Thank You, Blog Readers and American Heroes

I've always thought of this blog as a kind of collaborative project between me and my readers: I love sharing my new schemes and discoveries, and some of my best ideas have been contributed or inspired by readers. Today I want to continue opening the books on the project, and share with the curious some details on the support my readers have provided to the site.

Book Sales

It occasionally comes up in comments that I'm always trying to sell books.

I sure am!

Between the day the book first went on sale on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2013, and December 31, 2013:

• 142 readers bought or borrowed the book through Amazon.com;
• Another 118 people downloaded the book for free during the week-long promotional period I launched the book with;
• I make about $2 per book that's purchased or borrowed, and earned a total of $263.44 from Amazon book sales in 2013.

Signup Links

While I don't have any credit card affiliate links here on the site, there are a few referral links scattered around, and I occasionally get a few dollars from those referrals:

• Plink. 14 referrals; 100 Plink points, worth $1, per referral. $14.
• Uber. 7 referrals (1 complete, 6 pending); $20 Uber credit per referral. $20 ($120 pending).
• TopCashBack. 3 referrals; $10-15 per referral. $35.
• Venmo. 1 referral; $1-5 per referral. $1.
• BigCrumbs. 0 referrals.
• Fat Wallet. 0 referrals.
• Discover it. This is a "refer a friend" signup link for the Discover it card, which is also the only way to get the $50 signup bonus for the card (if you sign up for the card directly there's usually no bonus). 0 referrals.

PayPal Subscriptions

About a month ago, readers who visit the blog's website (rather than using an RSS reader or e-mail subscription) noticed that there was a new box in the righthand column, giving the option of signing up for a "PayPal subscription." As I explained last Friday, this is a way to continue supporting this project by making a small weekly or monthly contribution, if you feel like it's made a difference in your effectiveness playing the game.

• PayPal Subscriptions: 1 (thanks for your support Ben!).

Conclusion

I don't have any terribly exciting conclusions to draw from this data:

• This website is a labor of love, and my main reward is getting feedback from the amazing readers I've been able to help;
• It means an incredible amount to me when readers buy the book, use my signup links, and of course signup for PayPal subscriptions to provide continuing support for the site;
• Keep reading, keep writing comments, and keep the feedback and suggestions coming. The tips and tricks you guys suggest get multiplied through this site and help hundreds of people every day make or save thousands of dollars every year.

So here's to another year of travel hacks: new, old, and crazy! I do hope you'll stick around.

What's a PayPal subscription, anyway?

A few readers have written in to ask about the mysterious box that appeared in the top righthand corner of my blog a few weeks ago. If you get new posts delivered to your e-mail or through an RSS reader, you probably didn't even notice it, but it looks like this:

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If you click on the dropdown box you'll see a few different amounts and frequencies:

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So why did this box appear on the site and what does it mean to you?

The Multinational Free-quent Flyer Empire

First, let's be honest: this site is not a cash cow for me. I'm not throwing a pity party here: I love blogging, I love helping readers, and I love hearing new ideas and datapoints from my readers, all of which is only possible because I have this forum.

On the other hand, it does cost real money to host the site. Some of those costs are offset by book sales, and I want to extend another thank you to all the readers who bought my eBook and those who were kind enough to leave a review on Amazon (even the negative ones)!

At the same time, ever since my short-lived and ill-fated experiment with affiliate links, there haven't been any good ways for readers to directly support the site. Sure, you can sign up for Uber using my link (and thanks to those who did!), and there are a number of other referral links scattered around the site (I get a dollar if you sign up for Venmo!). But that's not the kind of money that pays for monthly hosting fees.

Consider Subscribing

Which brings me to PayPal subscriptions. I got the idea from a podcast I periodically listen to (heck, I even stole the amounts). By choosing one of the amounts and frequencies from the dropdown menu, you can make a small, regular contribution to the site, which I'll use to offset the costs of running it. Naturally, you can make the contribution using a rewards-earning credit card.

So if you've learned anything useful, and especially if you've learned anything lucrative, from this site please consider making a small, regular contribution. It'll go directly towards producing the great content that you know and love, and towards keeping this site uncluttered by intrusive ads, affiliate links, and the other junk that you don't want to see and I don't want to deal with.

Won't you consider making a contribution today?

2013 End-of-Year Accounting

Yesterday I asked my readers what they're curious about in my 2013 year as a travel hacker and blogger, and got a ton of terrific questions.

