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| Mr.Pickles in Cyprus? Blogging and its effects on aging are evident:-) And what is it with all the rumors about all the dollar coins he hoarded? Is he in Cyprus to help bail out its banks? Or is it because he is planning to…News out soon! |
MVP POST OF THE DAY
Warning: The 5 Dangers of Applying for Credit Cards. From Million Mile Secrets. Not said often enough! Must be required reading by all newbies. In all seminars it should be in a packet handed out labeled “Newbie FAQs” or something like that. I did chuckle when I read this “Keep a budget and stick to it.” Like eat your fruits and veggies?…Only if it was so easy lol. And banks feast on them!
ON MY MIND
I have read so many trip reports by Ben of One Mile at a Time that I must admit they are all starting to look the same now. I find them so…cold. No people ever in it. Maybe I am just over trip reported I guess.
I was so tired I took a nap inside my car at the parking lot of my gym:-)
Darn Mercedes, takes premium gas!
Major issue fixed at tenant’s house today. Positive: Club Carlson minimum spend was met in one transaction! Officially no minimum spending requirements in process right now. Time to focus on go to cards…
MILES/POINTS
I was so busy I did not run Award Wallet once all day, boo!
I still use Autoslash. My car rental in Las Vegas in May was booked for $203. It has dropped three times already and is now at $151. And still two months away from it! It is with Payless. Hey, it’s cheap and it is a rental around Vegas, works for me!
TRAVEL
Cranky Flier has a behind the scenes view of Delta’s JFK T4 Terminal expansion.
Myanmar:The Yangoon Circular Railway. Incredible post & pics from Matador Network.
A look at the Tour de France photo gallery in the gardens. From DC Rainmaker
ODDZ & ENDZ
35 Astounding And Uplifting Facts About the Universe. From Buzzfeed.
MY RESPONSE ABOUT MONETIZING:
This was posted in a response to other comments yesterday:
Obviously, this topic is controversial. I have been trying to keep it real here, pouring my soul out to you guys. In addition, watch what I do and not what I say as I tend to keep making fun of things in general, it’s in my blood. Like I said many times, I embarked on this journey last November because I was bored. I needed a challege in my life. I just crossed 45 and had it too easy in the past several years cruising along. I do not need the money and have not given serious thought to monetizing the site. I have no time to make an About Me page and you guys are jumping all over me for keep mentioning affiliate cards which I have not even looked into at all as I find the subject entirely confusing and feels like selling out to the devil. Seeing the Flight Deal going that route sure made an impact at me. I admire the bloggers who have resisted the very lucrative option and they will always have a priority here in my site.
I also admire how Frequent Miler (yes BA sure helps!) and MMS are monetizing. I guess there is a way of doing it and being able to see yourself in the mirror. The key point is they are both full timers. I have no intention of making this a full time endeavour, I like my real job enough. But this has been a passion of mine for many years so I wanted to have a voice and this is what I am doing.
One day I will think of monetizing in a humane decent way when I get around to it. At this pace that will likely be…never:-)
My two cents, thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.
i’m sick of one mile at a time.
As soon as a blogger takes a free trip from an airline or a free product to review they are no longer worth reading in my opinion. They are advertisers not reviewers.
I would rather have “cold” pictures than have pictures of someone’s mother-in-law in a bikini.
Yes, those are absolutely your only two options!
I was expressing my feelings as I wrote my post last night. Ben & MMS are at complete opposite ends when it comes to personal pictures on their own blogs! I do laugh with the picture of wet towels though:-)
You admire how MMS monetizes? Seriously?
There’s no more pitchy, over the top marketer in all of Blogworld.
Every time he writes about a better offer, he includes a link to the worse affiliate offer telling you why you don’t want to click on it. If he really didn’t want you to click he wouldn’t include the link! I’m sure some folks click and apply on the wrong link by mistake. Ka-ching!!
The bow tie picture? **Every post** imploring you to “join the 10,000+ readers” (savvy marketer! don’t be left out! join your peers!) by subscribing to his email list!
