Points and deals update, foot in mouth

1) Via The points guy, get 30 percent off on IHG properties on certain dates. Could be of interest if you are working on IHG Big Win. Read more HERE

2) I mentioned in my “Rio challenge” post that Alaska Airlines Visa Signature comes with 25000 miles bonus. Turns out, there is an offer for 30000 miles upon approval, that was mentioned on View from the wing blog. Pays no commission and you can apply for it HERE 

3) US Bank Flexperks Visa bonus is confirmed to be a little over 30000 points (once you meet minimum spend), good for up to $600 flight. Read more about it in my “Best deals” page.

4) Stay 2 nights, get one free night at Choice hotels. Read more on it HERE

5) Frontier offers a discount of 10 percent on flights  with a code PLAYBALL if you book by February 26th.

6) MMS blog reports that there is CITI Hilton Reserve card with a $100 statement credit for valid Hilton bookings. That offer is better than the one, that pays me commission. Here is the LINK

If you haven’t noticed from my blog, I suffer  from a case of “foot in mouth” desease. It’s an incurable condition. Anyway, I wrote a post on my blogging lessons a few weeks ago. In it I claimed that most top bloggers happened to be “in the right place at the right time”, as far as monetization is concerned, by starting  when they did. A few days later I saw a post on “One mile at a time”, where Ben (who also goes by Lucky) said that he blogged for 2 years without making a dime from it. I know he reads my crazy site, so maybe it was inspired by my rant. Or not?

Regardless, I thought I needed to clarify what I said. First, Ben is an incredibly talented and prolific blogger and deserves his success a 100 percent. He worked his butt off to be where he is.  His trip reports are not my cup of tea, but I’m not really one of his target readers and they sure seem to enjoy them. They even affectionately refer to them as “travel porn”! Say what?

Frankly, I don’t think any top bloggers started doing it for the money. I doubt, in their wildest dreams they imagined it would pay the bills eventually. In fact, if commission went away tomorrow, most would probably still be blogging away. Though, maybe not writing 10 posts per day. 🙂

What I meant was, that now is quite possibly the worst time to get into blogging mostly for the money. This is a very tiny community and everyone has their favorites at this point. Also, I doubt, there is much growth potential as far as readership number  is concerned, to sustain another blogger financially.

Most importantly, I don’t see the banks paying anything close to the current level of commission few years from now. There is a reason, Gary Leff and Daraius are not quitting their day jobs. I sure wouldn’t. I just wanted to give my opinion on the prospects of making travel blogging a full-time job at this point in time.

Bottom line: Lucky (or any other top blogger for that matter) didn’t get lucky, when it comes to their success.