Sliding Into 2024; A Quick Year in Review

I wasn’t going to write one of these this year, but after looking over some numbers, I felt I had to 😉 

2023 was by far the best year ever for MilesTalk and Your Best Credit Cards.

I am still a one man band on the content side of MilesTalk (and fully independent)!

The blog just about doubled in traffic from 2022, with three quarters of a million views (up from under 400,000 in 2022). Every spare chance I get, I’m writing something!

Remember that I started this as a side hustle in 2016 after hosting that South by Southwest Meetup and it didn’t become a real career until 2022! I chose to pursue what I love and am glad I stuck with it.

Despite having a P3 just under 2 years old, I’m not in any way changing to a “family travel” blog – though I am definitely adding in relevant content from what it’s like traveling with a toddler – which is a whole different kind of travel. But I still find time for my own review oriented flights and trips so you won’t find anything changing (except for some *additional* content on that).

Incidentally, I am pondering if this is the time to finally add someone to help out with content on a part time basis – primarily to cover as much of the day to day breaking news as possible (many of these are “quick hits”) to make sure those that rely on MilesTalk exclusively are never missing anything important.

I’m not quite sure how this would work, but if you are pretty into your miles and points, have great writing skills, and are looking to get your feet wet on an established but still very much growing blog, please reach out! Please note, this would not be suitable for someone looking to write here or there or “as time allows.” I would need someone I can count on regularly if I do this at all. And of course I’d want to see some writing samples. Who knows, maybe there is a fit out there!

The traffic to the blog did dip just a bit in Q4 2023 as my attention was 99% on Your Best Credit Cards 2.0, which I’ll get to below.

The MilesTalk Facebook Group is about to hit 32,000 members, up from ~18,000 at the end of 2022. Not quite double, but just about. I fully expect to clear 60,000 members by the end of the year as we continue to have members organically mention us on other Facebook groups as “the friendliest miles and points group” which we (myself and the moderators – Sarah, A.R., and Jenny) work incredibly hard to stay on top of.

And the crowning achievement was the launch of Your Best Credit Cards 2.0 which took over a year and a half to build and is now a framework from which we will continue to iterate in 2024 based on user and member feedback. Already we offer the absolute easiest way to find your next card, with easy to use filters that erase the cards that don’t have everything you want, whittling it down to only those that do. And, of course, you can enter your spending profile (and save it) to get precise estimated rewards values for each card. 

Without a doubt, the most popular feature so far is our Bonus Offer Notifications, where we email you automatically when one or more cards that you have subscribed to have their bonus offer change.

Here’s an example of that:

The service is free and we are about to double down on this feature with “Transfer Bonus Notifications” so stay tuned and create your free account if you haven’t already!

You can also read all about the main features we offer in Your Best Credit Cards 2.0.

By the way, once you create you account you can easily click one button and be notified when the bonus offer changes on any card that we track – just click on “Notifications” in your account profile and smash that button on top. And yes, we’ll be adding more cards in 2024 🙂

Long story short, 2023 was a great year and 2024 will be even better. As always, I’m grateful to earn a living doing what I love – which is helping all of you 🙂 

Any comments or suggestions on any part of the business are more than welcome in the comments section below (or via DM, etc)!

THANK YOU!

Dave