TBB Blog Mission: To Entertain. Educate. Inspire. In That Order
You can support TBB by clicking/forwarding any of our Referral Links and starting your online shopping at our Amazon affiliate link . Or click on the Amazon Banner on the right, thank YOU!
Time to evolve the formatting of the Blog Buzz…Cutting and pasting titles is a major bitch you guys! There is no way for me to comment on every blog post I have marked in my Feedly as I have no templates or contributing writers, Managing Editors or ghostwriters! So I ‘ll just type what goes through my mind and see how that goes. Trying this and perhaps picking the “Top 10” to comment on or maybe the “Top 5” when life gets in the way. Or something like that. One constant here…I like to mix it up!
Watching how Milevalue relentlessly is pushing only the cards he can sell (especially Barclays cards!!!!) is just nauseating. You would think there are no other cards in existence out there! Just when you think there was no way he can insert a Barclay link in a post…you were WRONG! Again and again. Wow!
Former TBB troll Rick/ingy resurfaced as “fan of the Buzz BS” in the comments again. For any new readers, he is the Founder of Frugal Travel Guy blog which, in my own opinion, is a corporate front for bombarding newbies with a horrific assault to get them to open more credit cards so the business can make even more more money. There is nothing wrong with making money of course, the key is how you do it. This blog belongs in our highly prestigious, Pulitzer prize winning, Amex approved (huh, just kidding about this one! ) Blogs to Ignore list. To them it is all about credit card conversions 24/7 365. If you want to read some nice things he dishes out you can read them here towards the bottom of the comments. Anyways, where was I going with this? Oh yes, I just had a senior moment exsqueeze me! So ingy mails in a couple of posts every week to Frugal Travel Guy (the blog). One of them was about credit card offers ending since he has been doing it for so long. For proof to show you I am not the only angry blogger or reader out there…in this post by Free-quent Flyer titled “Bank of America wants to pay you to be a customer” that FTG post is called “intensely stupid post”. Hey, it is not ME. By the way, one of FTG’s (the blog) posts was a trip report to the Maldives. You know, just because, you CAN do the Maldives frugally.
One Mile at a Time had a post about “Favorite Hotel Toiletries?”. I swear, not a single one that was mentioned rung a bell to me! It just goes to show you I do not waste a single second looking at the bottles or caring about their smell, texture or feel. They all look, smell and feel pretty good to me. I have a whole drawer full of them. I don’t remember the last time I spent actual cash for soap or lotion!
Delta Points continued on with Part whatever # on yet another boring trip to Sweden with tiny pictures, did a tiny post with almost non existent coverage of the latest Delta award sale (but managed to insert an Amex credit card link naturally) and then had THE post about the coming changes to the Skymiles program calling them Destruction of Skymiles or DOS. I bet the Delta folks in Atlanta are banging their heads! In a nutshell, the blog calls out this is a REALLY bad move by Delta. I disagree but will give it some time to see what happens. Actually, One Mile at a Time had a much more coherent argument that Delta can get away with these changes. Please please stop saying “bunch” so often! And, of course, both of these bloggers would just LOVE to sell you the Delta Amex credit cards! By the way, Points, Miles & Martinis wrote a paragraph, pasted part of Delta’s email and managed to stick 6 Amex credit card links in tiny post!
There will be a Dutch version of Frequent Traveler University in Amsterdam later this year. You can learn all about how to travel for FREE 🙂
Mommy Points wrote a post about the dangers of credit cards. Of course I welcome it and we do not get enough of them. BUT remember the frequency of the posts SELLING credit cards vs these cautionary ones…is it what? 99 to 1 or something like that? Remember the post a few days ago about 20 ways to charge things with my favorite “Go out and eat. You deserve it”! The blog will be back in its sell mode soon. Every blogger fears losing the lucrative Chase and Amex links if they don’t push enough “product” out the door!
The Miles Professor worked out some type of referral revenue arrangement with Award Magic, which is an award booking service. And then promptly found yet another way to sell the US Airways credit card. If only TBB devoted so much time to increase the blog’s revenue sources…ok, don’t finish that!
I am amazed how View from the Wing continues to come up with such click bait headlines. How about “Five Cards That Will Help You Travel the World Quickly”. Wow, impressive isn’t it? Anyway, for another proof that TBB is not a nest of “angry’s” the comments in this post by “Travel is Free” following View from the Wing‘s first comment are absolutely brutal! Makes TBB look like a saint! Anyways, I see both arguments of the “Free”, it is a semantics thing. What I don’t get is why he did not raise the same anti “Free” arguments in the Mommy Points Nightline post but felt compelled to raise it with TIF’s post? Someone counted (thank you!) how many times the word “Free” was used in the Nightline segment and it was 14 times in 6.5 minutes, WOW!
