The one man blog machine TBB with yet another COVID-19 Coronavirus special post for you with the ten best links I have found on the subject. I am also announcing a reduction in the number of posts every week to last through the whole month of April. Because it is time as with the viral times we are all experiencing support clicks have gone way down and I need to make sure I could achieve the goal of making half of minimum wage here, sad LOL #facepalm.
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Breaking: It appears a whole bunch of credit cards have vanished from affiliate links. Chase business credit cards gone! Bank of America cards gone too. Including at The Points Guy! I think you won’t be seeing any posts there why the Chase Ink Business Preferred 100k card is amazing anymore LOL. Sadly, it appears a lot of them are gone in my site too. Ouch. If you need advice on what card to get you can always email me or ask in the comments. If you see any card you want to apply with my links of course I would appreciate it if you use them, thank you!
Breaking #2: It is true! Credit Card Issuers Suspending Affiliate Programs. It is strange all posts about credit cards that no longer pay a commission have vanished from credit card sales blogs! Will my site even get five going forward? Sad lol.
In the month of April TBB will be posting twice a week. Every Monday and Friday. And this time I will stick to it. For a month!
Starting in May, the posting schedule will be dependent on the number of credit card conversions with my links found here. Mi familia is still the best customer here lol. Comments will stay open, please be civil.
Going forward, I am thinking to post based on the following number of conversions per month:
Five or less: Post once a week, every F
6-10: Post twice a week, M and F
10-15:Post three times a week, MWF
16-20: Post four times a week, MWFS
21-25: Post five times a week: MTWFS
26-30: Post six times a week: MTWTFS
Over 31: LOL
Saturdays will always be a day off unless the LOL happens.
As a reminder, many hours go into this blog and translating that into pay per hours is approaching prisoner type pay. Amazon is under three digits every month. Two readers donate by Paypal every month. The biggest revenue generator are the credit card conversions. There has never been a DIRECT credit card affiliate link here. I have been doing this for 7.5 years. I have outlasted numerous bloggers. With the covid-19 changes I need to spend less time here. It is sad just leaving you, quitting I mean. I am no quitter. Please support independent voices in the blogosphere. Before we quit. Or some of us go work at The Points Guy. Without your support most blogs just do not last. I am shocked I have lasted this long. I am in peace with this decision.
If no conversions the whole month, I am joining Mile Nerd posting once a month.
And now lets get you some Covid-19 links that are worthy:
I still can not believe Trump fans are giving this guy any excuses with the body count mounting and knowing that the worst may be ahead of us, WTF! The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life.
You will see this dilemma be raised more and more in this viral era: The rise of the bio-surveillance state.
So countries are faced with what one might call the “coronavirus trilemma”. They can pick two of three things but cannot have them all: limit deaths, gradually lift lockdowns, or uphold cherished civil liberties. Not all countries are facing up to this reality – the US remains a notable laggard – but most will have to eventually. Those countries that have recognised the choices before them are picking the first two options at the cost of the third, bio-surveillance. It is a choice that has most clearly been made in east Asia. But it is coming to much of the rest of the world too – and will transform the role and reach of the state.
This is a great presentation about the The Economics of a Pandemic: The Case of COVID-19. Many slides. At least look at slide 92. And tells me who is responsible for dropping the ball here!
This is a great video interviewing a doctor in New York City. Title of the video is “Protecting Your Family From COVID-19 by Dr. David Price“. Great explanations and in the second half of the video he responds to audience questions. I am now a hand Nazi for sure! At the same time, would this disease spread so fast if it was only spread the way he describes? There must be more going on…like in the air? My gut feeling, I am no scientist. My most hated subject in school was biology, nothing came close!
I am starting to become a mask fan lately the more I read about this topic: You Probably Should Be Wearing a Mask If You Can. I predict at some point we will be using them here as much as they use them in Asia.
I don’t think we have seen this before. Global Shutdown: Visualizing Commuter Activity in the World’s Cities.
