The basic formula for 75 Swagbucks a day

Swagbucks is a website that gives you points, called "Swagbucks," for doing Internet searches, playing games, watching annoying videos, signing up for services you have no interest in or use for and buying Groupon offers, among other things. You can trade in points for a variety of things, such as baseball cards, CDs, jewelry and electronic gift cards for restaurants and retail stores, as well as online retailers. You can even get cash deposited into your Paypal account.

The best value on the site is the $5 Amazon gift card. You can use your free Amazon credit to purchase anything on its site, as far as I know, including items offered for sale by third parties, not just items stocked and sold by Amazon. If you are willing to waste time on the Swagbucks site every day instead of playing Facebook games, you can earn $25 a month without a ton of effort. This works best if you're the type of person who is on a computer and can access the Internet throughout the day.

My philosophy: If you can average 75 Swagbucks a day, every day, for 30 days, you'll earn $25 in Amazon credit that month. You don't have to earn points every day. If you earn 100 points three days in a row and don't have time to earn points on the fourth day, you're still averaging 75 points a day.

Let's say you find that you can't earn 75 a day, because you just don't have the time and Internet access to do so. Can you earn 38 points in a day? If you can do that, you can earn $25 in Amazon credit in just two months. Do that over the course of a year and you have $150 in free product coming to you from Amazon, and that will make a nice Christmas gift for somebody.

So, how do I recommend earning 75 points a day? Here is my basic template:

Earn 75 points a day by completing these steps. Some days the Swagbucks will come easier than others, but if you can spend some of your computer time clicking back and forth, or can accrue points while watching some sort of mindless TV show or sporting event, it won't be that hard.

1. Find the "daily poll" under the "earn" tab at the top of the screen. Vote every day. Click on anything, just register a vote. I don't even read the question. You get 1 Swagbuck.

2. Find the "NOSO" selection under the "earn" tab at the top of the screen. Click on the red "start earning now" button and then scroll through five screens of offers. Select "no" or "next offer" on each page. When you skip five offers you will have to complete a captcha to earn 2 Swagbucks.

There is also a Swagbucks toolbar you can download. If you use it daily, you get 1 Swagbuck. I'm not interested in adding their toolbar to my browser.

3. Search for anything. The Swagbucks search engine isn't as good as Google. They have too many sponsored links in their search results and don't always give you the best search results on the first page. But use it for simple searches of anything. You will randomly earn Swagbucks for this activity. Occasionally you will earn as few as 6 Swagbucks, but sometimes you'll earn more than 20. They promote Friday as a bonus day for earning, but I don't hit that many big awards on Fridays. And occasionally I'll earn a big reward on another day of the week.

You should be able to earn search points at least three times a day. It has been recommended, and I tend to agree, that you should clear the cookies and/or online history of your browser before trying to earn search points. Clearing all browsing history and data forces you to sign into every website you had been signed into, which is a pain, but most browsers have a way that you can clear cookies from select websites, and I use that function to clear my Swagbucks cookies every day, sometimes four times a day, without ruining my Hotmail log in.

Sometimes a search returns points immediately. Sometimes it takes 4-5 searches. If you don't get a quick payout, and you have cleared your cookies, come back in a minute or two. Also, it seems to help if you click on links from your searches before you come back and try again.

Interested in a recent sports story or news item? Search the term, get the results, click on the "news" menu on the left side of the screen and see what results pop up. Click on one of those links and scan the story before coming back. Or look at a few photos of a celebrity that you just searched for, then start a new search.

I prefer to start new searches from the home page, not the search results page, but to each their own. Find what works for you.

I find that I can earn Swagbucks in as little as five hours after a previous search reward. Do a search in the morning, do one late in the afternoon and perhaps one in the hour or two before you go to bed. If you can squeeze three searches into your day, which isn't tough, you should get rewarded for it.

Sometimes it seems like Swagbucks just doesn't want to pay you off for searching, even though you have cleared the cookies and it has been eight hours since your last search reward. Some days it is just too tough to get three search rewards. Don't spend an hour chasing that reward, move on to something else. Get search wins when you can, but don't spend a lot of time chasing them.

If you do earn three search rewards a day, we'll estimate that you will have earned 25 Swagbucks for your trouble.

4. Watch for bonus codes. Swagbucks gives out bonus codes most days. Not every day, but most days, and sometimes has more than one code. (Occasionally there's a promotion where they give out 60 or 70 points in a day through multiple codes, and those are usually advertised a couple of days in advance.)

