Wow, I had no idea! I do link back so maybe they will take it easy on me

Frequent Miler is taking all links (referral also now) out of his posts. I'm very very impressed. But I don't think anyone else can do this and get a good income. Why? Because FM is unique in that he IS the source of triple dipping, vanilla bluebirds, debit gift cards with pins, and all that other manufactured spend stuff. MMS might be able to do some stuff, but FM is the only one where nearly every single post will elicit 50+ comments. And he isn't "on top" with daily deals, redemptions, and all that.

It's not surprising that the blogger with the best affiliate link policy is the most unique, and that's the only reason that he can get enough clicks to not put them in posts. For example if TPG stopped posting links in posts, I guess that a significant amount of his clicks are gone (of course I have no idea and I don't have links yet).

Here's the thing though... I like him and his content a lot first of all..

He is sticking with boarding area, and they are posting things beyond his control on the site- Adsense for one, and affiliate links are possible too.

If he really wants to go down this road he should drop BoardingArea and Adsense, if not his posts direct readers to a 30k UA chase card...

At least with affiliates he can control what offer his reader gets to click.

But when your blog becomes your source of income, what is stopping you from focusing mainly on THOSE kind of articles? I'm not saying you are guilty of it, but there are a lot of blogs out there where the content follows the affiliate link demands, not the other way around.

To think that someone would deliberately google a product instead of clicking your affiliate link is quite silly - people want easy to chew content, they won't go through the trouble of de-affiliating them.

There is too much content out there nowadays where you read the article, then have to conclude that it was written not to inform or educate, but to boost income.

Out of curiosity - the list of tablet accessories you wrote about, did it only include products you had actually used yourself?

I often will go google a product through evreward to get the max cashback.

For your question, there were some products that I hadn't used but created the same solution. Eg I am a nexus user and I included an Apple solution to move SD-Tablet so it would suit a wider audience ( but for the same purpose of transferring photos for backup whilst traveling.

http://saverocity.com/blog/essential...en-travelling/

And this is exactly why I think it's hard to judge bloggerse about inferior offers. I'm pretty sure in this case it's not the FM actually knows about the superior link, but rather he's not interested in posting about the newest deals. So with other bloggers that offer inferior links, are they ignorant or tryin to make money?

Well, frankly they should be given the best offers and when they aren't its unfair to them. But once they have the inferior link, what they do with it is up to them.

I think if a comment points out the inferior link it certainly shouldn't be censored out- that's scummy.

As has been stated up thread, when the content is just a cover for filler for affiliate links I stop reading. I now only spend less than a minute on many blogs where I use to spend much more time. I know that type of "hit and run" is being logged and viewed by some one who hopefully may care.

I now spend a lot of time on Frequent Miler and I always go to Wandering Aramean. The other BA blogs do not get a lot of time from me anymore.

Hey, I don't have affiliate links! :P (yet) and even if I do I'm not going to base content on links.

It's really down to quality though.

Even if the sentiment behind content to support an affiliate link if it is done well enough with sufficient value add in the content it is fine. It's just when the content is washy is the blog disparaged.

Ergo it may not be about the links at all, just crap content makes people switch off. Which is perfectly acceptable.

Embedding the links is a must. Too many people read via RSS and never actually visit the site. I for one, can't stand to read *any* of these sites due to the cluttered page full of ads. But that doesn't stop me from getting the content via Google Reader standardized in a format that I like.

Brooklynmatt- I wouldn't worry about what anyone here says about the links. Take the money, and keep up the good work!

I thought this was pretty hilarious to see on BoardingArea today:



Half of these bloggers were promoting the 25K AMEX biz plat a few months ago, no doubt due to the affiliate commission which is reported to be among the highest paid. Unfortunately, anyone who got suckered into that 25K AMEX biz plat would be excluded from this 75K biz gold offer. Just another example of affiliate commissions leading to bad advice. It's mostly about the commission, not necessarily offering the best advice to readers.

EDIT: looks like MJ also chimed in, making it 7 BoardingArea bloggers to post the same thing. I'm sure the potential commission has nothing to do with it, lol.

Read through the blog posts on BoardingArea, it seems each blogger found out from another blogger about the hike in points. I think from what I've seen TPG is the only one who found out from a reader.

This is a story, so fair play to run it. What is amusing is how people rush to get it out - you can imagine people sneaking out of their office / telling daycare to keep the kid for another hour etc - in order to bash out a post :-)

Any other bit of travel news and it would dribble out across blogs over a week.

Reading this thread the only thing I can think of is "the tragedy of the commons".