Remember Wait But Why? It used to be a great blog and then it suddenly turned into an Elon Musk fan blog and then silence. And then a post every once in many months. They are back again with a fiction post about, what else, the virus. You Won’t Believe My Morning. You may have nightmares after you read it, you have been warned!
When this is all over, we should see a really good investment towards Public Health! Lets get a historical perspective on the Major Epidemics of the Modern Era.
You may want to sit down if you decide to read this: First Denial, Then Fear: Covid-19 Patients in Their Own Words. OMG!
Lets finish with something positive. Some Good News With John Krasinski. Of The Office broadcasting from his home.
And I leave you with this…
TBB
travelbloggerbuzz@gmail.com
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Opinions expressed here are author’s alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
Good morning!
The world has changed for sure.
It sure has, thanks for the donation.
Going forward there might be interest in thinking through a sensible
accumulation strategy uncluttered by the incentives of bloggers. If
bloggers get a commission for each sign up then from their point of view
diversification is a strategy to push. If status chasing is attractive then
focus on a small number of programs is sensible. A focus strategy doesn’t
generate much in the way of credit card revenue. Sorry!
Having Platinum status on Delta during the crisis has been terribly important when
I had to cancel two b class award tickets to Japan. All the miles came right back. The wait on the phone line was minimal.
There is need for your expertise!
Most blogs are in it for the money. The money has always been pumping travel rewards credit cards to the newbies. Everything has changed. People are not out spending so banks will not pay lucrative sales commissions to these blogs that have become big businesses. So expect a wipeout…the longer this goes on.
The true hobbyists will still be around. You may see bloggers who went to TPG come back and start posting whenever they can. Which is not that often.
I expect TBB to continue posting quality content. And keep whining here and there…
I think.
I support the site via the Amazon link, read the site every time there is a post, but as I believe Dan commented a while back, posting once a week or less is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Less traffic, fewer chances of conversions and I would expect the end would be near. Best of luck, I appreciate the years we’ve had.
P.S. Now it makes sense why a certain Thought Leader and his companion haven’t posted any credit sales posts in a bit. Clearly The Ghost of Emily’s site did not get the memo and are working as a charity for the credit card companies.
Thanks for the support with Amazon.
Why not support with cc’s? Trying to understand how you all think about it.
Mondays and Fridays posting here. I still expect me to bring you the best read in the blogosphere in this new world we are all facing. Self-fuilfilling prophecy? Dude, it has been like this since day one! So, as I have always said, enjoy my blog while it is up! Many blogs pour over traffic stats and spend most of their time promoting their site. I focus on the content, always did. And look at that got me…LOL.
I want to last at least as long as to see MMS go offline…They are just pumping plastic nonstop only cards that still pay them…barf.
TPG staffers, work on yr resumes! This is why I had been screaming abt working on marketable skills instead of becoming a credit card sales ‘writer’!
For credit cards, I am locked out of Chase (over 5/24), Barclays (hasn’t approved me for a card in over three years), Amex (hit card limit), U.S. Bank (won’t approve me for anything) and Citi (AA Shutdown and locked out of ThankYou cards for now). For BOA, I have been approved once in the past year and a half and I did use your links. I have tried using your links for some of the above banks, but I got denied every time. My wife did use your links for the three cards she has applied for in the past year, two got approved including the Sapphire Preferred.
Mondays and Fridays I think you’ll be fine. If you cut down to once a week or less, then I would expect less, but I do understand. Now I will set my alarm back another 15 minutes or so on Wednesdays.
Understood, got it.
Thanks a lot.
I gotta give this M and F posting thing a shot in April. I need the extra time…We see what happens.
The newbie market is there the money WAS at. And it will be when we get past the virus. The question is…when and the extent of staying power for the blogs. I have no payroll to meet, no rent and the fixed costs can be covered with Amazon for the most part…so what the hell do I have to lose? 🙂
You need *extra* time? I’ve got a lot of that now…
Hi George. I’ve been reading the blog for 4 years or so now. In that time I’ve applied for two (yes only 2!) credit cards. One of them was with your link but from the sounds of a post that month, I don’t think you got credit for it. I’ve done a few PayPal donations over the years because I really appreciate your work as a content curator. I know others have suggested this, but I’m going to not only suggest it but practically beg you to do it: please, please, please go to a newsletter format.