Bonus codes may be given through the Swagbucks Twitter or Facebook account, or hints on where to find them may be given on the Swagbucks home page. (Sometimes a code is buried in the Swagbucks site.)

How do you find the codes, which often expire less than two hours after they're given? There are multiple sites dedicated to sharing the codes, which is against Swagbucks policy. If you are found using a code sharing site, your account may be deleted. I have never had a problem with that, however, and thousands of people are using the code sharing sites, I'm far from the only one. So I don't worry about being banned from the Swagbucks site.

My preferred site is sbcodez.com. Multiple people contribute to the site, making sure codes are announced as soon as they are discovered. Everyone using the site avoids referencing their Swagbucks user name or any other telling details about their Swagbucks ID, and you should, too.

You can check the site every day, or you can follow the site on Facebook and Twitter. Following a code sharing site on Facebook would seem to be counter-intuitive, as presumably Swagbucks could determine which of its users follow the code sharing site and then ban them from Swagbucks. I wondered about that too, but the people who anonymously run my preferred code sharing site swear that Swagbucks doesn't go that far in trying to dissuade people from using Swagbucks. Swagbucks is only successful if it has users who are actively engaged in their site. They don't want people cheating by creating multiple accounts, but they don't seem to be too angry that their codes are shared among their loyal users, either.

Let's assume you earn 7 Swagbucks per day by bonus code. At this point we're at 35 daily points, not quite half of what you need for your daily average. What do you do to fill in the gap? There are several things, but today I will note the two most consistent ways to earn another 40 points. There are many other methods, and those will follow in the next article.

5. Earn 10 Swagbucks playing games. There are many ways to earn Swagbucks in 2-point increments by playing the games found under the "earn" tab. This is the simplest way I know how.

After selecting games, scroll down to "Crusher" and select it. Then select "play for free." After enduring an ad, which can be abandoned partway through, the game will load. Start it and fire four or five balls to score a few points by hitting two or more adjoining balls of the same color. After doing this a handful of times you can go back to eBay and continue searching for your World War II airplane models.

When the balls crush down upon you and the game is over, it will ask you if you want to go to the leader board. Click "no thanks" and then click "return to games" in the upper right. Now repeat the process to start Crusher all over again, including the playing of an ad. Every two times you do this, you receive 2 Swagbucks. You can do this 10 times and earn 10 Swagbucks.

It's not the fastest, most efficient way to earn Swagbucks, but if you need 4, 6 or 10 Swagbucks to reach a daily goal, this will help get you there. The important thing to remember: run the ad before each game. And if you don't want to play the game, do this when you're busy with other online activities. It's a bunch of clicks for every 2 Swagbucks, but if you spread it out during the day and don't focus on it, it will take care of itself.

6. Earn 30 or more Swagbucks per day watching videos. The video system will reward you with 3 Swagbucks per every 10 videos you watch. You do not have to actually watch them and you do not have to stream the entire video. You need to play a video for about 45 seconds before it fills your meter in the top right of the screen with another 10 percent of the goal. At that point click on a new video and start the 45-second process all over again. (And go back to whatever it is you're doing on your computer.) When you reach 100 percent, you will earn 3 Swagbucks.

Note: You will often, if not always, have to enter a captcha when your 3 TV bucks are awarded. You have a couple of minutes to do it. They require this because the system use to be set up to stream videos one after another using certain mobile devices, and people could earn 150 Swagbucks a day by streaming videos for four of five hours without having to do a thing. Now you have to click to start every video. I think the daily earnings for TV bucks are capped at 75.

You can only watch a video once per day for credit. There are hundreds of videos across the Swagbucks TV channels, so you won't run out of videos, but make sure you're not running a video you ran five minutes ago.

Earning 30 or more Swagbucks a day via video takes a while, but it's simple if you can bounce back and forth for an hour or more while doing other stuff online. Just don't forget to bounce back quickly when your meter is going to hit 100 percent.

FYI: You can have two windows running games and Swagbucks TV simultaneously, so you might as well do one if you're doing the other. 

That's the basic formula for 75 Swagbucks a day, and it can take a lot of 10-second increments to get there. But there are other ways to earn points and reduce the time spent on daily searches and video streaming. Many days I don't even stream videos or play the games, and I still earn 75 Swagbucks. I will detail those in the next article.

How else do you earn Swagbucks?

