In December 2019, I wrote a post and pinned it to the top of every page of my website.
I just re-read it.
Ugh.
I’m going to show you parts of it, because it’s the most honest “before” picture I have — and because I wrote it, I can tell you exactly what I was thinking when I did, and exactly where the thinking was wrong.
Here’s how it opened:
“I decided to write this article, because I am very aware that NigelChua.com is growing to be a monster authority site, with more than 600+ articles…”
Six hundred articles. I was proud of that number. I led with it.
Here’s what the post actually contained, underneath the motivational framing:
- A pitch for a website-building subscription, with my affiliate link, and the instruction to “sign up now”
- A list of eight supplements I took, each one a product link
- Instructions for wiring money to a crypto exchange
- My stockbroker’s contact details
- Headers in all caps: FAME, FORTUNE, WEALTH, SUCCESS
And the line I keep coming back to:
“Fame, fortune, wealth, success, health, progress, growth favors the consistent action takers.”
I believed I was teaching people to take action.
Read it again with seven years of distance and it’s obvious what the post actually was: a funnel. Every “action” I prescribed routed through a link that paid me. The urgency wasn’t conviction — it was borrowed copywriting. I had absorbed the voice of internet marketers the way you absorb an accent: without noticing.
What I thought I was building
I thought I was building an authority site.
The model in my head was simple: volume of articles → search traffic → affiliate commissions → passive income. More articles, more authority. 600 was good; 1,000 would be better.
The model wasn’t stupid. It was the standard playbook of that era, and it produced real money for real people. That’s exactly what made it dangerous — it was the default.
I never chose it.
I downloaded it and it infused into me.
What it actually was
Strip the post to what’s verifiably true and here’s the audit:
- I was renting, not owning. Every product I promoted was someone else’s. The subscription service, the supplements, the exchange. If any of them changed their terms, died, or turned out to be junk, my “asset” evaporated.
- Volume was a vanity metric. 600 articles sounds like an asset. But 600 articles written to feed a search algorithm, recommending products I’d attached myself to, is not a body of work. It’s inventory for a shop I didn’t own.
- The voice wasn’t mine. “Do it now.” “Catch the rocket.” “90% of the world will stay where they are.” I can tell you exactly which gurus that cadence came from. None of it sounds like how I think, how I talk to my staff, or how I’d explain a decision to my children.
- The advice mixed real conviction with paid placement — and the reader couldn’t tell which was which. Neither, honestly, could I anymore. When every recommendation carries a commission, you lose the ability to hear your own judgment.
The turn
It took me quite a lot of time and experiences and considerations, and finally deciding to stop publishing on the old model and method (though it still claws and calls to me), and my affiliate links have dropped significantly to the curated few that’s really tried and tested over time…not just chosen simply because of how much money it can potentially make me.
What I can say with certainty is what replaced it, because that’s the site you’re reading now:
- Very curated affiliate recommendations (see the “Stuff I Use” section)
- Leaning towards own products, not just chasing commissions. The old model: drive traffic to other people’s products for a cut. The new model: build the audience first, then make the products myself. Slower. Owned.
- A spine, not a volume target. Every post now has to be one thing: a real decision, with the reasoning shown. If a post doesn’t do that, it doesn’t get published — no matter how well it might rank.
- My voice, with the receipts. Real numbers from my own businesses. Real structures I’ve actually built. The test for every line: is this recognition or is it marketing? The 2019 post fails that test in almost every sentence. That’s the standard now precisely because I know what failing it looks like — from the inside.
Why I’m showing you this
It would be easy to quietly delete the 2019 post and let the new site imply I always thought this way. That’s what the highlight-reel internet does.
But the whole point of this site is the reasoning, including the bad reasoning. I ran the default playbook for years…I think, since 2006 where I had been chasing affiliate marketers and all those hype. I didnt make more than $200 a month. I didn’t wake up one day wiser. I accumulated evidence that the model was renting my effort out, sat with that evidence longer than I should have, and then built the inverse deliberately.
If you’re a few steps behind me — running someone else’s playbook right now and vaguely uneasy about it — the diagnostic is simple, and it’s the one I failed in 2019:
Whose asset grows when you do the work?
If the answer isn’t yours, you haven’t chosen a strategy. You’ve downloaded a default.
I’m keeping the old post in my archive, unedited. It stays as an embarrassing reminder.
That’s its job.