I would absolutely pay $5 a month for a thrice-weekly newsletter from you. If you wanted to keep the blog going to, you could do what Stratechery does and make one of the weekly newsletters (say Friday?) a blog post. Since it sounds somewhat inevitable that you’ll be down to once a week in the future, why not give this a try? With Stack or one of the other services, it sounds like it’s not all that difficult to set it up, and they cover the back end for a fee (no disclosure to make here, I’m a community college teacher with no relation to them). And if it doesn’t work, as long as you are keeping the once-weekly public version of it I don’t think it’ll harm the readership numbers much over a couple of months.
It’s clear you do this because you love it and because it provides a therapeutic outlet for you. I’d really love to see that continue and maybe this is the way to do it. Admittedly, this would be a pretty rough time to launch a new newsletter, but maybe you keep it in the back pocket for when the economy has started to recover in the future.
Thank you!
Lets see what happens in April..
I should definitely look into the newsletter idea. Two things held me up. One is the technical aspects of it and the other is…I do not want to stop helping people by forcing them to pay…because I like freeeee 🙂
Stack is a service that does this? Any others? Got first quarter business stuff to take care of now and finishing last few struggler tax returns…
Thanks again…I have been trying to kick my blog addiction here for soooo long 🙂
I guess it would help if I got the name right (shows how little of an expert I am in this area) – it’s called Substack. Sorry! Their main competitor that I know of is Buttondown. Some quick searching shows that Substack takes 10% and whatever the credit card fee is for each person, and Buttondown is fee-free for your first 1000 subscribers and $5/month per 1000 subscribers after that.
It could be a way to bridge both. You do the Monday/Friday posts on the newsletter and the Wednesday post on the newsletter and the website. I genuinely don’t know what your market would be like for this kind of thing, but with affiliate links going away, it probably can’t hurt to try. If you find yourself at the point where it’s either “do the blog once a week” or “do the blog once a week and try out the newsletter thing twice a week”, it’s probably at least worth the attempt. On the other hand, you might be making so much in your regular line of business that only doing this once a week would be a welcome relief!
Thanks for the two suggestions.
Lets see how April goes.
What I made here was always so little it was, in accounting speak, immaterial. Thank the Lord for the day job. But the day job is to a large extent dependent on the stock market so that has taken a hit with the worst first quarter ever in history behind us!
My struggle has always been to more properly align the time I spend here bringing you a quality product with some type of compensation to make feel I am not a loser. So the positive emails DO go a long way towards that 🙂 But with the new reality the disconnect is just getting waaaaay too large, therefore starting a twice a week posting. And see how it goes…
No sane person will keep a blog for 7.5 years and pour so much effort in it for what it brings in. This is not a casual posting blog at my free time. This has been a sizeable portion of my every day while turning away numerous opportunities to make a LOT more in my current job. I told you…this is insane!
So you all enjoy it as long as it is alive.
Insane George
Je suis TBB
When all is said and done TBB will be worth more than TPG, which has a lot of fixed costs and a shaky revenue source.
Maybe I should contact Brian Kelly and make him an offer 🙂
An offer to jump the ship and come work for TBB? I doubt he’ll pass HR’s drug screening test.
It has only been a month since PointChaser joined TPG. I have a feeling she’ll be blogging soon again. The burn rate must be massive at TPG. Will the big banks come back with affiliate programs? Marketing $$ is always the first to go in a recession.
TBB has no drug screening. No HR dept either lol.
I had been telling her to have Plan B.
out of curiosity–any place that still sells masks at reasonable price at this time?
No clue, this is not like DansDeals here 🙂
You can get all excited by going to Lowes.com and searching for N95…lots of masks are listed!
Then you will come back to reality when you see that all are OOS.
Why not make/sew your own? These are apparently almost as effective as the “pro” models (made in China).
Just this for now….back with more shortly, but….