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There are many ways to earn Swagbucks each day. Some are better than others, some are easier than others. Here is a list of several ways to net Swagbucks besides the 75-point plan I previously outlined. These are my preferred methods:

• Bonus videos. There are bonus videos offered every day. There are several places to find them. Sometimes they’re on “cards” on the Swagbucks home page. These often provide you with 1 or 2 Swagbucks by clicking on the card and opening a video player, then streaming the video. Sometimes you can earn several Swagbucks from a single video, and occasionally the video player or the on-screen card will offer you another earning opportunity when you finish a video. Sometimes you can stream the same video several times and earn points upon completion of each play. Usually you don’t have to watch the video, most times you can do something else while the video is playing. Occasionally the video will stop playing when you click on another window. That sucks, but it’s a tiny percent of all earning opportunities.

• Referrals. Under tools at the top of the home page is "Invite & Earn." It will help you post invitations to Swagbucks through Facebook, Twitter and email, as well as provide you with the referral link you can copy and paste anywhere. I won't paste my referral link here, since I don't want my account associated with a blog that preaches bending the rules to maximize your earnings. If you are known to be bending the rules or "cheating," you could get your account deactivated, and that's no fun for anyone.
I don't push people to join this site, despite the fact I make more than $25 in rewards per month these days. It takes a lot of bits of time to earn points all month long, and not all of it is passive time. Most people are going to get bored with the concept before they start raking in $25 in rewards per month, so I don't bother trying to recruit people. But occasionally I find somebody who is really interested in what I'm doing, despite the fact I don't talk about it much, and they sign up with my referral link.
The referral gives you matching search rewards, which is a nice benefit. (When your referral wins 10 Swagbucks for a search, you immediately get 10 Swagbucks, too.) There are limits, however. Once your referral earns 1,000 search bucks, you stop getting matching bucks. But that takes some time, and if your referral is dedicated, you'll earn an extra 1,000 bucks over time. And you don't earn matching bucks for anything other than their search wins.
But these can come in handy some days when you're trying to hit a daily goal. 

• Groupon purchases. This isn’t a great earnings opportunity, but Groupon and some other online discount sites are partnered with Swagbucks to reward you for your purchase. If you’re going to buy a Groupon deal, find it on the Swagbucks site under “Daily Deals.” The site doesn’t update the moment Groupon releases a new deal, but it usually has your local offer available to you the same day.

• Complete surveys. Surveys can be frustrating, as they require some attention,and time, but they earn better rewards than most searches. There is a section called “Trusted Surveys” under the earn menu. There are survey options there. Sometimes surveys are promoted on one of the cards on the front page. That can direct you to earnings opportunities. Your Swagbucks inbox at the top of the page, near your Swagbucks total, may include a survey invitation, too. And then there are “Special Offers” under the earn tab. Those offers come from several companies and each company has a variety of surveys to offer. I have had good luck with Peanut Labs surveys, but I get rejected for plenty of their surveys. There are several tips I have for completing surveys, and I’ll go into detail further in a subsequent article.

• Inbox. As noted, you have an inbox, and sometimes the mail delivered is simply an advisory of a special event taking place. Other times it’s an invitation to earn points through joining a Facebook application, streaming a video or completing an offer. Look for opportunities to earn easy points. And if you ever get a 3-point video offer where you click on a link to open a video, then return and click on another link to answer a question about an ad that played before the video, the answer is always “I didn’t see an ad.” I don’t know why, but it always is.

• Special Offers. As noted, there are special offers from several companies, and they contain surveys, video ads and Facebook/website registration opportunities. Some of those opportunities require you to make a purchase, some don’t. I add Facebook applications whenever I can, get the points then delete the application days, hours or minutes after I am credited with the points. I recommend having a junk email address for use with all Swagbucks registration opportunities. You need a valid junk email, as sometimes you have to go to that inbox to respond to an email verification of your registration.

There are other ways to earn points, such as printing coupons through their site and redeeming them at your grocery store. It takes weeks before you receive those points, but few coupons available are coupons that are of value to me, and I don’t have a home printer, so it’s not a practical way to earn points. You can also trade in old video games, consoles and books, but I’ve never given that much consideration, I don’t have much to offer in those categories. You can earn Swagbucks by shopping through online retailers via the Swagbucks website, but I don’t do much online shopping, so I never give that a second thought. There are a few other ways I have not mentioned, but those are the main ones.

