At this point the analogy between credit
card affiliate bloggers and hotel booking sites is hopefully obvious: unless special bounties are being offered for certain credit cards, it is much less important to your affiliate blogger which credit card you get than the fact you get credit cards — as many as possible as often as possible.
I like to joke on Twitter about bloggers killing deals, but the simple fact is, most bloggers of any merit are fairly circumspect about deals they believe are fragile, and most credit
card affiliate bloggers either don't know or don't care about real travel hacking deals, since there's no money in it for them.
Not exact matches
Unsurprisingly,
affiliate bloggers tend to resolve that problem in the following way: not only should you apply for IHG's co-branded credit
card, you should also convince your significant other to apply for the
card, so you can take advantage of the
cards» overlapping annual free night awards to book up to 4 consecutive free nights (Frequent Miler ably demonstrates this sleight of hand here).
If I had to choose a
blogger to give
affiliate money to for this
card, I would have given it to him, hands down.
Affiliate blogging creates the opposite result: rather than laying out all the options and weighing them carefully and objectively so that readers can make the decision that works best for them, credit card affiliate links lead to motivated reasoning: since affiliate bloggers don't think of themselves as bad people, but do write blog posts promoting the credit cards that pay them affiliate kickbacks, it's absolutely necessary for them to be emotionally invested, for example, in the absurd notion that the Hyatt credit card annual free night certificate really is the best way to get a hotel room in downtown
Affiliate blogging creates the opposite result: rather than laying out all the options and weighing them carefully and objectively so that readers can make the decision that works best for them, credit
card affiliate links lead to motivated reasoning: since affiliate bloggers don't think of themselves as bad people, but do write blog posts promoting the credit cards that pay them affiliate kickbacks, it's absolutely necessary for them to be emotionally invested, for example, in the absurd notion that the Hyatt credit card annual free night certificate really is the best way to get a hotel room in downtown
affiliate links lead to motivated reasoning: since
affiliate bloggers don't think of themselves as bad people, but do write blog posts promoting the credit cards that pay them affiliate kickbacks, it's absolutely necessary for them to be emotionally invested, for example, in the absurd notion that the Hyatt credit card annual free night certificate really is the best way to get a hotel room in downtown
affiliate bloggers don't think of themselves as bad people, but do write blog posts promoting the credit
cards that pay them
affiliate kickbacks, it's absolutely necessary for them to be emotionally invested, for example, in the absurd notion that the Hyatt credit card annual free night certificate really is the best way to get a hotel room in downtown
affiliate kickbacks, it's absolutely necessary for them to be emotionally invested, for example, in the absurd notion that the Hyatt credit
card annual free night certificate really is the best way to get a hotel room in downtown Seattle.
Of course it sometimes happens that
affiliate bloggers make good points about the benefits of credit
cards.
While plenty of
affiliate bloggers will tell you how easy it is to earn with Chase credit
card signup bonuses, it's also easy to earn through every other method of travel hacking: shopping portals, reselling, manufactured spend, and of course actually booking paid tickets.
Instead of simply going straight to the credit
card issuer's website, or using some
blogger's
affiliate link (watch out!)
If you spent any time following
affiliate bloggers before discovering my blog, you may have signed up for a variety of random credit
cards you don't actually use to manufacture spend.
So when you see other
bloggers push their own
affiliate offers for the
card earning just 40k MR -LSB-...]
It often feels like this is the approach implicitly endorsed by
affiliate bloggers who, in promoting a given credit
card, explain exactly how and where they think you should use the
card's signup bonus.