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.