Frequent Miler on the Air - Frequent Miler origin story - Greg's story | Coffee Break Ep09 | 4-30-24

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Today's Coffee Break episode was inspired by a recent email we got asking... how did Frequent Miler get started? Since our Coffee Break episodes are 20 minutes or less, we started but telling Greg's side of the Frequent Miler origin story. (01:47) - in 2011 Greg first learned about this points and miles hobby when his current employer at the time issued a "no travel" decree... (04:22) - Greg started a blog for his friends...because it was easier then emailing everyone about what he'd learned. (05:29) - Greg almost immediately became intrigued with stacking opportunities. (07:06) - Greg was also very focused on increasing spend on his credit card which he later learned was called "manufactured spending." (08:17) - Before long, Randy of Boarding Area discovered Greg and invited him to join. (10:38) - Greg meets some other Boarding Area bloggers and learns how to monetize his blog. (14:15) - In early 2012 Greg's "real job" restructures and he gets laid off, inspiring him to set an earnings goal for the blog. (16:02) - Greg discovers Vanilla Reload cards... Visit here to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. You’ll find all other Frequent Miler on the Air episodes here. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads  

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's Coffee Break episode is the frequent miler origin story. So this was inspired by an email we received from Tracy. Tracy said,

I've been following the FM team for a few years, and I'm curious about the history from Greg's perspective. I'm assuming he's the founder. Yes, Tracy, he is. Did you start with a blog? What was your vision when you started? How did you grow? Where does one take out a help wanted effective. I'm assuming he's the founder. Yes, Tracy, he is. Did you start with a blog? What was your vision when you started? How did you grow? Where does one take out a help wanted ad for a smart, articulate, adventurous Points and Miles enthusiast who's into hats? Your check is in the mail, Tracy. FM team is the best. I love the Points and Miles hobby and couldn't do it without you. I also love to be entertained and you provide plenty of that as well. Thank you for the ego boost, Tracy. So Tracy's questions though, I thought were really good because I know some of

the frequent miler origin story, but I don't know all of it. So Greg, what's up? How did this all get started? Yeah, I'll dive into that a second, but first I have to explain in case people don't know, Nick is famous for wearing fedoras so when she when she mentioned a points and miles specialist who's into hats she may have been talking about maybe i mean tim wears some cool hats too i mean tim wore hats everybody wore hats steven wore even a hat on our party five trip he did so she could have been referring to anyone but but my bet is it might have been Nick. Anyway, yeah. So Frequent Miler back in 2011 is when I learned about the hobby at all. So I used to be a software developer.

I had moved up into management and other things. At the time, my title was something like VP of Technology Strategy or Senior Director of Technology Strategy. I don't know. It doesn't really matter. But the company I worked for had issued a no travel decree. I had been traveling quite a bit, both personally, but also for the job, not usually to see customers, but usually to go to different offices around the country to talk to the development teams in those offices. And I liked my Delta Gold status that I had earned through that travel. So when this was like the tail end of the recession, the company was trying to save money. When they said no more

travel for these kinds of things, I started Googling like, well, how can I get my gold status without flying so much? And that's when I discovered this whole world, this hobby, points and miles. People used to call it travel hacking. And I fell for it and fell for it hard. So there was a forum thing. There was Flyer Talk, which is still around. And there was another one called Milepoint at the time. I don't think it really exists anymore. But I got heavy into those and heavy into the blogs that existed at the time. There was Frugal Travel Guy was a really big blog at the time. Million Mile Secrets had Guy was a really big blog at the time. Million Mile Secrets had just come out and was really big. The Points Guy had come out,

I don't know, six months earlier and was really big. Then of course, some standbys that are still some of my favorites, like One Mile a Time, View from the Wing were big at the time and are still really big. And I just read everything. I consumed everything like I was starving. And I started signing up for credit cards weeks after reading everything I could find. My family went on our first trip with the Points and Miles. So I think I started the hobby in June or July. And we did our first big points and miles trip to England in August, flew business all my friends and family members who I thought would be interested about it. But I realized that it would be hard to send emails and answer questions through emails

because I'd be getting a lot of questions that are different from different people and trying to keep a common thread would be impossible. So I thought, all right, I'll just start a blog where I just tell people the basics. And here's how easy it is to do this. So that was the original idea. And that's why I set up Frequent Miler as a blog originally. Wow, that's pretty wild. So I mean, to start from there and end up where we are, there had to have been a few steps in between. So all right, you set this up as sort of like a side thing, a hobby in order to teach your friends and family about it. So I'm

