I’ll be very interested to see how this equates to new traffic for my website. I mentioned earlier that I gave an interview to the Associated press for an article they were doing on gift cards. That article went live today and the first media to pick it up was msnbc. The links in the article aren’t live (oh, wouldn’t that have been a dream come true), but the site is mentioned 2 times – once in the middle quoting me and once at the very end quoting one of the users from the forums. I’m curious to see if the mentions will create some new traffic to the website.

The other good thing is that it’s an Associated Press article so I assume that many other print and online media will pick it up. I will be following the website numbers over the next few days to see if I can detect any result from it. At the very least, it’s good publicity and hopefully will get our name out to other journalists for more quotes in articles in the future.

As you can probably tell from the article, I’m not a big gift card fan, but I seem to be on the losing end of the battle right now. Gift cards will be the #1 holiday gift this season with shoppers giving an average of just under 5 gift cards away. While they seem like a pretty straight forward gift, redeeming them for exactly what you want can be problematic at times and many do come with hidden fees. Writing a check or giving cash will give the recipient a lot more flexibility to use the money exactly the way they want and possible even invest it for their future instead of being forced to spend it.