Taking surveys

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The surveys offered via Swagbucks can be easy, mindless ways to earn dozens of points, but it can be frustrating trying to qualify for one.

The surveys are looking for certain users, and you never know what the criteria is from one survey to the next. Here are guidelines to taking surveys and increasing your odds of qualifying, based upon general information I have collected. If you insist on being honest and truthful in the completion of all surveys, so be it. I choose to improve my odds. In no particular order:

• Try to be consistent in how you answer questions for every survey you attempt to qualify for. Don’t register to Swagbucks as a 35-year-old man then try to qualify as a 29-year-old woman.

• Always say your income level is high, pick a figure and use it every time you answer a survey. Pretend your income is $90,000 per year and use that consistently. Surveys often have a hard time filling high-income demographics.

• If you don’t have children, you’ll find that a number of surveys will appear to target parents. Consider answering that you have 1 or 2 children, and use nieces or nephews as your guide to what age your children are.

• Watch for leading questions. If it asks if you’re a smoker, chances are it’s a tobacco survey. If it asks if you watch a lot of TV, say you do. Chances are that’s what the survey is about. If you don’t care about identifying yourself as a smoker when you’re not for the sake of an anonymous tobacco survey, say you’re a smoker. I have done that several times.

• Avoid identifying your job. Many surveys innocently ask if you’re in the media, market research or advertising. Chances are you’ll be eliminated if you say you are. Sometimes surveys suggest they’re looking for people from certain professions, then ask if you work in banking, finance, etc. I assume they’re looking to eliminate people in those professions, too. I find the best answer to occupation questions is the “none of these” option.

Sometimes you can spend five minutes on a survey, think you have qualified, then find out you’re disqualified. It’s frustrating. I don’t do surveys every day, but on days when I want to reach a high goal and haven’t had a lot of time to earn Swagbucks, spending 20-30 minutes completing a survey for 60 Swagbucks is worth the trouble if you do it while watching David Letterman.

Daily goals

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Several months ago Swagbucks introduced daily goals, a way to earn bonus swag bucks for your daily earnings. What started as a special promotion became a regular part of the website.

The daily goal: In a box on the right side of the main page is a daily goal meter. It will tell you how close you are to the daily goal. The daily goal has been as low as 40 or 50, and as high as 130, to the best of my recollection. Almost all Swagbucks earned during the day (which starts at 2 a.m. Central Time) count toward the goal. Hit the daily goal and you’ll be eligible for the daily goal bonus, awarded during the first five days of the following month. (The bonus is typically 10 percent of the goal, but occasionally it’s a buck or two higher or lower.)

The monthly goal: Most months there are monthly goals that are based upon how many consecutive days you are able to hit the daily goal. (There was an exception in October 2012 that did not require the total days to be consecutive.)

If you hit the goal for 7 consecutive days, any 7 days, you’ll get 25 Swagbucks next month, in addition to the daily goal bucks you earned during each of those 7 days. (We’ll assume that the daily bonuses average out to 7 Swagbucks per day.) If you hit the goal 7 days in a row, you’ll earn 49 bucks for those 7 days, plus 25 for the monthly bonus. You’ll receive 74 Swagbucks within the first five days of the next month.

If you hit the daily goal 14 days in a row, you’ll get a monthly bonus of 100 Swagbucks. Hit the daily goal any 14 days in a row during the month and you’ll receive approximately 198 Swagbucks for your effort.

Hit the daily goal for 21 consecutive days nets a monthly bonus of 200 Swagbucks, in addition to your daily bonus earnings. That will result in a monthly bonus of approximately 347 Swagbucks.

And finally, if you hit the daily goal for every day of the month, you’ll receive a monthly bonus of 300 in addition to your daily bonus earnings. You’ll receive more than 500 Swagbucks when the bonuses are paid out. That’s more than enough for a $5 Amazon gift card.

Strategy: There’s obviously a benefit to hitting the daily goal, but it can be difficult to hit every day of the month, and if you miss the daily goal on the 15th day of the month, there’s no way you can get more than 100 bonus bucks for the month.

I try to hit at least 14 days in a row, but 21 is my preferred streak. I don’t know if you can earn 25 Swagbucks for two 7-day streaks in the same month, but even if you can earn two 7-day bonuses, that’s 50 Swagbucks. Put together 14 consecutive days and you’ll get 100 Swagbucks.