curious about two things now. I'm curious, number one, at what point was it not just like friends and family reading it? Like what happened there that became a lot more than just friends and family reading it? And I'm equally curious, of course, at what point it became like not just a hobby thing, but a career. Yeah. Okay. Firstly, I need to say something, which is that maybe the first post may have been that very basic, like teach people about things. But by the second post, I had diverted from that approach altogether. One of the things that really caught my imagination was reading about stacking opportunities. And I remember in particular, there was a deal going on at the time with Hyatt, where if you signed up for a Hyatt credit card,

you'd get, I think it was two free nights. And if you had top tier status, you would get two free nights and sweets. And so what some blogs wrote about was how you could sign up for the Hyatt challenge. At the time, you would get instant top tier status by just signing up for the free challenge and then sign up for the cart. And then get the two suites, regardless of whether you meet the challenge or not. And I just love that. Like it was so eye-opening to me that there's like ways of tricking the system, you know, to get even better than is intended. So that was like a long way of saying so the the entire focus of the blog shifted really before it began yeah to to really stacking opportunities for stacking you know i started writing about going through

portals to buy gift cards and then using those gift cards by going through portals again and you know double dipping that way that that sort of thing i started writing about that stuff pretty early and another thing i did different from most people people had to do with the origin. So remember, I wanted to keep my Delta status. And Delta was and continues to be an airline where you can earn high-level status just through credit card spend. So my whole focus early on was like, well, how do I increase credit card spend without really increasing my spend? And so I would write about the things I would discover that I don't think I knew at the time that people referred to it as manufactured spend, but that's what they call it. And anyway,

so those were the two sort of focus areas, which are so far from the original idea of making it easy. Right. That's not a beginner thing really at all. You just start to explain the hobby to somebody and you're like, yeah, you just go out and you buy $50,000 in gift cards and boom, you got status or whatever it was at the time. There's a big jump in between there. There's a big jump. In fact, I diverted so far that there were places in the blog I'd say, oh, if you want the basics, go over to Frugal Travel Guy or The Points Guy or whatever, read it there. So anyway, so that's where I started. And it was just a hobby. I didn't think there was any money possibilities in it. But what happened to expand the audience right away was

I was on Milepoint, the forum I mentioned. And one of the ways of spending money and getting it back is through Kiva, where you can make microloans and you can have the potential to get all your money back, even though you made those loans with a credit card. And so I was somewhat active on the Milepoint Kiva forum. And I shared the blog on there. I said to people something like, I'll make a loan for every person who retweets my posts. It was something like that. I'll make another loan. And so a lot of people did. But Randy Peterson, who runs Boarding Area, was on there. And he reached out to me and asked if I wanted to put my blog on boarding area, which was absolutely massive, huge. I mean, boarding area

is it's, it's really just a hosting platform for a lot of miles and points blogs, but it's, it's also famous within the community. It's like a place you could go to get all kinds of, to get all the, the most of the best blogs on there and they have their own like newsletter and homepage and stuff that people go to. So as soon as I was on there, all of a sudden I went from, you know, a dozen readers to thousands of readers. So, you know, that made all the difference in the world. And so that that's so that was really how I got an initial audience. And then it turned out that a lot of boarding area readers really enjoy that complex stuff. And so a bunch of readers started seeing, oh, Frequent Mileage writing some really cool stuff. The audience expanded pretty rapidly from there.

That's awesome. That's amazing. So how long was it until you... Well, first... So okay. All right. You said that you started it and you didn't really even have any thought that it could be something that could earn a living, right? So how did we go from there to... All right. You had dozens of people reading and then all of a sudden you got thousands of people reading. And so how did it end up becoming something that makes money? And you were like, oh, this, well, I mean, it has to first go to like, oh, this is kind of cool. And it's a side thing to then like, oh, this is a full-time thing. Like how did that progression happen? Yeah. I honestly did not think it was possible to make significant money with a blog. It never occurred to me when I

started the thing. I knew about advertising, but I figured, okay, you could get 10 cents here or there. How would that be any use? Randy from Boarding Area, he offered to send Boarding Area bloggers to Blog World or something. I can't remember what it was called in New York City. And this was still in 2011. So fall, late fall, early winter, maybe of 2011. And so I met several other boarding area bloggers there, including one was Jen from Deals We Like. And Jen, I don't think it was at this thing, but later on, Jen told me about credit card affiliate links and how you could get paid when people click through to sign up for credit cards. And that was surprising because, you know, I mean, I'm already, I'd already been telling people, here's a great, easy way to sign, you know, to get points and miles quickly.