“This is a great presentation about the The Economics of a Pandemic: The Case of COVID-19. Many slides. At least look at slide 92. And tells me who is responsible for dropping the ball here!”
The link no longer works. Can’t read anything there. Can ya fix?
Hmm, it works for me. It links to a pdf file in Dropbox. Not sure if you must have Dropbox? Try opening int in a different brower tab? Incognito? I will create a ticket for tech support but…we never had one around here lol
Ok, believe it or not, I turned my laptop off and turned it back on…. It worked! NO idea why!
Crazy times we have. I wish I had even a clue as to what will happen in the next few months only that I hope it ends up only a deep recession and not a Depression.
Scary!
Ok, read all the rest of the good stuff that I wanted. I am set up for all purchases for Amazon to go through your link. I never know how or if it works, but there you have it.
As far as conversions from CCs though, I am pretty much in the same boat as Josh. US Bank? NAH. Barclay? Fergit it. Chase? You’re HOW MANY over 5/24? BofA sort of likes me but it’s a rocky thing. Amex, I thinjk I am on the edge with them and am treating with kid gloves.
Love getting this 3 times a weeek (or more!) but the less you post, it is gonna be the less conversions you get, for saure. Repetition is the key and I think we both know it. Times are a-changin’, as the guy said.
Weekly or bi-weekly newsletter? Yep, that is the way to go. An d set it up so you can write it in bits and pieces until YOU think it is time to send so it is just a little time to put together each day or two.
Whatever you do, as long as it is what YOU want to do and are at peace with, that is the right thing.
>>>>>>>>>>Love getting this 3 times a weeek (or more!) but the less you post, it is gonna be the less conversions you get, for saure. Repetition is the key and I think we both know it.
I used to post daily so I can assure you this is not the case, sad lol.
I will look at the newsletter route one day, hopefully soon. In my to do list…but waaaaay down.
I am at peace with M and F in April.
We see what happens.
Thanks.
The whole “bio-surveillance state” thing is really terrifying — that article you linked didn’t even go into it that deeply. Some of what I have read that is happening in Asia (and elsewhere) is quite Orwellian and deeply disturbing. “Here, we’ll just put this tattoo on your arm to know if you are allowed to move about.” That should send some shivers down your spine.
I sit here happy and healthy, for now, thank God, working from home. But it is hard not to be pessimistic about society from this — either the collapse of health-care/first responders to disease, the economy from disease prevention and the resulting social unrest/revolution, or personal freedoms as a fallout.
I actually had a second article on bio-surveillance stuff, will post it on Friday. It may make you even more depressed…
I think more of this stuff is coming because….at the end of the day, health safety supersedes that. And the article states (if I remember well…I read too much!) we will be okay with it so we can return to…normal. Of course it will be a different normal.
No doubt Public Health will never be short changed again…so I am optimistic we will turn around and come out even better out of this. With Joe Biden at the top…if Trump wins again we are all going to die, he will finish the job!
1. I’ve noticed drew deleted his post about moving to Points Guy.
2. I wonder if Ariana is regretting her decision now that travel has died.
Really? I am going to get the amazing TBB investigative reporting team out to…investigate this!
I would not be shocked. Red Ventures appears to be very numbers oriented. And what they see now is a huge drop in affiliate and advertising revenue and expenses that seem soooooo out of line! Maybe ok for a few weeks, tops a month. If no improvement, they better have their resumes ready.
My two cents
My bad it looks as though drew still has his post up but I do agree with you and also didn’t think about someone else mentioning all the AirBnB properties he was trying to leverage.
Drew is like the Marcus Dupree of blogging. He had all the talent in the world to be better than anyone at this hobby but his creativity and other life choices were to much of a barrier for him to focus.
Now that I think about it I hope he’s not to depressed cause who knows how long this will last and those ‘tools’ he was building for TPG seem prettt damn pointless now don’t they.
