I’m going to stick with daily blogging. It’s fun, it helps me collect my thoughts, and it keeps me accountable.

What it doesn’t do—at least not very well—is increase blog traffic. As expected, the traffic spike I saw last month was mostly caused by scammers adding my site to their bot comment databases. I receive plenty of suspicious emails and replys about AI tools I should “recommend” to my readers, as well as automation services that promise to send me traffic and make me famous as easily as snapping a finger.

It’s all nonsense.

Real traffic is probably only about a third of what I saw last month.

Still, I’ll continue writing daily, as I enjoy daily tasks. Establishing a routine is basically half the battle. And blogging is a mostly free way to market my books—even if, for now, I’m only marketing them to a handful of regular readers.

Topics I’ll Write About Next Year

I’ll stick to the topics I’ve already started:

• Blogging basics
• SEO basics
• Movie and TV show reviews
• My author project

I’ll also publish regular updates on my goals for 2026:

• Writing 12 books in 12 weeks (expect weekly updates)
• Reading 52 books in 52 weeks, with a weekly book review
• Monthly “Author in Progress” reports, sharing all my numbers in real time

In addition, I want to share my experiences with freelancing. I’ve been doing it for over a decade, and during that time I’ve had to reinvent myself more than once. For example, I used to make most of my income as a translator in the beginning. Around three to four years ago, translation work dropped by about 95%, largely due to ChatGPT and other AI tools. Still, the core principles of freelancing remain the same.

Adding Images and Graphics

In general, I need to think more about adding graphics and photos. I’m a writer first, so the text should always be the main focus. But an image here and a graphic there can make longer pieces easier to digest and give readers a much-needed break from pure text.

Tracking

In my report posts, I want to expand what I track. Especially with writing, it could be interesting to see how many words I can produce in a given amount of time. How long does it take to edit a 60,000-word book? How long does translating that same book take?

These are interesting questions to answer.

I’d also love to include numbers for book sales and Amazon KENP (Kindle Unlimited page reads). But to be honest, I’m not selling many copies right now, and there are usually only a handful of KENP readers each month.

So there isn’t much to report yet. If that ever changes, I’ll add it to the reports.

AI can already churn out 1,000 words about a single topic. Ask it to write about writing, and within seconds it produces an article that would normally take an experienced human writer with knowledge about the theory of writing an hour.

This development will flood the internet with long-form blog posts produced at scale. Quantity will no longer be a signal of effort, skill, or insight in the era of AI.

To distinguish yourself from AI-generated content, writing less may be the better strategy.

• Start with a clear idea.
• Collect your thoughts around it.
• Freely write your article about these thoughts.
• Then compress it all into as few words as possible.

Focus on the density of meaning rather than word count. In an era where AI can generate endless text, clarity and minimalism may become the strongest signals of human authorship.

More than ten years ago, I ran a freelancing service that included writing SEO articles for German websites. I wrote about crypto, fitness, event hotels, gardening, and many other topics. The goal was always the same for every client: write as many articles as possible to cover the three or four main keywords from every possible angle.

In fitness, for example, that meant keywords like:

• Lose weight
• Build muscle
• …

So I was asked to write article after article from that perspective, such as:

• How to lose weight with strength training
• How to lose weight with running
• How to lose weight with low-carb
• How to lose weight with intermittent fasting
• How to lose weight…

You get the idea.

At some point, I had covered every topic I could think of. So the client simply wanted me to repeat myself, just with slightly different long-tail keywords:

• How to lose weight with low-carb
• Losing weight with low-carb
• Is losing weight with low-carb possible?
• What is the most efficient way to lose weight with low-carb?
• …

Naturally, this led to articles that recycled the same old information. Eventually, I could just take the articles I had already written, rephrase them a bit, and change a few key sentences to include the new long-tail keywords.

It was boring. It was ridiculous. But it paid the bills.

Thanks to that experience, I’ve become very attentive when reading other people’s blogs. Whenever I see this repetitive structure, I know I’m not reading a genuine, authentic blogger who wants a space to share ideas. Instead, I’m looking at a corporate blog that exists solely to cover keywords for Google.

And the only thing I’ll get out of reading it is the same repetitive stuff I already learned from the first handful of posts on that site. So I’m out. Bye.

Personal blogs might be harder to rank on Google, but once you find them, you discover new ideas, new opinions, and new topics for as long as you follow them. That’s what I like. That’s what I’m interested in. And that’s what is easily identifiable by simple looking for blogs that don’t write this repetitive keyword shit.

Social media has taught millions of kids to “fake it till they make it.” What nobody told them is that most people never make it. The result is an army of 14-year-olds pretending to be experts on fitness, crypto, politics, and life without having any knowledge or experience.

Influencers have learned that being early matters far more than being right, because algorithms reward novelty and anything that saturates a new niche. If you post a video about a rising shitcoin today, you’ll get more views than if you post about it next week—when its price has inevitably crashed back to near zero. Remember NFTs? All these NFT gurus have disappeared because the money flow has long dried up and with it: they hype.

Problem is: People love the hype.

So, in the race for views, jumping on hype trains becomes the bread and butter of anyone trying to blow up online as fast as possible.

But here’s the catch: you only have one reputation to lose. Once it’s gone, you’ll never get it back—just ask Jack Murphy.

The sad part is that some people really do succeed by faking it. There are those infamous twin influencers who’ve been riding the wave of low-IQ hype content since they were teenagers. And other 14-year-olds see this as a blueprint, because that one example turned into millions of dollars and supermodel girlfriends.

What they don’t see are the countless others who try the same thing, fail, and permanently stain their names in the process.

If you want real advice from someone who spent six years on YouTube just to reach 10K subscribers: be real, be honest, and never fake it. Real growth takes time. A few people blow up overnight—some are even handpicked by the powers that be. But for most of us, it takes years of daily work and authenticity to build even a small audience. And you rarely hear about that, because most people aren’t willing to stick it out for that long.

But if you are willing, you’ll be on the safe side. No one will dig up dirt on you. No one will uncover lies or fakery, because you built everything slowly, organically, and truthfully without dirt and fakes involved.

That’s exactly how I intend to handle my writing project.

So far, I’ve sold fewer than 100 copies of my personal “best-selling” novel Forever. By most standards, it’s a failure—for now. But that’s how things really work online: you’re a failure for days, weeks, months, and sometimes years.

Until one day, finally, you’ve turned into a success.