I mean, it was, it's, that's what I was personally doing to get points and miles. So, wow, just by sharing, you know, these, these links, I could, I could make money. And so, so I started doing that. The very first post or two was, was really designed around this idea of like getting people to sign up for links and like, Hey, if you want to go to Hawaii, you could sign up for this card and this card, and you'd have all the points you need. And I hated that. Like, like I immediately hated it. I was like, Oh, I feel like a salesperson. I don't want to do that. So I decided that I don't need the money. I had a full-time job, a great job. I will just share credit card links on a separate page at the money. I had a full-time job, a great job. I will just share credit card links

on a separate page. At the time, I never referred to cards in posts. I just had a separate page where if people wanted to support the blog, they could go over there, click through. I didn't put on the links if they weren't the best offer I knew about. And so that's how the best first page kind of started was from that idea of having a separate page where my links are. And if you want to help out, you can go over there. And of course, let's continue to this day where we will not put credit card links. We will not put any credit card links on the site that aren't the best public offers we're aware of. And so probably, I don't know, four out of five times we're not getting paid for the links that are up there. One thing that's changed over the years is I eventually started referring to credit cards

within posts because I realized at some point it was dumb. If people wanted to learn more about the credit card that would help with whatever I was writing about, why make them like go find another page when I could just link to it right there? I just wouldn't put the affiliate links right in the posts. And that has continued to this day as well. And that's a pretty unique thing about Frequent Miler that there are not affiliate links within any of our posts. If you want to use one of our affiliate links, you still have to go to the best offers page and find the credit card specific page to click through. And like you said, probably four out of five times.

If you take the overall numbers on our best offers page, it's not an affiliate link. So most of those are not, but some obviously are. So, all right. So you said, okay, I don't need the money from this. I got a job. So we'll just create this separate page that people can go to if they want to support the blog. And I mean, doing the math here, we've got two full-time employees two part-time employees it seems like quite a few people must have clicked on that separate page over time so like how did

that all go down yeah all right so in in january and february of 2012 i saw rapid growth in the blog i saw some people signing up for credit cards and maybe like a thousand dollars or so, not yet in the bank, but promised by the affiliate company. And I had already told my boss, I wasn't happy with my current job. I said, you know, if it's possible to get a package or something, I'd want to consider it. Anyway, the company restructured and I was given a choice, apply for another job within the company or basically you're fired. I mean, it was said much nicer than that, but it was super cool losing my job that way because I had about eight months of severance. So-

A nice cushion. Yeah, a nice cushion. So I went home, my wife and son, and said, hey, I know we're not really making money yet with the blog, but I think it's going to do well. I'm not going to apply for another job. I'm going to do this. And my wife's face turns ashen.

And she's like, don't you think you should like look around a little bit? And so literally on a napkin, I came up with a plan. I said, I said, look, currently making this much, you know, a high number. We don't really need that much. So a target is like this much, a lower number. And I said, all right, over the next eight months, let's see if we can get sort of one eighth of the way there the first month and two eighths of the way there in the second month and so on. Or you could say a quarter of the way there in the second month, if you want to be particular. We won't make you do whatever you call that now, reducing the frag camera or what working for Future with that company. I found something called Vanilla Reload Cards at Office Depot. And that was super exciting because you were able to buy them with a credit card at the time the ink i think it was called the ink bold at the time but it it offered five points per dollar for office supply purchases so that counted and it was kind of like buying money and getting five

points per dollar just buying money i mean and it was it was super, a super big find. I posted about it and the post was huge, biggest post by far at that time. And actually for years, it was the biggest post by far. And it happened that the Inkbold had a really big affiliate payout. So I made the target amount in like May. So nevermind eight months. All right.

So that's Greg's Frequent Miler origin story. On a future Coffee Break episode. We'll talk about the origin of the rest of the team. But that wraps us up for today. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe.

And don't forget to check out our Frequent Miler on the air, full length episodes dropping every Friday. Bye everybody.