When you blog you will attract some haters, it comes with the territory. Actually, you can learn a lot from negative feedback and all bloggers should value that in my humble opinion. I always liked to stick with the entertainment mission of my blog. If you spend five or ten minutes here and you leave after laughing a little, perhaps learning something I am really happy to achieve that. I try to have something original and not follow herds. I have been reading all these guys since Day 1 so I think I am pretty well qualified and I can judge quality/true expertise (or not) when I see it. This was never supposed to be a blog full of data crunching and deep analyses! We have so many out there doing exactly that (cough). Anyways, I managed to get a hater blogger I always highly admired: Seth over at the Wandering Aramean. He is well known to be a little combative online and I found it honorable I finally became a target of one of his attacks. Latest attack is that I could not report on BAcon14 since I was not there and I made up crap. This even after prefacing my post about being satire AND posting a link to tweets/pics of bloggers present in the BAcon conference! And then I made my colorful commentary only intended for entertainment. Did he think I made up “Titans”? And yet, I made crap up. Well, thank you for the feedback and taking the time to tell me at Flyertalk I guess. Ok, where am I going with this, where is the entertainment in this paragraph? Here it is. It is so hilarious that my two biggest fans, ingy Frugal Travel Guy (the person) and Delta Points, JUMPED on the opportunity to STICK IT TO ME (comments #8 and #16). Now THAT is entertainment! I thought about sticking an Amazon link right HERE for some laughs but I didn’t as, according to them, I am pimping my links so much LOL.
Finally, I have gotten to know online Grant over at Travel with Grant. He made a brave post and he is looking for a job. This was my comment I left in his blog post:
Please share any job leads with him and/or give him any feedback. To all the big bloggers, please reach out. Grant is talented and should add value to your organization! Grant gets two thumbs up from me!
Ok, I managed ten items, woohoo!
Thanks for wasting your time here and I hope you got a few laughs out of it. If not, please read Million Mile Secrets who wrote the book on how NOT to be a bore 🙂
Yes, over 1,500 blog posts daily in Feedly. This is how I feel at the end of the day and I take it all out here. Sometimes I may lose it, please forgive me. This is my therapy. I miss the good old pure days of MCI, Valuemags and my Northwest Airlines (pause to fill wine glass bottle!) lol.
And there are times I want to say…
And last one…
One more. A deep thought by Jack Handey of SNL fame:
Check out my updated blog lists: Blogs I Love, Blogs I Like, Blogs I Ignore
Please pass my blog link to your friends and family if you think they will enjoy it too.
TBB
travelbloggerbuzz@gmail.com
Join over 3,065 TBB followers on Twitter @ FlyerTalkerinA2 and add TBB on Google+
First!
Thanks for your help George, I really appreciate it. I got some really good advice from Matt and have some major homework to do after I get back from FTU Advanced 🙂
Segundo
3rd again.
Now, what the heck is the problem with Seth? Both incidents that he picked up is lacking any substance. As a reader without any prejudice, i am with you George.
wow, ingy has an attitude…. maybe its because that seminar he put on in SC drew only 20 ppl (when they set the capacity for 100)??? i guess he’s right about has been….
on a side note, his comment from last buzz referring to you “shuckin’ and jivin’ ” holy crap, that is REALLY racist term. And as an african american, i’m pretty offended by it. shows his character by using it
James, if I offended you with the term, I truly apologize. I have never considered the phrase racist in any manner. If you did in any way, please accept my apology.
would you prefer flippin’ and floppin”? Deflecting and diffusing? Or maybe running and hiding?
@ Grant: You are Number 1! Hope me linking to your post could help. Holler if you need anything.
@ Mike and @tv7: Hardware!
@ Kumar: You are either with us or without us…just kidding. Been around online a long time, nothing surprises me. What is most interesting is he admitted he never read my blog so he probably thought this was some serious operation. We have so many around the blogosphere you know lol. Thanks.
@ James; Thanks a lot for taking the time to comment. I am not going to make a comment about the SC “seminar” for obvious reasons 🙂 Nothing surprises me.
@ Rick i: Thank you for taking the time to read and comment in my blog.
Gary is an obnoxious buffoon. He gets what he deserves.
@john…Dildo……………………………………………..er, I mean ditto
My boss Ramsey is always naughty 😉
He deserves to be called a fatso and a moron? I beg to differ. There are other ways to state one’s disagreement that does not require prepubescent vocabulary.
On a positive note, Delta shows insane SkyPesos availability to a dozen of cities in Europe in J out of JFK next summer. Click me and ye shall see. This is yet another example of why we should not dismiss outright either people or business entities we might not like. 🙂
Hint: search by 1 seat at a time.
Yes please, what’s up with the name calling. All it does is give ammunition to the two haters to say “see what an angry nest this is!” and then go deflecting…to showing the incredible pimping that goes on here lol.