So much bolding so many exclamation points!!!! Hitting you over the head. In many ways he’s marketing harder than TPG and FTG.
And the quality of posts over the past couple of months has really gone downhill, ever since he quit his job and became a full-time blogger.
MMS is full-time now? His “About Me” page still says Darius has an “exciting career in Global Marketing”…
Anonymous Guy #1, stop complaining. Nobody said MMS was perfect, but some of us think he is better than the rest.
Instead of your whining, why don’t you tell us someone better or start your own blog? You will see that a bunch of spineless anonymous guys will start to complain about YOU. Can’t please all of the people, all of the time…
Why would MMS need to quit his job?! 2 not exactly indepth posts per day max does not a day fill. He doesn’t have Brian’s TV schedule …
I have said and I will say it again. The way MMS does affiliate links, IN GENERAL, is so much better than the vast majority of bloggers! You can complain all you want but the mother (or is it mother in law) rule makes a lot of sense! Lots of other bloggers will sell their mother for a Chase Ink click. Please don’t get me started on what I am willing to do about my own mother in law:-)
I don’t think anyone was complaining about MMS — they were complaining about the unjustified love of MMS while he ka-chings all the way to the bank. @Anonymous asks why MMS would NEED to quit his job? He probably doesn’t. But he can. Because he’s BloggerRich.
MMS and all the bloggers run into a wall. At first it’s fun and exciting with lots to talk about, especially when the money starts to roll it. But then it becomes a chore strictly for the $$. It has to be tiresome to continually whore yourself for referrals – even Bowtie seems to be choking on them.
I have an MB that is supposed to use premium gas. we have been using the cheap stuff for four years and it is going fine. BUT you are paying zero for the car so don’t complain 🙂 I still like Ben’s trip report, is humor is funny. I agree some pictures of people are good. For Ben it should be easier. For someone like you or me with real full-time professional jobs, it is not so easy. While there is no conflict, I may not necessarily want to have people doing due diligence on me or my firm come across picks of me on vaca are holding up vanilla reload cards at cvs lol
Yes, that was a spontaneous comment I made…It just hit me last night that they all starting to look the same because I have been reading them for so many years! And I do love his humor too! Good point on the full time professional jobs and holding VRs:-)
Mr. Pickles has/is an African grey, whereas the parrot above is clearly a blue-fronted Amazon. They’re not even from the same continent, George! [[rolls eyes, sighs, is generally an unpleasant person]]
I do believe you can get away with buying cheaper gas, unless that’s part of the science experiment. The difference between 87 and 92/93 octane is not significant.
Not So Best Of by way of analogy:
I went to a restaurant in SF recently with friends, and they supposedly have really good pumpkin ravioli. (18th and Connecticut for the curious.) It was on the menu, and looked like the dish I wanted to order. When the waiter came around to take our orders, I ordered it but they said that the particular dish was unavailable, as the menu was going to change the next day. When pressed, he apologized but reiterated that the dish was simply not available. “That is a worthless excuse for a number of reasons!” I shouted. I asked to see the manager and demanded that he go to the market immediately and buy pumpkin because I wanted pumpkin ravioli for dinner, and his menu clearly advertised that they have pumpkin ravioli for sale! I waited while the manager ran to Safeway and bought pumpkin for my dish. I finally got my pumpkin ravioli.
Anyway, all of you readers should do the same.
[scene]
Note for the integrity-impaired: teaching your readers ways to make sure that award availability isn’t phantom by completing a dummy booking or putting an award on hold or using the ANA site is virtuous. Telling your readers to harass CSRs and CSR supervisors to bend or break the rules because a website is buggy is low.
harvson3
I *think* you might be an interesting person with something good to say but I will have to drop acid or something to decipher what the hell you are talking about. #flummoxed
Google the phrase in quotes above and you’ll find the Not So Best Of post.
And my students have convinced me that I am neither interesting nor full of anything good to say.
harvson3
Thanks for the attempt at clarification but there are a lot of phrases in quotes above. I tried “That is a worthless excuse for a number of reasons!” and did not see anything relevant.
