Well, here goes my first post – and a disappointing one to start with!
I started The Savings Side in January 2026. It was one of my New Year’s resolutions – to start a side hustle of my own. But as I mentioned in the About page, the objective is to build a part-time side hustle (ie, work on it whenever I’m free & feel like it) & not get rushed into building something big or trying so hard to make money.
Maybe because of this lackadaisical approach, I’ve been slow to make progress. But hey, at least I’m still up & running. Had it been a serious thing, I’d have spent hundreds of hours, published 100 posts by now, still have no readers (like so many blogs I’ve built before), gotten disappointed & stopped. Instead, I’m writing my first post in the 5th month. So, definitely slow – but running.
Okay, coming back to the main topic…
With respect to income, I have little to say, as I made $0.
I’ll talk more about what happened in the first 4 months instead.
I launched the blog in January. Initially, my plan was to use AI to copy successful blogs (as I’ve tried so many times before). I did that as well. I published roughly 15 posts, started pinning, etc.
Then I realised, this is what I’ve tried so many times before with so many different blogs in different niches. And results were the same – not one blog lasted.
Maybe, the truth is that simply copying success stories don’t work. People become successful because of their unique way of telling stories, communicating & most importantly, creating content of value. When you blindly copy it with AI, you don’t stand a chance against the original. You might feel you have the advantage of quantity over quality (by publishing a ton of posts in short time), but that means nothing to today’s algorithms. You’re just another AI content. Hell, even top notch original content is struggling to rank & publishing generic AI content was a poor idea.
So I pivoted. I then published 4 posts, that are completely my own personal stories, but used ChatGPT to write them. I would dictate my stories and how I wanted the post to be like and ChatGPT would give me publish ready posts. Hardly took an hour or two for each post. It initially felt efficient. But after publishing 4 posts and rereading them, something felt weird. It was my story, but it felt like I was not the person telling it. It wasn’t my tone. It was efficient, but it was not real.
I had to think again. Because all these years, I’ve built blogs copying others, used freelancer & ghost written content, had freelancers pinning & sharing in social media, etc. Nothing has worked till date. The one blog that scaled to $500 per month – was actually 100% original content, completely managed by me. That happened back in 2021 & things have changed a lot – but hey, it seems like originality was the only thing that worked for me. Everytime I tried a shortcut, it has failed.
And so, I decided to go crazy. I put down some conditions for this blog:
- 100% human written, honest, from-heart content
- No AI content what so ever (build something 100% human in a world of AI content)
- Be completely transparent – share income reports, progress, etc (till I reach the point of $100K/year)
I know these rules are crazy. It dips my efficiency. It’d take me hours just to publish 1 post – but hey, that’s the real me, telling the real story – just like how I’m doing now.
I want to test this hypothesis and see what happens. Because it’s incredibly difficult to win with AI content. So let’s test if real human voice can stand out in the chaos.
I’ve deleted all the AI-written & AI-assisted posts I’ve published in the first couple of months. I’m starting from scratch again. I’m kind of getting that old nostalgia – building a blog from scratch, with a head full of dreams. Let’s see where it goes.
That’s pretty much it for the first 4 months.
No income, no visitors, nothing. And whatever I’ve spent time publishing, I had to delete and restart.
I didn’t even link this blog to Google analytics to track web traffic. In a way, I’ve been quite lazy & laid back. I know I don’t want to spend too much time on this side hustle, I want to spend just enough time. Because everytime I’ve started a blog in the past, I’d get addicted, spend so much time and money trying to build something, fail pathetically and look back disappointed. And the worst part is that whatever I built were a copy of something or ghostwritten that I couldn’t even proudly tell – I built this. I don’t want that to happen again. That’s why I’m trying to build The Savings Side different this time.
Even if the blog doesn’t get enough visitors, it’s okay. I should be proudly able to tell the world that I built this website. I built something that’s of value & of decent quality, not a cheap replica of other success stories or a rounding of AI written BS. That’s what I’m chasing this time. Who knows – maybe that’s what the internet might reward in this day & age. So, it’s an experiment and let me treat it just as an experiment & nothing more!
See you in the May update!