gpapadop

Well, it's like Top 40 music. What is commercial does not necessarily mean that it's high quality. On the contrary, I always liked alternative music lol

ddallas

It looks like he currently only has affiliate links for Barclay's. If you have a store and all you have in stock are turnips, you sell turnips.

jrey

Regardless of what MV true intention is, I feel I learn something new every time I read his post whereas on some other blogs more than half is quite useless/redundant.

ddallas

I agree he has very detailed and useful award booking advice. I think most people would agree on that. The reason he gets dissed a bit on this thread is because of the U.S. Airways affiliate link issue and his deleting comments when people point out a better offer that is not an affiliate link.

fishdance

Citicard links aren't his ref links? If so my apologies.

Scottrick

Having met TPG in person, one of the things I liked about Brian is that he dials down the self-promotion. Maybe it's because he has a publicist to do that for him and he already gets enough attention without having to beg for it.

But in my experience there seems to be an inverse relationship to the popularity of a blog and how annoying they are. Attending the BlogWorld/NMX conference in New York last year was nauseating -- it was all about how many ways you could monetize your blog, search engine optimization, creating and selling email subscriber lists, etc. I ended up ditching most of the sessions to spend time writing instead.

fishdance

Isn't it what its all about? Do you really think its about being good Samaritan?
Im pretty sure Brian outgrew the stage where he edits footer on his blog and instead has one of his "staff" members in Philippines do it.

amolkold

Many new "tricks" involve booking a hidden-city leg with an award redemption for a leg you won't fly, thus saving miles by fulling a round-trip requirement, etc. Despite the miles saved, that's something I'm not prepared to do since award availability has gone down lately. It hurts other FFers who want to redeem their miles legitimately for that unflown route.

That being said, MV does have unique posts, and knowledge is power. (France is bacon).

satz

Another incredibly selfish advice he gave was to book 14 one-night stay if one plans to stay there a few nights and cancel some of them later when the PC Pointbreaks are out if one doesn't have his/her plans set in stone thus preventing others to book some nights

philemer

Folks, let's keep this about blogger 'content' and not personal issues. Last warning. Next person who strays OT may have a short time out.

Scottrick

It's not about being a good Samaritan or not. I was just disappointed with the content of the meeting at BlogWorld. I was hoping to learn more about being a better blogger, balancing time/work demands, and so on.

Instead I was learning how to collect a list of email addresses and sell them to a spammer, how to up-sell my readers, how to create pay walls, how to pay some guy in Africa to give me 1,000 Twitter followers, how to scrape and republish content without writing it, and how to build a blog in six months before selling it to the highest bidder.

Now, I'm all for making money. I enjoy traveling, and I like that I can make a small living writing about it. But the goal is to travel first and make money second. The attitude I got was "How can I squeeze as much money out of my readers and disappear before they notice?"

Astrophsx

Also note that this blogger is giving false information on his blog. They are soliciting people to use their link for the US Air card:

Application Link: US Airways Premier World MasterCard with 40,000 US Airways miles after first purchase

The link takes you to an application that gives 30,000 miles after first purchase and then 10,000 miles after a balance transfer.

MileageUpdate

As a poster of quality FF article links I hope we can discover more writers coming up with their own spin on relevant topics. It makes my job easy when I see post thats short on relevant info and heavy on 4-5 CC links I can rule them out and skip over them quickly.

DCann

I like much of the content on TPG. However, a publicist (i.e. PR firm) doesn't count as staff. Unpaid contributors also don't count as staff.

I did see he hired a managing editor, but the text really doesn't look like it's getting terribly much editing (I was a copy editor in college so I tend to notice any typos or mistakes).

Regardless, it looks like TPG is at least adding some degree of editorial oversite that most others lack so that effort is to be applauded. ^

Minos

And he sleeps in a hostel after flying the A380 in First... So I infer from the content of his posts that the Credit Card referrals must be paying in miles...