Probably witty, definitely obtuse. You are probably a teacher. Let me guess: math? physics? 🙂
I think harvson3 must be into rocket science:-)
I was using an analogy to illustrate why the advice in TPG’s “The Phantom Award Space Menace” is No So Best Of and ethically questionable.
Thank goodness I’m not a writing instructor.
harvson3
George,
On behalf of many/some of your loyal long time readers, please put up cc links. We want to support you gas addiction, while making fun of you for putting up cc links.
Mark this comment as URGENT!
LOL.
hammer53
OMG… I love when this blog makes me laugh…….URGENT…lol
This where we say Bluebird to make sure George’s SEO gets up so he can get those FlexOffers, right? 😉
I appreciate your support:-)
Has MMS officially used up every single points and miles blogger on the internet?
He brought some guy who writes about Portland, OR?
“I was excited to watch paint dry…. er, sorry, I meant our Friday chat”
insert picture of Emily holding Home Depot paint samples
Please don’t. (No wallpaper samples, either)
The Portland localization is a trend for blogs from what I read. Have a very specific locale focus.
The latest trend in blogging…. putting CC links in your trip reports
MP saw how much fun Lucky was having, so she decided to join the circus
Looks like MommyPoints also decided to become a comment censorer
Increases in CC shilling are usually met with increases in comment censoring as well
MP is the worst offender IMO. Folks like Lucky and Gary are fairly consistent in their views – MP claims to offer “the world for free” and her blog is supposedly geared towards families, but she neglects to mention all the other costs that go in to making a “free” trip (e.g. free upgrades on UA come about because she takes Mileage Runs to achieve status). Her blog started off catering to a niche, but has lately just become a hodgepodge of stuff.
MP is far from worse. I tend to give the full timers a little more of a break since they must put food on the family’s tables. This blogging thing is not easy. Only idiots and/or mega addicted do it as a labor of love:-)
I stand guilty of having some different travel/miles and points topics covered on my site. Family travel is the one closest to my heart, but my daughter has gotten older, and we have been able to venture on some different types of trips as a result. Apologies it isn’t as singularly focused, but life evolves and so do blogs – especially when they are tied to someones own personal life and trips (at least to a degree). The elements of travel that are virtually free (as in sign-up for x card and get x nights or miles) are still very much covered as I use those “tricks” myself. I also try really hard to be transparent things that cost money and/or status as well instead of just pretending they fall from the sky…because they very much don’t.
Life would be simpler (as would blogging) if I only had one style of travel and focus, but for better or worse life is more layered in my world, and I guess the result is a hodgepodgey blog. 😉
I do censor and/or edit a handful of comments, usually because they are related to name calling or being unnecessarily ugly to me or someone else, but that number is very very small. If you left a comment that isn’t showing, feel free to hollar at me and I’ll see if it is stuck in spam.
Thanks for posting your thoughts here MP! I predict a trip report from Tokyo from you soon? You have a nice niche, keep hitting at it. Veering away from it every once in a while is fine, don’t do it too ofthen. That was advice from a blogger who still does not feel like a blogger…heck, I have a difficult time saying “I am a blogger” as I talk about ya guys here:-)
Ha ha – I love my base niche of family travel, and don’t plan to steer too far. Just mix it up some…just like life. Mostly family oriented, but some non-family oriented excursions as well. Tokyo report absolutely in the works…after finishing Europe, Disney, and ski trip. Ha. Good problem to have. Hate to tell you, but after you cross the 90 day threshold you are a blogger. Sorry. 😉
Joke of the day is here guys http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Gyrrg6ikmII
Ha! Nice Moobs.
Two hot guys promoting Chase CC. How can one resist that?
Amazingly, there was no affiliate link inside the video:-)
I love these two comments: Darn Mercedes, takes premium gas! and
“I was so busy I did not run Award Wallet once all day, boo!”
you crack me up George!