This week I ran a simple audit on my own blog. I searched every post for a pattern: a first-person claim (“I made,” “I earned,” “I tested”) sitting next to a specific dollar figure.
Nine articles out of forty matched. About 22% of everything I’d published.
Every one of those dollar figures was invented. No $5,800-a-month AI product business. No friend clearing $300–400 a day doing makeup bookings. No side hustle that turned into my main income. Just generic advice, dressed up as personal experience, with a plausible-sounding number attached to make it feel earned instead of generated.
I’ve spent this week going through all nine, removing the fake numbers and fake stories, and replacing them with the same information written honestly — as a guide, not a confession dressed as a success story. If you’ve read this blog before and it sounded like I was casually making thousands of dollars a month from side hustles, that’s why it sounded that way. It wasn’t true, and I’d rather tell you that directly than let you keep believing it.
The Real Story, Not the Padded One
This domain is a little over two years old. It didn’t start as a side-hustle blog at all — the original brief was for a developer site built in Next.js. At some point that got shelved and I pivoted it into a WordPress site instead, running on a custom theme I called “IncomeLab.” The name was more aspirational than descriptive.
For the first year or so, I worked on it consistently and did some light promotion — sharing posts in relevant online communities and forums here and there. Traffic never moved. Not “grew slowly.” Never moved. It sat at roughly 10 to 15 visitors a day the entire time, regardless of how much content I added.
Eventually I stopped. I walked away from the site for over a year.
I came back to it at the end of April this year, mostly because the motivation resurfaced and I wanted to give it a real second attempt. Today, a little over four months into that second attempt: still 10 to 15 visitors a day. Still zero revenue.
So Why Did I Add Fake Numbers If the Real Numbers Weren’t Working Either?
Because it’s a well-worn template. A lot of the “side hustle” and “passive income” content that ranks well online follows the same shape: personal narrator, specific dollar figure, implied proof that the advice works because the author supposedly lived it. It’s a format that’s easy to write and, in theory, easy to trust.
The problem is I never actually lived any of it, and running that template for two years didn’t move the traffic needle at all. It didn’t build an audience, and it added a layer of dishonesty that, frankly, I’m not comfortable leaving live now that I’ve looked at it clearly.
I’d also be lying if I said the timing was a coincidence. 2026 is the year audiences got noticeably more skeptical of AI-flavored blog content that reads like it was generated to hit a keyword rather than written by someone who did the thing. Search itself is changing too — a growing share of informational queries get answered directly in the search results, without a click to any blog, mine included. Padding a post with a fake success story was never going to fix either of those problems. If anything, it made the underlying issue worse: there was nothing real underneath the polish.
What Actually Changes From Here
- No more invented numbers or invented people. If a number appears in a post going forward, it’s either a published market rate I can point to, or something I’ve genuinely tested and can show.
- Real tests over synthesis. Where it makes sense, I’ll be testing the tools and platforms I write about myself, rather than summarizing what other sites say about them.
- This blog’s own numbers, in the open. I’m not going to pretend the traffic problem is solved by being honest about it — it isn’t. But I’d rather build an audience on a true, unglamorous story than a fabricated impressive one.
- Actually promoting this, not just writing. Two years of light, occasional promotion is a big part of why this never took off, independent of the content-honesty issue. That changes too.
If You’re Building Something Similar
If you’re two years into a project that hasn’t moved and you’re tempted to dress it up to look further along than it is: I understand the impulse, and I did it for two years. It doesn’t fix the underlying problem, and it adds one you’ll eventually have to clean up — which is exactly what this week looked like for me.
The real story is less flattering. It’s also the only one worth telling.
Writes and tests every guide on hustle&passive. Everything here is something we have actually run — including the parts that did not work.
