What I’ve Learned About Blogging After 6 Years
I’ve been blogging since January 1, 2020. My first blog post ever was on millennials and financial education. But the blog has since grown and evolved since then.
Taking my blog to over 27 million all-time hits was not easy at all. In fact, it was very painful. It required a lot of sacrifice, commitment, obsession, and a will to simply succeed.
In this blog post I want to share some of the lessons I’ve learned over the years. See, this blog peaked at $81,000 in one month alone in 2024.
It’s also hit a point of being on life-support.
Here’s the raw unfiltered lessons I’ve learned about blogging over the past 6 years:
- Making Money Takes Time
- You Must Be Original, There Are No Shortcuts
- Understanding Owned Assets (Followers, Subs, etc.)
- Distribution is Key to Success
- Write Broke, Write Rich, Just Write
Making Money Takes Time
Making money takes time in every industry. Blogging is no exception. I remember when I first started FrankNez it took me a month to monetize my site with Google Adsense ads.
I was rejected about 5 times before finally getting approved.
I was doing sales at the family business while creating this blog to help others understand my world of sales, closing, marketing, personal finance, and investing — which later blew the F’ up. More on that below.
In the beginning, I knew that if I could make $0.01 online with ads, I could make $0.25, $1.00, $10.00, then my first $100, and even $1,000+; because why not?
My goal was to create passive income while I built my sales career. I figured, if I could create great content that would be useful to others, and I could make some money from ads, it would be pretty f’ing awesome.
My first year blogging I made $100 from Google ads. Yeah — not the dream blogging career every aspiring blogger dreams of.
I didn’t quit though — I’ve always had a passion for writing. So, I kept writing, expanding my library of blog posts until I eventually published one piece that changed my life forever.
One investing article blew up organically on Google search and I was discovered by a massive community of investors.
This attracted so many viewers allowing me to take this opportunity to apply to Mediavine, a top advertising agency that would bring in lottery-type revenue at some point.
(I left the family business a month prior to getting signed by Mediavine)
After being approved, I made $3,000 in one week. The first full month attracted $18,000…
All my financial and investing articles were blowing up. Why might you ask? Well, if you didn’t know, Franknez.com is the news blog that crippled Wall Street.
That’s right, we squeezed Wall Street short sellers during the meme stock frenzy of 2021. My blog made millions of retail investors a lot of money.
Readers were buying cars cash and signing up to my newsletter daily for the next report, article, and play.
I only made money because I helped a lot of people make money.
It Doesn’t Stop There
It took me 1 year and 4 months to make a living from just advertising revenue of running my blog. I was averaging around $8K – $9K per month. The greatest lesson I learned here is that hype doesn’t last forever, and neither do trends — or revenue.
My revenue became very volatile.
One month I would earn $7K, another month I would earn $11K, then $6K and change, then $8K, and I was lucky to maintain this for many, many months.
Then the dip started occurring. It got to the point where I almost sold my blog for just shy of $300,000 in an online marketplace.
Organic traffic was beginning to come down, and I was now earning between $3K – $5K on a good month. It was very painful to say the least after hitting bigger numbers. I felt like I was struggling even though as a ‘side gig‘, this is still the dream! But it was no longer a side gig for me, it was my full-time gig.
During this time, my brand was exploding and my followers on X were growing despite the dip in the trend.
After a buyer failed to pull the trigger on buying Franknez.com in October of 2022, I decided to push through this dip and provide loads more of value to my community.
I identified a variety of niche relevant topics of importance to them and went all in. I was then discovered by another community going through something very shitty, and so I began to write about their story and financial injustice.
This chapter of my blog was one of the most important. I didn’t make people in this community money, but we did get the attention of bigger media, the SEC, and even Congress. This was the MMTLP story and now my market news blog had evolved into journalism.
My work on this story led to being featured in a Wall Street Documentary by Mark Faulk.
