Is everyone excited about the new JetBlue credit card products offered by Barclaycard, fine purveyors of the Hawaiian Airlines® World Elite MasterCard®? It sure seems that way when all of your favorite blogs are suddenly writing about the card. This is a friendly reminder that the activity this week is primarily a sales pitch, not analysis or advice.
I’m not privy to commission schedules, but I’d have to assume a new product is going to have a marketing infusion to get people to write about it, in the form of higher payouts for conversion. The new cards may even be right for you, but think critically about the benefits versus the costs, and don’t take your advice solely from the folks being paid to sell it to you. Look at the annual fee, look at the benefits, and decide whether you come out ahead. What I find interesting is that at the moment, I can’t find a clean link to the cards on Barclaycard’s US site. That may change quickly, or this is possibly a soft launch for affiliate marketers. In fact, of the blogs I scan each morning – ones that I like for their other content, even – are mostly not written by people who even fly JetBlue yet the posts extolling the virtues of these cards were ready to go all right around the same time.
I was able to Google a clean link to a landing page, so if you were considering these, here you are:
I’m not compensated if you click through these, but I couldn’t find them browsing BarclayCard’s site, so I can’t guarantee that no one else is.
Just to be clear, I don’t have a problem with monetizing your content. This site has ads. By all means, earn what you can. Let’s just be clear that sometimes the things that are written about, particularly credit cards, are done so because of the financial incentives offered. If you see an advertorial, consider the financial motivation to paint the product in a positive light.
If you want to avoid affiliate links, you can also go to jetbluemastercard.com and then click on “Learn More” once there to see and apply for the basic card. From there you can scroll down the page and click “Compare Cards” to get the link for the Plus and Business version of the card (also not affiliate links).
Thanks for the heads up. I was wondering why everybody was writing about how great these cards are all of the sudden. I guess I should have put 2 and 2 together.
Truthfully they seem pretty good if you fly JetBlue, normally check a bag and also redeem your points. But it’s a matter of weighing whether you’ll do that enough to get your $99 worth or whatever the annual fee is.
But yeah it’s not as though every blogger woke up last Monday and discovered how good this is. It’s a marketing campaign, and while no one is telling bloggers what to write, there is a financial motive to sell the card. They get paid per conversion. On the flip side, being too critical about a product may get their affiliate relationship terminated. So you won’t see much of that.