My final update is posted below. I just wanted to sign on today, May 5, 2016, and let you know that if you want to use the resources of sbcodez.com to help maximize your earnings, it will be worth your time. I have used the site plenty of times. That said, their moderator, "to the left," is the biggest fucking prick in the world. Fact.
And on Dec. 26, 2018, I signed on for giggles, as I hadn't looked at this blog for a long time. Lots of spambots posted comments on my articles during the past two years, I learned. Things have changed at Swagbucks, yet it is still cranking out rewards. I don't use it much any more, but I still cash in occasionally. And "to the left" is still an asshole.
Once again I have signed in, despite not remembering my user email and password. It's April 2, 2020, and SBCodez still provides a lot of info to help you earn Swagbucks and points on other platforms. "to the left" continues to hang around, and continues to be a complete arrogant asshole. But hey, s/he's the queen/king of her/his little world, so I'm sure s/he's very happy acting all superior and shit. What a fuckhead.
Feel free to share this information with others. If I have a new update, I will try to let you know right here, up top.
FINAL UPDATE: (Feb. 21, 2016) This info is a bit outdated. A lot of the basic info still applies, but more than two years ago I had to give up chasing Swagbucks the slow, painful ways. I still picked up the occasional points via searches, but my earnings were tiny on a month-to-month basis.
Then, more than a year after that, I was back at it. Armed with a smart phone, for the first time in my life, I was able to stream videos via six Swagbucks-affiliated apps. People had been doing it for quite some time, I had read, but I had never looked into it, despite the fact I had owned a smart phone for months. Suddenly I was earning points faster than ever, and with less effort than the slow painful ways of 3-4 years ago. I have banked more than a few hundred dollars since May 2015 toward a trip I'm taking in the fall of 2016. It's a great feeling to have many of my expenses paid for already with savings courtesy of Swagbucks.
I created this blog to try to help out the folks I had somewhat recruited to Swagbucks. None of them were that interested, ultimately.
This blog has had its share of hits, but like I said, it's old news, and not that helpful in 2016. I have had no reason to update it, despite the fact I have been very active since September 2014.
But I'll leave my content online, because once or twice a year it's fun for me to look back at this blog and remember how much effort I use to put into trying to earn 75 cents every damn day via Swagbucks.
75 Swagbucks a day
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, October 22, 2012
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.
• 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.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
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.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
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?
Friday, October 19, 2012
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.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
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.
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