I was slowly recovering, now earning around $6K – $7K a month again. But around July of 2023 is when everything changed, only it was something out of this world.
Franknez.com was discovered by a massive news aggregator for my banking fraud reporting.
I was receiving weekly emails from people who were experiencing fraud and negligence from Walmart’s affiliate bank, Green Dot Bank.
The news aggregator then began to push my news reports to millions of daily users on their platform. In August, Franknez.com earned $19,000 in advertising revenue alone. September hit $64.1K, and October did $52.8K. And the rest is history.
I focused on providing as much value to this new community outside of my original big break.
This lasted for only one year — the aggregator had a change of policies and paused distributing independents and journalists, catering to big media only. It was heart-wrenching and stomach-turning as you could imagine.
My personal finance blog had had two massive big breaks over a course of four years and it was crashing all over again.
This is where I began to operate differently, causing a much bigger wreck for the blog.
You Must Be Original, There Are No Shortcuts
My work has always been 100% original up to that point.
When distribution stopped, I was left with only sponsored content revenue. But when your monthly income falls from high five-figure months to just under five-figures; you’re scrambling to identify what happened, and then emotions start kicking in.
This is when I began to use AI to create scaled content to identify what other topics I could tackle and self-distribute on my own amongst relevant channels and groups, in efforts to find the next big break.
Although they were 50%-70% AI-generated, it backfired BIG TIME, because in June 2025, Google had a core update that deindexed sites with heavy AI use. This destroyed all my metrics, and with it, my sponsored content clients; the only income foundation I had at that point.
My biggest lesson here was to remain original no matter what. AI was a shortcut to helping me figure out what ‘could work?’, but in the end it wasn’t worth it.
Understanding Owned Assets
Thankfully, I understood the importance of owned assets, though I wish I had taken advantage of this way earlier.
Owned assets are things such as follower count, newsletter subscribers, memberships, etc.
As of the time of this writing, I have 23K followers on X, another 2K subscribers on YouTube, a few Patreon members, over 4,000 newsletter subscribers, and new partnerships in the industry.
Over the past 6 years, I have come to understand the importance of having owned assets. Although my site is currently recovering, I can still:
- Create valuable & original content to my 23K followers on X (earning rev. share from platform too)
- Monetize my YouTube channel
- Increase the number of Patreon members that support the blog
These ‘owned assets’ means that although my site is undergoing a recovery process for Google until its next core update, I’m not starting at zero.
Distribution is Key to Success
Distribution really is the key, especially to any content creator that relies on advertising revenue to put food on the table.
If you look at your favorite content creator, the gamers, the pranksters, the entertainers, they all make loads of money from a massive audience.
The problem with blogging is that Google isn’t necessarily recommending your content to other readers like the YouTube algorithm does. With YouTube, there is a compounding process; with Google, it’s more organic, making it much more difficult.
Distribution will vary and come from a variety of sources: your following count, and your organic reach on search engines for the most part.
Mass distribution is where the scaling happens. This is often times not sustainable until you have proven time and time again that your brand has seniority, consistency, and is organically growing year-over-year in a human way, not through the use of AI.
Write Broke, Write Rich, Just Write
Throughout my 6-year period of blogging, I have always had a business running outside of my website and personal brand; this has helped during bumps and rough patches.
This shit is hard.
But even as I sit in my office after hours, writing this blog post, something profound has become to dawn on me.
I’ve always been passionate about writing. It was never about the money until it was.
I may have gotten lost for a second, greedy even?
I just went through a 6-year run of so much evolution, growth, pain, success, and all over again.
Write broke, write rich, just write.
Give yourself grace, life is always changing and nothing ever stays the same. Soak it all in and begin again. Better this time.
Be proud it happened; be proud you’ve learned. Be proud you’ve changed lives and have left even the smallest mark on earth.
I heard the setback is never as big as the comeback; so, come back, only stronger than ever before.
More prepared than ever before.