I figure that I need a break from the daily bonuses now and then, so I don’t kill myself to hit the daily goal every day of the month. If I can hit the goal 21 days in a row I’ll earn plenty of Swagbucks during the streak, and I can count on a bonus of approximately 350 to jumpstart my earnings during the next month. (Bonus Swagbucks do not apply to the daily goal on the day they are applied.)

Keep in mind that if the daily goal is 50 Swagbucks, you can still earn 75 or more during the day, but sometimes you might want to take a break for the rest of the day once you have hit the goal. If I have Saturday evening plans, I’ll make sure I hit the goal early on Saturday so that I don’t have to spend 10 minutes scrounging for Swagbucks at the end of the night. (Weekend/holiday goals tend to be lower than the weekday goals.)

Because the goals are 90, 100 or 110 on some days, if you stop at 50 Swagbucks on a Saturday, the higher days will help you maintain a 75 Swagbucks/day average. 

Tips: Make sure to start earning Swagbucks in the morning with a search win, especially on days when you’ll need to earn 90 or more. If you want to hit the goal, but will be away from a computer much of the day, make some time in the morning or evening to qualify/complete a survey that will boost your total toward the daily goal. I often hit goals of 90 or higher without completing a survey, for the record. But some days I look for a survey because I know I won’t be on the computer much of the day.

If the goal is 90 or higher you may want to take some time to search out offers that pay 25 or 30 Swagbucks by registering for an e-mail newsletter or adding a Facebook application. One of those offers can reduce a 100-point goal by 25 or 30 points in a hurry, allowing you to follow the basic 75-point template in order to reach the day’s goal.

While most offers credit immediately or within seconds, some take minutes, hours or days to credit. When you complete an offer that doesn’t credit on the same day, that’s frustrating, but there’s not much you can do about it other than make sure you find offers that do pay you on the same day and put you over the goal.

Bottom line: The daily goals can help you keep up with the overall goal of averaging 75 Swagbucks a day, and that should make it easier to ensure you receive at least $25 in payouts every month. Yes, some days it will take extra effort and work to reach the daily goal and keep your streak going, but it's a minor nuisance, typically. And which would you rather do, play Wheel of Fortune on Facebook or ensure that you'll have $25 or more in credit coming to you at the end of the month?

How easy is it?

Here’s an example of how easily you can earn $25 in Amazon credit each month, particularly if you use the daily goals as your guide.

In November 2012 I earned more than 2,250 Swagbucks. I started the month on vacation, and didn’t log into the Swagbucks site at all. When I came home from vacation I was busy catching up with life, and didn’t spend a lot of time earning Swagbucks for a few days.

I decided that I would earn a monthly bonus by compiling a streak of 14 consecutive days, so I set out to accomplish that. After two weeks I decided I shouldn’t stop there, not when there were another 100 Swagbucks to earn for another 7 days of work.

So for three weeks of November I made a point to hit the daily goal every day. A few times I stopped as soon as I hit the daily goal and never went back to earn another Swagbuck. A few days I earned 1 more Swagbuck than the daily goal, and several days my total was less than 20 more than the daily goal.

I did overachieve a few times. One day I cashed in on some sort of car insurance offer where I would receive car insurance quotes by phone or email. I accidentally entered the wrong phone number, and used my junk email address when completing the offer. That was an easy 200 Swagbucks on a day when the goal was less than 100.

But most days my earnings were based upon following my basic template. I did a couple of surveys, but most days I reached the goal without one.

So how did I do?

I didn’t earn 2,250 Swagbucks during my 3-week streak, but I came close. I earned more than 2,150. Add in a smattering of Swagbucks I earned during the days prior to my streak, and about 100 Swagbucks for my October daily/monthly goal bonuses, and I topped 2,250 during November. Even if I hadn’t earned one Swagbuck during the first week of November, my October bonuses plus my earnings during my 21-day streak were enough to reach 2,250 in earnings for the month.

My October goal bonuses were low because it was a busy month and I needed a break after several months of ambitious earnings, by the way. Most months I put together a streak of at least 14 days.

So what did we learn?

Three weeks of dedicated earning is nearly enough to earn 2,250 Swagbucks, which can be turned into $25 in Amazon credit. And by hitting the daily goal for 21 consecutive days, I’ll receive about 350 Swagbucks in December, making it even easier for me to get to 2,250 next month.  

84 Swagbucks a day?

Shortly after I committed to building this blog, there was a change in the redemption policies for Swagbucks.