Meanwhile, I've been counting beans and came up with the following data to share with my readers. There are a few things that need a little explaining, but first, the data:

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That's a lot of information. There are a few obvious questions, but let me get the asterisks out of the way first:

• * I redeemed all but a few hundred of my Ultimate Rewards points as transfers to my United Mileage Plus, Amtrak Guest Rewards, and Marriott Rewards accounts where I earned well over 1 cent per point in value. However, since they're technically redeemable for cash I thought they should be included here. Additionally, 40,000 of these points came from my Sapphire Preferred signup bonus;
• ** I received a 10% rebate on my Barclaycard Arrival redemptions and received a 40,000 mile signup bonus;
• *** Almost all my Flexpoints were redeemed for up to 2 cents each for flight redemptions. However, like Ultimate Rewards points, they can be redeemed for cash at 1 cent each, so I included them here;
• **** Here's the really tricky stuff. For all the rest of my spending related to manufactured spend, I was able to just divide the total fees I paid by the cost of one "unit" of manufactured spend. For example, I paid $67.50 in manufactured spend fees to US Bank Visa Buxx. Since one load costs $2.50, I knew that I had manufactured exactly $13,567.50 in spend using that technique. At Walmart, there are 3 different price points for manufactured spend: $0.70 for $1,000 money orders, $1.00 for bill payments to American Express and Discover, and $1.88 for bill payments to Visa and MasterCard. While it may be theoretically possible for me to figure out how much I manufactured using each technique, in practice, I'm just not willing to go there, since I had so many split transactions: I would literally have to reconstruct every transaction of manufactured spend I made at Walmart this year.
• **** Likewise, MyVanilla Debit transactions at Walmart cost $0.50, but cash advances at banks cost $1.95. It's knowable how much I spend on each technique, but it would simply be a nightmare putting in the work to find out.

Finally, my Bank of America Alaska Airlines debit card poses one final problem: if I buy a $1,000 money order with a MyVanilla Debit card, deposit it in my Bank of America checking account, then make a bill payment with my Alaska Airlines debit card, I earn 500 Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles. But what technique gets the credit for that? The credit card I bought the Vanilla Reload cards with, MyVanilla Debit, or should there an additional category for purely excessive profit (500 Alaska miles for $1.88)? That's not a question with a definite answer, so I'm not going to attempt to venture one here.

Conclusion

Frankly, it was a good year. I took a lot of risks, made a lot of money, traveled a lot of miles, stayed in a lot of great hotels (and one disaster!) and had a really good time learning from my readers.

I hope I helped my readers have a little bit more lucrative and little bit more interesting year than they would have had otherwise.

And I'm looking forward to an exciting new year!

What are my readers curious about?

I'm putting together a year-end summary of my mile-and-point activity, scouring my rewards accounts for data that might be interesting to my readers. So far I've put together a collection of data on the cost of my manufactured spend, my fixed-value points redemptions (i.e. Citi ThankYou student loan rebate checks), and airline and hotel redemptions.

But I can't help but think that there must be specific questions my readers are interested in. What do you want to see included in my year-end summary?

Here's a quick glance at some preliminary data:

• Minimum measurable manufactured spend: $189,755 (for information on why I call this the minimum measurable MS, check back for the complete dataset);
• Cash spent on manufactured spend: $1,554.70;
• Maximum cost per dollar of manufactured spend: $0.0082 (0.82 cents per dollar)
• Value of fixed-value and cash redemptions: $5,435.81;
• Fixed-value and cash balances remaining at EOY: $1,041.89;
• Annual fees paid: $259;
• Minimum cash profit this year: $4,664.

So, what do you want to see included in my year-end summary?

What would you do?

Every once in a while I muster up the strength to visit Million Mile Secrets, who is rightly famous for his circles and arrows , which cause great angst and hilarity in the travel hacking community.

He also has a completely undeserved reputation for ripping off my blog posts, and I won't hear anyone say differently.

I was skimming his 11-part travel reports and exhortations to book Southwest tickets (thanks but no thanks) when I came across this post advertising a $49 guide to travel hacking (only $37, for a limited time only!).

Now, I don't want anyone to accuse me of restraint of trade, so instead of telling you to instead buy my ebook, available through Amazon.com for just $2.99, I thought I'd share my thoughts on what I'd do with the $34.01 I'd thereby save, using techniques that are included in my book and described right here on the blog.

• Load your Nationwide or US Bank Visa Buxx cards with $500 17 or 13 times, respectively. Ultimate Rewards points generated at 1 point per dollar: 8,534 or 6,532;
• Buy 8 Vanilla Reload Network reload cards. 2% cash back: $80.63;
• Buy 11 Vanilla Reload Network reload cards with your PayPal Business Debit MasterCard at 1% cash back, after loading your PayPal account with 11 PayPal My Cash cards bought at a "gas station." Ultimate Rewards points or Flexpoints generated at 2 points per dollar: 11,086.
• Buy 5 PIN-enabled Visa gift cards at a local supermarket. Membership Rewards points generated at 2 points per dollar: 5,060.

