When I started Frugal Travel guy in October of 2007, I wanted to share my knowledge of how to book discounted travel learned through Flyertalk with friends and family, and if the opportunity arose, generate some income from online advertising. That opportunity arose in early 2008 when I was the first travel blogger approved to offer the Starwood Preferred Guest card links on a travel blog. My first commission was under $50 for an SPG card and the number of readers generating discounted travel with credit card sign ups have grown from that date forward.

Just for fun, we went back and looked at the number of credit card applications approved through links on Frugal Travel Guy since its inception and used a conservative base number for the number of points or miles that would be awarded per application. Based on our calculations of approvals, I’m confident in saying that 750 million miles and points have been generated from credit card sign ups. And that’s only from folks using our trackable affiliate links, not the non-affiliate links we include. When you add in the non-affiliate estimate, I feel safe in assuming that over 1 BILLION MILES have been generated for travel from readers of the Frugal Travel guy blog. That is a whole lot of travel for taxes only and I’m so happy for all of you that have benefited from what we have been doing here.