Swagbucks:
EASY way bank up some extra cash for next Christmas!
Thumbs rating: UP!
Swagbucks is something that I signed up for awhile back and didn't pay much attention to it (dumb of me as I could have done even more awesome with my holiday shopping this year had I not given up!). At first I really didn't get it. I stumbled across it during a time when I was only on the internetz occasionally, so after visiting the site a couple of times, I gave up. I believe at the time I only looked at the sweepstakes portion of the rewards section and figured it was a waste of time as I didn't want to use a site where my time was only rewarded with a very slim chance to win prizes. Yeah, my bad! As my interwebz usage started increasing due to my need to coupon and search for deals, I started to see more and more mention of swagbucks. I decided to head back over and give it another go.
I started back up in October, and by the time I was in the swing of things with holiday shopping come mid November, I had already banked up enough to redeem $20 worth of Amazon codes. I redeemed those to snag some pretty sweet deals on gifts for the kids. Since then I have earned enough to redeem another $15 in Amazon codes and that's with a considerable reduction of time spent on there due to the busy nature of the holidays. Plus, once I was done with my Christmas shopping I wasn't in such of a mad rush to bank up.
I'll start with the good stuff and the question that's probably most important, what kind of stuff can you get with what you earn? The answer is pretty much just about anything. For only a few points (swagbucks) you can enter sweepstakes or even donate to charities. While they have gift cards for nearly everything on there, I choose to use my swagbucks for Amazon credit because it's the most bang for your buck.
*My Gift Cards section on Swagbucks (I did it in two transactions as I wanted to see if they were instant rewards. After submitting the first $5 one I then saw that it stated 8-10 business days for you to receive your rewards so I submitted the rest immediately to ensure I got it in time for holiday shopping)
For 450 swagbucks you can get a $5 Amazon credit code sent to your email. A $5 code to other popular retailers costs 500 swagbucks, which is still a good deal if you don't use Amazon. There's even a paypal cashout option, but that doesn't start until 2500 swagbucks for $25. So basically, Amazon credit aside, it's a penny a swagbuck, with a $5 cashout threshold. A great rate in the world of paid tasks and survey sites, plus the low cashout threshold is a bonus.
How do you earn swagbucks? There's lots of different tasks you can do on the site to earn credit. There's a daily poll you can answer for 1 swagbuck, a No Obligation Special Offers (NOSO) path that you click through daily for 2 swagbucks, swagbucks earned for completing surveys, watching videos....many ways to earn. You can also use the site as a gateway to the printable coupon site coupons.com and earn 10 swagbucks for every coupon redeemed, and if you online shop frequently, you can shop through swagbucks and earn swagbucks per dollar spent. You can also earn by using their search bar for your everyday web browsing. Instead of opening your browser and directly typing the webpage in, go to swagbucks and search for where you need to go. You are randomly awarded swagbucks for searches. The site says the amounts are random from 1-1000 but from my experience it generally averages from 6-13 swagbucks. There are lots of ways to earn, but I stick mainly to the search bar, surveys and the daily tasks. It would take a long time to really describe them all, so go check them out for yourself! Also, there's special contests that the site has throughout the year where you can win a few extra SBs.
Swagcode: At least once daily (sometimes multiple times in one day) Swagbucks will release a code that you can enter on the site for bonus swagbucks. These are a varied amount (I just entered one for 14pts today). For the best chance of catching these, like Swagbucks on facebook, as well as like SwagCodez as it's a facebook page dedicated to updating on the latest code. Once released, the code is only good for usually 2 hours or so, so you have to be quick to catch it. It's a great and easy way to add a few points to your daily tally.
I'm sure the next pressing questions you have are: how easy is it to earn credit and how much time do you have to spend to really earn anything? When telling people about swagbucks, I usually tell them this: If you did ONLY the two most basic tasks, the daily poll and click through the NOSO path (it can range from 1 to 5 different offers you have to click through (just choose skip to go to the next one) and quite often there's only one offer to skip) you will spend maybe a half of a minute on the site and earn 3 swagbucks. If you do only this every day, by December 1st (345 days from the time I'm writing this) you will have earned 345x3=1035 Swagbucks + 50 SB bonus on your birthday = 1085 Swagbucks which is good enough for $10 worth of gift cards for holiday shopping. It doesn't sound like much, but that's also for less than a minute of time a day. Now if you take your time commitment and up it by only 1 to 2 minutes to do some searching in their search bar (sometimes you get SBs on your first search, sometimes you have to do many searches to be awarded) and even if you only earned 6 extra swagbucks a day, you are now up to 3155 swagbucks by next holiday shopping season which will get you $30 in gift cards (or $35 in amazon credit). That's just a low ball number too as frequently I get 8 or more SBs on a search.
Currently, swagbucks has a daily goal program where you are given two goal thresholds to hit for the day. It looks like this:
If you reach the goal, you are awarded the qualifying bonus. Above is my first daily goal for today. If I earn 30 SBs today, I will get 3 bonus SBs. Once I hit 30, it switches to my second goal for the day which for today is 90. If I hit that, I will get an additional 9 SBs. You don't get the bonus SBs right away, rather they are awarded monthly, which can make for a nice surprise. Sometimes they start you off at a low goal of 20, sometimes the first goal is ridiculously high like 100 or more. Whenever it starts off at 20 or 30 I try to hit that goal if I have time to. It really doesn't take a whole lot. I just do my few minutes of searches a couple of times throughout the day, do my daily tasks, click through the watch and earn clips, etc. I do surveys whenever I can as well, but you aren't credited right away for them, so surveys will not generally count towards your goal for that day, except for the fact that you do earn 1 SB for every time you do not qualify for a survey (you are limited by the number of times you can get this 1 credit per disqualification credit...I think it's 5 per day).
So as you can see, you don't have to be unemployed with all the free time in the world to make some extra spending money for the holidays on this site. You can be a super busy, working, single mom like me and still manage to make a few bucks towards extra things by taking just a few minutes out of your day.
Just a few minutes a day...and I've already got $15 in Amazon credit for next Christmas :)
-- UPDATE: I've recently downloaded their SBTV mobile app on my android phone and run it every day for easy peasy SBs!! (I do it while I'm at home and connected to my wi-fi so I don't use up a lot of data). All you have to do is keep it running videos and you earn 2 SBs for every 5 that you watch. For the most part it auto plays, but you have to check it every once in awhile as it gets stuck on an ad and you have to click the X to move on. You can earn 32 SBs per day with this app, so I get pretty close to my daily goal by running this app alone! If you can remember to run the app every day, you can earn 960 SBs per month (which is two $5 amazon gift cards)!!
If you decide to give swagbucks a try, sign up here:
I get credit for the referral ;) And if you try it out and love it like I do, use your own link to refer friends and get credit for your own referrals. Good luck, happy earning!