The Amazon gift card was your best value if you ordered it in $5 increments. You were limited to five gift card orders per month, and you could only order two per day, although you should order them as soon as you accumulate enough Swagbucks. There’s no benefit to hoarding your points and ordering them at the end of the month. The sooner you convert your points to a gift card and apply that code to your Amazon account, the better.

With the November 2012 changes, the $5 Amazon gift card is still your best value at 450 Swagbucks per card. You’re still limited to five of those per month, but if you earn a ridiculous amount of Swagbucks in a month, you can order additional gift cards. In the old days the rule was five gift cards per month, period. Now you can order an unlimited number, just no more than five of the $5 Amazon cards.

Those five cards, as you know, cost you 2,250 Swagbucks a month.

The new policy allows you to order other retail cards, and Paypal credit, for 500 Swagbucks per $5 of credit. And that includes Amazon cards. Yes, you’re limited to five of the $5 cards per month for Amazon credit, but you can order a $15 card for 1,500 points in addition to the five $5 cards you should order first. Earn 3,750 points in a month, you can turn that into $40 of Amazon credit.

And more important, at that same rate of 500 Swagbucks per $5 in credit, you can earn Paypal cash. And honestly, unless you know you’re going to order something on Amazon in the near future, why not just take the cash?

There are drawbacks to the new redemption system. We’re offered Amazon gift cards in increments of $15 and $25 for 1,500 and 2,500 Swagbucks, respectively. Paypal however, is offered at the $25 level and higher, although I don’t think that’s a big deal.

If you’re averaging 75 points a day for 30 days, you’ll earn 2,250 Swagbucks, and that will get you $25 in Amazon credit. If you would prefer cash, then all you have to do is earn 84 Swagbucks a day for 30 days. That will give you 2,500+ points, enough to order one $25 Paypal payment.  

There are $5 gift cards for 500 points – including Target, Walmart and CVS – but to me you’re better off saving up 2,500 Swagbucks and getting cash.

I anticipate accumulating some Amazon credits during the year. Yes, I can use my Paypal cash for Amazon orders, but why waste 250 points if I don’t have to in order to earn $25 for an Amazon purchase?

Decide what’s best for you. If you know you’ll use all the Amazon credit you can get, dump your Swagbucks into Amazon gift cards, because you’ll get the most bang for your points. If you’re like me, your goal will be a daily average of 84 Swagbucks, which can then be turned into $25 cash.

It's like a drug

Here’s my December Swagbucks report/analysis, just for fun.

I set out once again to hit a goal of 21 consecutive days, and I started that quest on Dec. 1 so that I’d be done amassing Swagbucks before Christmas and could therefore take it easy for the rest of the year.

I made 21 days in a row and was therefore eligible for approximately 340 bonus Swagbucks in January. But I decided I’d try to find the time to keep hitting the daily goal for the rest of the year. That meant capturing Swagbucks on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, but the daily goals were low those days, so it was relatively easy to hit them all without a significant disruption to my holiday celebrations.

Moral of this story: I hit the daily goal all 31 days, earning the December bonus of 300 Swagbucks and the daily goal bonuses for all 31 days. The total: 540 Swagbucks.

So here we are, a week into January, and I’ve hit all seven daily goals for the new year. Given the bucks I have earned daily, plus the 540 in bonus I was awarded a couple of days ago, puts me at nearly 1,250 in the first week, nearly half way to a $25 Paypal credit. Obviously I won’t earn 1,250 in the next week, but if I can keep the streak up for 21 days, as is my personal goal each month, I’m certain to earn more than 2,500 Swagbucks by Jan. 21, and will have more than 300 in earnings for February.

And once again I suspect I’ll shoot for another 31-day streak to maximize my bonus earnings. That’s because I’m taking some vacation in February and I have no interest in making Swagbucks part of my vacation. My vacation starts Feb. 18, so there’s no way I can hit 21 days in a row next month, the best I can do is 14 days. But even with a vacation week in February and a bonus of about 200 Swagbucks in March, I should still be able to earn enough points for a $25 Paypal credit both months, thanks in part to the fact I’m earning more than 2,500 Swagbucks a month in December and January.

I get obsessive about my daily points, but I have to remember that this is all bonus cash, and it does come at a price. Taking some time off from the site now and then helps recharge the batteries for a few months, and whether I’m ready to or not, I’m going to recharge those batteries for a week in February.  

January assessment

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I swear I’m going to stop doing this, but once again I’ll show how a little obsessiveness pays off.

