI content. There are readers who only care about running, or about coding, or about being a digital nomad. Writing for all of them simultaneously is something I’ve stopped trying to optimize for. I write what I’m actually thinking and let the right readers find it. That’s less of a strategy than it sounds, and more effective than most strategies I tried.

What Six Months Can’t Tell You

Six months gives you enough data to know if you can do it at all. It doesn’t give you enough to know what it will become, who it will reach, or which of the things you’re building now will still be standing in fifteen years.

On the other side, staying seventeen years on the path gives you the real patterns. Persistence is a pattern. The posts you’re most uncertain about sometimes last the longest. The reader you’re actually writing for is usually someone who needs what you genuinely know — not what you wish you knew, not what you think you should be teaching. The gap between those two things closes slowly, and only if you keep showing up long enough to notice it.