Saw a post by OMAAT about getting a hair cut…Shaked my head to bolivion 😉
I don’t know guys, the public spanking Gary was handed on Travel Is Free earlier this week was pretty priceless.
In my opinion if Gary and his kind knew how close this debt bubble was to imploding, his (generally arrogant) demeanor may be a little different.
Credit card ABS may be a high demand product for banks to sell to investors in a zero interest rate world awash in liquidity….
But when delinquencies inevitably spike or interest rates move that product isn’t going to sell and will sit on the dealer’s (issuers, banks) balance sheets–this is quite unprofitable for them. Thus there will be need to originate this crap because there will be nowhere to place it.
I noticed the evolution towards clickbait headlines in the form of the quarterly Freedom signup reminder. Long gone are the days of the straight and to the point “remember to sign up for your quarterly bonus” headlines.
Now we have cryptic and supposedly enticing headlines like “Earn 5% at Amazon next quarter” which masks the fact that it is a simple reminder post for the the Freedom Q4 bonus [link] and INK with amazon gift card purchase [link] but likely, via honest mistake no doubt, forgets to inform that Discover has 5% back on all online purchases in Q4.
Yeah I totally agree. I hold my nose almost to the point of asphyxiating myself!
VFTW: The Five Cards That Give Your Spending the Most Leverage
OMAAT: Credit Cards With The Best Annual Spending Bonuses
These two posts were posted almost simultaneously. Nothing new really. So, you tell me. You are a loyal reader (huh?) and you see YET another credit card barrage. I don’t know….but if it was me I would be PISSED of seeing yet another post! I can understand they need to make money to keep the links but constantly coming up with moronic titles full of affiliate links (while not giving most of the non affiliate ones the light of day) well makes me barf and…keeps me fit! So I thank them LOL.
Did OMAAT and VFTW duplicate each other’s templates today? I thought I was having Deja Vu when I saw Gary’s post this afternoon.
Lol. Funny because I tweeted this below earlier today after seeing what you saw:
Looks like the two poster boys of Boarding Area are in a race to see who will sell the most credit cards today, WTF!!!
As long as there is an audience to read those types of articles; and as long as readers keep supporting those affiliate links, those types of articles will continue, George.
You know that “spam” you receive in your e-mail account, George? Do you know why you continue to receive it even though you never wanted it? Because there are people in this world who patronize “spammers”. If no one did — if there was no way for the “spammers” to profit — then they would not do it anymore.
Why do ticket prices for professional sporting events and concerts continue to rise despite the state of the economy? Because people ultimately pay them. If they did not, ticket prices would decrease. Simple supply and demand.
Now, I am not equating any “bloggers” with “spammers” and professional athletes and entertainers — but the principle is generally the same: if there is a market for something — especially if demand is high — then someone will sell to that market. It is that simple.
Supply and demand…
Sure, I agree.
But it is getting out of hand…or it is because I see so many 🙂
My point is about respect: Don’t they see they are pissing off long time readers? Apparently not or there is a always a stream of newbies available…
I just came back from seeing the movie Equalizer. It was so deep that I will think about it for days, err, minutes. Good action though.
Yes, your busines model is so unique that even a “Nigerian prince” with a wifi connection can do it.
We also understand the capture rate dynamic of Boarding Area’s volume spamming….
What an elder man told me sometime ago which is unfortunately true…
Pumping pays
and
It is all about conversions
🙂
Its quite obvious from a guy who makes his living online why they keep spamming their CC links and use their clickbait headline.
Its all SEO custom tailored. They know all the newbies come from google, and hope a newbie clicks a CC link out of curiosity. It is so obvious they did their research on the most searched phrases for their particular niche.
Now this may be ALL speculation cause I dont know if CC companies allow cookie stuffing but the reader may not even sign up, but that cookie is stored then, so when he DOES decide to sign up, that blog may get COMMISSION.
Think about this: DONOTTRACKME trick on United. Why is it so hard to find this trick? Oh of course, then the bloggers wont get their commission.
I am a big fan of your blog, you really need to sign up for CC affiliation and put a side link on the main page, so anyone who wants to support you, can do so. No need to pimp out the links, just have it on the side for us to see.
I think your “SEO custom tailored” point is right on!
I am not sure about the cookie stuffing though.
>>>>>>>>>>>you really need to sign up for CC affiliation and put a side link on the main page, so anyone who wants to support you, can do so. No need to pimp out the links, just have it on the side for us to see.
Yes I need to do this. Been meaning to look into it since about…16 months or so ago. I think I have a mental block or something. And this world is just too confusing to make sense of it. Or I fear I may turn into a whore 🙂 So…I always put it off until…later. Pimping my Amazon link just is a lot more honest even though I probably deserve more rewards than the “honorable” blogs I keep track and hammer here 🙂
Thanks for taking the time to comment and the kind words. One day I will do this or just fold when my mother in Greece gets ill and I have to drop everything and go look after her…