After hitting the daily goal during every day in December I started January 2013 off the same way, hitting the daily goal. I told myself to hit 21 days in a row, and if it isn’t too much trouble, go for 31 in a row to maximize by bonus earnings.

So, how did I do during the first 21 days of January? I hit the daily goal every day. I also earned 540 Swagbucks for hitting all 31 December goals, 300 for the 31-day streak and 240 for the sum total of the 31 daily bonuses.

In 21 days I earned more than 2,700 Swagbucks, more than enough for a $25 Paypal credit. Take away the 540 bonus bucks in that total and I earned nearly 2,200 Swagbucks. That’s not enough for a Paypal credit, but it’s close, and it’s less than 100 away from five $5 Amazon gift cards at 450 each. Once again I have proved that hitting the daily goal 21 days in a row month after month is enough for $25 in Amazon credit, and nearly enough for $25 in Paypal credit.

It just so happens that Jan. 22 was one of those code bonanza days, where they dole out several codes during the day. Today they awarded 65 points via codes, and I scooped them all up, thanks to the folks at sbcodez.com. It was a relatively easy day as far as the goal: 120 Swagbucks. As if the day wasn’t easy enough, I hit a mega search win, netting more than 30 Swagbucks for one of my searches.

During the day I read on the sbcodez.com chat box that there was a “trusted survey” awarding 250 Swagbucks, and it took less than the 30 minutes it said it would. I went to take a look, found it and tried it. I qualified for it and estimate I put in about 20 minutes of effort on that survey while attending to other trivial tasks at my desk simultaneously. Upon completion it instantly awarded me 250 points. I had topped 400 Swagbucks before the seventh and final code had been revealed.

So after 22 days I have earned more than 3,100 Swagbucks, and I have at least 340 bonus bucks coming to me in February if I do nothing else the rest of the month.

A few observations:

• Hitting the daily goals has been a bit easier lately as I have been the beneficiary of a referral that is active most days. (Hi Leesa!) Some days her search win have helped me hit the daily goal faster, which has allowed me to take the evening off. Sometimes her search wins have saved me the time and trouble of racking up points in small doses through the games and SBTV. And sometimes I end up earning a ridiculous amount of points thanks to a survey, and therefore the matching points I get for her search wings are merely icing on the cake. Having an active referral makes the daily goal much easier to attain on a daily basis. Sadly she’s nearing the referral cap of 1,000 Swagbucks, so I won’t be able to count on her earnings much longer.

• Lately there have been fewer points available throughout the day via 1- and 2-point videos. This is frustrating, as they can make a 90- or 100-point goal much easier to obtain during the day. Not long ago there was a 6-point Best Buy offer that was super easy to complete, and it would allow me to do it up to four times some days. A quick 24-point score makes a 90-point day pretty easy when you get other bonus videos and referral bucks to pad your total.

• On days when I can’t spend all day picking up search points and other miscellaneous offers, I turn to the 60-point surveys. It can be frustrating trying to qualify for one, but I eventually do. Some days I can complete a survey without spending a lot of time, some days it takes to long to get to the end. But on days when you can’t be on the computer all day, if you want to hit the daily goal, it’s worth the extra time in the morning or afternoon to complete one. I have used the daily survey offer on the front page of the site to qualify for a 60-point survey a handful of times already this month, more than I typically do in a month, but it is nice to hit the daily goal on a Saturday morning after earning 60 points via a survey and not having to think about earning points the rest of the month.

• Although not all surveys are aimed at parents, enough of them seem to be. I now have a daughter or two when answering survey questions. I have two young nieces, and now they serve as my children for the sake of surveys.

• Keep checking the “special offers” for easy points from Peanut Labs, SponsorPay and the like. There was an easy one a few days ago SponsorPay that earned 70+ points for registering for some online game. You didn’t have to connect via Facebook, play the game or even confirm an email upon completion of a quick, simple registration. I just signed up using my junk email address and was done. Some folks at sbcodez.com reported it was taking up to five minutes for the points to credit to your account. I received mine in about 30 seconds. Once again I made next to no effort to hit the daily goal. There aren’t always a ton of easy-to-earn offers, but it’s worth taking a look, especially on days when the goal is higher. It’s tempting to leave easy offers for another day when you’ve already hit your goal, but the danger in doing so is that the offer may be gone by the next day. Some offers stick around for days, some are gone within hours. Typically the easier the offer, the faster it disappears.