NEW POINTBREAKS, 80K BONUS REMINDER: The new IHG are scheduled to be posted here today. If you don’t know what Pointbreaks are, they are the best use of IHG’s Priority Club loyalty program, wherein you can get hotels for only 5,000 points per night. And as TravelBloggerBuzz reminds us, there is a gray market credit card offer that will get you 80,000 points. This offer is better than any publicly advertised deal, and it’s one I’ve used before. If you work the deal well, it’s an exceptionally valuable bonus.

30,000 MR POINTS FROM AMEX: …But you have to sign up for and use their FX International Payments service. Is this a good deal? I get the sense from FatWallet Financial that it’s not, but take a look for yourself.

FREE COFFEE FROM STARBUCKS: To be specific, it’s $5 for you when you e-gift $5 to someone else. Details here.

NEW BLOG: Big Habitat just started up and there’s some good content there, especially if you’re interested in the reselling game–give it a look!

HOW TO EARN MONEY ONLINE: Trent at The Simple Dollars offers some thoughts on making money by blogging:

First of all, the only way to make money consistently online is to produce a lot of content on a very consistent basis. There’s really no other way to do it with any consistency. Sure, someone might throw a video up on Youtube only to see it go viral and get passed around like crazy, but that type of phenomenon is often completely unexpected and heavily based on luck.

The only way to make it work consistently is to produce content every day – or at least several times a week – and do it over and over and over again. You have to treat it like a second job.

Because you’re going to be doing it so often, you need to either be producing stuff you’re excited about or have an incredible work ethic. Ideally, you’ll be doing both at the same time.

…Second, if you’re concerned about earning money during the first year of putting in consistent effort, you’re better off spending your time doing something like Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk can earn you a few bucks an hour right from the start, so if you’re just wanting to earn a few bucks right now while clicking around, that’s probably a better approach for you.

I can can vouch for that last paragraph–but then again, I haven’t tried very hard to make money. I’ve tried harder than TravelBloggerBuzz, certainly, but not by that much. Given the constraints on my time and energy, my goals for my first year of blogging were to (a) actually make it to the one-year mark, (b) produce decent content that’s not exactly the same as everything else out there, and (c) pick up readers beyond family and friends. Three for three!

The point of all this is, if you’re all about making money, you could probably make some decent money in your first year, but you’ll have to do more than merely churn out content on a regular basis.

In conclusion, Trent writes:

When I suggest to people that they should make Youtube videos or start a website to earn money online, I’m proposing a very long-term side business that takes very little initial cash investment, but a lot of time investment. It’s also a side business that is going to have tiny returns at first and never go beyond that without a great deal of effort, but once the ball starts rolling, it builds on itself very nicely thanks to the “long tail.”

This is why you see some of the mediocre content people complain about with the points-n-miles bloggers. A lot of those posts aren’t necessarily written for you to read, they’re written for the long tail, aka search traffic.

SUCKS TO BE THIS GUY: Since a lot of us credit card hobbyists are, frankly, a bit odd, it’s interesting to see how the rest of world looks at things.

Bamboozled: Man loses credit card rewards for gas purchases over ‘pay at the pump’ technicality

In the summer of 2011, Haines saw another savings opportunity. He read about a cash rewards credit card offered by the Pentagon Federal (PenFed) Credit Union, which promised a 5 percent rebate on purchases of gasoline when you “pay at the pump,” and a 0.25 percent rebate on all other qualified purchases

He signed up.

“In New Jersey, we always paid at the pump,” Haines said. “By that, I mean we would sit in the car while an attendant filled the tank and ran the charge from inside his little booth on the island.”

That’s how it worked at the Fuel10 station on Route 10 in Succasunna, which became a regular stop for Haines. He’d pay using the PenFed credit card.

Fast forward to July 2013.

Haines noticed his account wasn’t being credited 5 percent for the purchases at Fuel10.

Two years without looking at the rewards on a frequently-used credit card! It boggles the mind.