How many points would you manufacture on a $34.01 budget? Leave your suggestions in the comments, but Square Cash, Venmo, and Amazon Payments don't count – otherwise Nomadic Matt might get the impression that we were making fun of him.

A quick update on affiliate links & how to support the site

Back in June I wrote a post about being approved for affiliate links through one of the many credit card marketing companies out there. They had a terrible selection of credit cards and signup offers, but their links for the Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard and Discover it cards were as good as the best available offers, so I went ahead and changed my links on this site to those affiliate links.

Long story short, I never made any money, and then they fired me.

I bring this up now because they recently got back in touch with me and told me to remove the links that I had put on various pages and blog posts. Weirdly, it turns out that a large number of the different credit card affiliate marketers on the internet are all owned by the same people, Bankrate.com.

So I removed all those links too.  If you happen to notice any changes to where my links direct you, it's because they should all now point to the applications hosted by the credit card companies themselves (unless there's a better offer available elsewhere).

The affiliate link thing was an interesting experiment, but it was pretty much doomed to fail since there was no way I was ever going to change my website or style in order to secure more signups or meet their requirements for affiliates.

How can you support the site?

This leaves the question of what you can do to support the site, if you're so inclined, and I'll be floating some ideas and asking for feedback as I approach my 1-year anniversary, when I need to decide whether to renew this project for another year.

If you haven't already then you can first and foremost buy or borrow my Kindle ebook, The Free-quent Flyer's Manifesto. If you really can't come up with $2.99 to buy the book, but have an Amazon Prime account, don't worry, I also get a small royalty when the book is borrowed, and it doesn't cost you anything!

If you've already bought or borrowed the ebook, please consider leaving a review. I absolutely love hearing from readers by e-mail and in the comment threads, and it would be terrific if you can share what you think with even more people by leaving a review on Amazon.

Finally, there are a few signup links scattered around the website:

• If you're going to sign up for Plink (you should), you can use my referral link;
• Venmo also offers a small referral credit if you use my link;

Some of the most popular cash back portals offer referral credit as well:

• TopCashBack
• Fat Wallet
• Big Crumbs

Thanks again to everyone who has supported the site. I adore my readers, and hope that together we can keep this project going for a long time to come!

The Second Edition of the Free-quent Flyer's Manifesto is now available!

I could not be more excited to announce that the Second Edition of my eBook, The Free-quent Flyer's Manifesto, is now available through Amazon.com! If you've already purchased the Manifesto, thank you! Your copy should be updated automatically in the next 24-48 hours (although if it's not, let me know, since Amazon is a bit unclear on that point).

 If you haven't purchased a copy yet, here are a few of the many reasons you should consider ordering a copy of the Second Edition:

•  It's the only work of its kind. The Manifesto is a careful compilation of the ins and outs of every major American hotel and airline loyalty program. I parsed the details of earning rates, award charts, and elite status so you don't have to. All you have to do is open it to the relevant page.
•  It helps support this site. If you find the groundbreaking work I do here on the blog useful, and want me to continue reporting on the cutting edge of manufactured spend, credit card application techniques, and maximizing your points haul, there's no better way to support the site than buying the book, leaving a positive review, and recommending it to your friends and family. This website is a labor of love, but it also costs money to maintain, and all the money I earn from eBook sales go straight towards paying my hosting costs.
• It's an instant winner. When I run occasional promotions, for example connecting people with the brief-but-lucrative Google Wallet opportunity to manufacture thousands of points for free , every reader who sent me their Amazon receipt got an instant Google Wallet account and the ability to send money using their rewards-earning credit cards.
• It's never been cheaper.  With the release of the still-groundbreaking Second Edition, I've lowered the price from an exorbitant $4.99 to the eminently reasonable $2.99.

If you've already purchased a copy of the Manifesto,  thank you again! If you haven't yet purchased your own copy, there's never been a better time to do so.

How to follow the blog

A quick housekeeping note. If you read my blog at freequentflyerbook.com, you'll notice a slight change to the right-hand column. It now provides several options to follow the blog and stay up-to-date on all the latest news in the world of travel hacking.

Subscribe by E-mail

First, you can enter your ​e-mail address and receive every blog post in your inbox as soon as it's published. This is typically no more than one post per day, although frequency varies.

Subscribe to the RSS feed

Second, you can enter my RSS feed into your preferred RSS reader and you'll see my blog posts appear there, as well.

Follow me on Twitter

Finally, you can follow me on Twitter, where you can quickly see the title of each post and a link you can follow to read it here on the website.