A year ago, I sat at my Mac Mini on a Sunday evening, published the first proper article on Tech Dads Life, and then did what every new blogger does: refreshed the analytics page approximately forty-seven times before going to bed. The numbers were not exactly explosive. My mum had visited. Possibly my wife. I’m fairly sure the third click was me, checking the formatting on my phone.
That was a year ago. And now, sitting here in June 2026, I want to write something a bit different. Not a round-up of the best gadgets, not a buying guide, not a CES preview. Just an honest look back at twelve months of building this site. What I got right, what I got badly wrong, and what comes next. If you’ve been reading from the start, this one’s for you. If you’re new here, welcome, and brace yourself for some candour.
What I Actually Got Wrong (And There’s Quite a Lot)
Let me start here, because the failures are more useful than the wins.
The first mistake I made was thinking Tech Dads Life was primarily a tech review site. It isn’t. Or rather, it shouldn’t be. Early on, I wrote a string of fairly dry, spec-heavy articles, the kind of thing you’d find on any tech publication, just with slightly less budget and slightly worse SEO. They didn’t land. Not because the writing was terrible, but because they had no point of view. There was nothing in them that only I could have written. A bloke from Hampshire, father of three, who’s built his own drones, commutes into London on South Western Railway, and has a 13-year-old who’s currently obsessed with whatever the 13-year-old equivalent of everything is. That’s the angle. The moment I started writing from that place, things improved.
The second mistake was frequency. I published in bursts and then went quiet, which is exactly what the algorithm punishes and exactly what readers notice. Around 50% of successful bloggers publish weekly or several times a month. I was not in that group for longer than I’d like to admit. Life gets in the way. The day job, the kids, the commute. But inconsistency is a credibility killer, and I knew that going in.
Third, and this one stings a bit: I underestimated how brutal the search landscape had become. Google’s March 2024 core update was, by most accounts, the biggest algorithmic change the company had ever released. It folded helpfulness directly into the core ranking system and aimed to remove a significant portion of low-quality content from results. Organic traffic was already declining for many publishers before I even launched. By 2025, analysts were describing a “Great Decoupling” where search usage kept rising but clicks to websites kept falling. Research suggested that around 60% of Google searches were ending without anyone clicking through to a site at all. I launched into that environment thinking SEO would do the heavy lifting. It doesn’t anymore, not on its own.
What Actually Worked
The articles that performed best were the ones where I had genuine skin in the game. The Bambu Lab P2S piece I wrote from direct experience with my own printer. The Tesla ownership stuff, real world, my actual 2022 Model 3 Long Range, parked on my actual drive with my actual wall charger. The Starlink Mini review after I got my hands on one. The CES coverage, written with the weight of having attended the show around eight times as credentialed media, not as someone summarising press releases from a sofa.
That’s the pattern. Personal experience plus useful information equals something worth reading.
The dad angle, when I leaned into it properly, also worked well. The audience here are people like me. Not engineers, not early adopters with bottomless budgets, but parents who want to understand tech well enough to make good decisions for their families. When I wrote with that reader in mind, the response was noticeably warmer. Comments, emails, people sharing articles with their partners. That’s the connection I was after.
The newsletter also proved more valuable than I’d anticipated, which I’ll come back to.
The Landscape Every Blogger Is Navigating Right Now
I want to be honest about context here, because it’s easy to look at a blog’s first year and blame all the struggles on execution. Some of it is execution. Some of it is the environment.
The wider blogging world has had a genuinely rough couple of years. Many bloggers I follow have spoken candidly about 2024 being among the worst years they’ve experienced, with traffic evaporating, income dropping, and Google’s AI Overviews intercepting the informational queries that used to drive steady organic traffic. The median publisher saw around a 10% year-on-year traffic decline in the first half of 2025, with non-news content sites down roughly 14%.
| Challenge | What It Means for a Dad Blog |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | Answers simple queries directly, meaning fewer clicks for informational content |
| Zero-click searches | Around 60% of searches now end without a website visit |
| Algorithm volatility | New sites lack the trust signals to weather big core updates |
| Content saturation | Millions of active blogs in the UK alone |
| Reader skimming | Most readers skim rather than fully read an article |
None of this is an excuse. It’s context. The sites that are growing in this environment are the ones with genuine authority, distinct voice, and audiences that come directly, through newsletters, bookmarks, and communities, rather than being entirely dependent on Google to send them readers.
That shift is the most important thing I’ve learned this year.
What Comes Next
The plan for year two is cleaner and more deliberate than year one.
First, the writing gets more personal and more opinionated. The research briefings, the buying guides, they stay, because they’re useful. But the articles I’m most proud of are the ones where I took a position. Expect more of that.
Second, consistency. Non-negotiable. The site needs to be somewhere you can rely on for a steady stream of genuinely useful content, not a burst of activity followed by three weeks of silence while I’m camping in the New Forest with the kids.
Third, and most importantly: the newsletter. If the last year has taught me anything about the current state of the web, it’s that an email list is the only audience you actually own. Social platforms change their algorithms. Google updates its core system. Your newsletter subscribers chose to hear from you, and they’ll keep hearing from you regardless of what any tech giant decides to do with its ranking signals next quarter. If you’re reading this and you’re not subscribed yet, that link is at the bottom of this piece. Please use it.
Hype Cycle Check
LIKELY TO LAST: Personal, experience-led tech writing with a specific point of view. The generic review format is dying; the authentic voice is not.
WATCH CLOSELY: AI-assisted writing workflows. Around 80% of bloggers now use AI in some capacity, but only about 6% use it to write full articles. The distinction matters. Used well, AI is a useful tool. Used badly, it produces exactly the kind of content Google built its 2024 update to remove.
VAPOURWARE RISK: The idea that SEO alone will build an audience for a new blog in 2026. It might contribute. It won’t do the job by itself.
CES 2027 Angle
CES 2027 will be my ninth or tenth visit to Las Vegas for the show, and I’m already thinking about how to cover it differently. The traditional “here are the coolest gadgets” format is the first to get swallowed by AI Overviews. What I can offer that no AI summary can is context, comparison to previous years, and the honest sense of which announcements are genuinely significant versus which ones are stage-managed noise dressed up as innovation. Expect the Tech Dads Life CES coverage to lean harder into that perspective going into January 2027.
What to Watch
- Direct audience growth over search dependency. The sites that survive algorithm volatility are the ones with loyal direct audiences. Watch how independent publishers respond to this in the second half of 2026.
- AI Overviews expanding into more query types. If Google continues to answer more questions directly in search results, the informational content model for bloggers will need to evolve further, faster.
- The newsletter comeback. Email has never really gone away, but its value relative to social and search is increasing as both of those channels become less reliable for small publishers.
- Dad content going more mainstream. Research suggests that a significant proportion of parents have made purchasing decisions based on dad influencer recommendations in recent years. Brands are paying attention. The tone and quality of dad-focused content is rising accordingly.
If you’ve made it to the end of this one, thank you. Genuinely. Building something like this while working full time, commuting to London, and trying to be a decent dad to three kids is not always easy, and knowing people are actually reading makes it worth every late Sunday evening at the desk.
The newsletter is where the best of Tech Dads Life lands first, with a bit more behind-the-scenes honesty than I always put on the blog. It takes about two minutes to subscribe and costs nothing. If you’ve been here for any part of year one, I’d love to have you in year two.
Sign up at techdadslife.beehiiv.com . See you there.