I really don’t get it. He went silent for years. Came back, had an audience, and abandoned them within 6 months for TPG. Now with travel dead for moths I wonder how any of this blogging world will recover. Ever since Lucky Doing an enormous amount of trip reports (which I personally don’t mind) people have advanced this hobby to Video travel reviews on you tube and a different type of interacting for content. Blogs are dead this decade in my opinion and the only people who will last will be the ones who didn’t care to monetize in the first place !! Aka you the real winner !!!
Fkc tpg
I agree with most of what you said. I am more sad than everyone seeing Drew part ways with TIF in this manner, by far the most talented blogger in this space who ever blogged and I have been around since the startup Flyertalk days.
As long as the job at RV is there, he will be fine imho.
Me the real winner??????? I had to sit down and not collapse from laughing. Thanks….if I truly cared about monetizing I would be looooooong gone as they say in baseball 🙂
I thought about Drew last night and today. I wondered whether he still has those 10 or so Air BnBs, which I assume were highly leveraged. I hope not-#justcan’twatch..
I think TPG is going to flip over and reappear as something entirely different. #saveourbutts.
I am pondering what value these FF miles will have after the slaughter that’s coming. Is it time to dump the piles of AA, UA and other airline specific miles since cash tickets will likely be cheap in the future, as people will hesitate to get in a metal container with 150 strangers and recirculated air.#notsosoonhombre.
All this certainly got my mind off Ingy. Maybe he’s thinking of what the new CC world will look like and how to goose the system. He was a great hustler and may this is his second act. #howtoseetheSuperBowlfreeusingpointsandnike.
Most of our friends and contacts are still going into stores and such, confident that going in during the hours for high-risk is good enough. I haven’t been indoors anywhere except our home for 20 days. #Playingalltheodds..
And then there’s Buzz and TBB. #nexttime.
I think Ingy can buy back Frugal Travel Guy for peanuts as it appears they have stopped posting…I think.
Yeah, good call on Airbnb’s. Looks like Airbnb (the company) will try to help owners listing their places but if this keeps up…it does not look good. I have a saying “Reaching for leverage kills”. We are in the killing phase now…
Was pissed off yesterday my kids ordered some food and did not choose delivery so I had to go and pick it up. Second trip outside other than Kroger pickup…so many items sold out, including bread, phuuuuck!
Freequent Flier is going to be back blogging more it appears. Drew will not at Travel Is Free as he sold the site to RV. Looks like RV has some room to withstand this as they are a lot more diversified than just travel. Drew is in its IT dept, not TPG so he will be fine for now.
I can not lose my baby here….not that I ever had any offers. Oh wait, Ingy had offered me $100 LOL.
Made a joke about Simon Malls buying Frequent Miler on Twitter, I thought it was harmless. Apparently, Nick did not think so. For the record, I have never done April Fool’s jokes, I always thought they were in bad taste and a stupid tradition…I am weird.
You all enjoy your Friday 🙂
Stay The F_ at home!
Regular reader/lurker here. Going to apply for 1 cc through your link today for some upcoming purchases we have. Need some bonus pts!
I think I’ll still read your blog, even with few posts, as long as you tweet it. 🙂 Thank you!
I will tweet it 🙂
I hope that cc you want is indeed available. They are dropping like flies. Got email today that the Fingerhut affiliate links are gone too…I had no idea they even existed LOL.
Thank you.
I will laugh so hard if you outlast TPG! Which you will!!
If I had just one intern 🙂
To whoever thinks the “any other presidential” would screw it up as badly as Trump
“Trump adviser working with WH officials on messaging for pandemic said Trump “took a gamble” that warmer weather would cause Coronavirus to dissipate, siding with aides pushing back on dire warnings coming from doctors. “He took a gamble and got it wrong,” adviser said.”
The=that
Natural ability to…phuck things up I say…cheers
Another one
“ Last summer, the Trump administration let the contract lapse with the firm maintaining the ventilator stockpile. Now, ventilators are reaching states in disrepair. ”
Don’t forget that the Trump Administration is still actively in court trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Kicking 20 million Americans off their health insurance in the middle of a pandemic sure seems like something no other president could do better too.
The cruelty is the point…
What’s the phrase? It’s a feature, not a bug.