Alternative Income Sources: Rewards Sites

I happened to be bored the other day while surfing the web, and decided to log into Swagbucks and poke around a bit. I joined Swagbucks months ago, but didn't really get into it at the time. I was also a member of MyPoints for a while, and was somewhat successful with that site as well.

If you don't know what Swagbucks is yet, let me explain. It is a website that rewards you with points (aka Swagbucks, SB) for doing things online. Watching video clips online, searching through their website or their toolbar, playing stupid flash games, completing surveys and polls, or doing tasks. These points can then be used to purchase all kinds of things, including gift cards and Paypal deposits.  Now, it is a fairly simple program, but it's no get-rich-quick scheme. It takes patience and some amount of dedication to keep coming back and using it.

The good news is that Swagbucks seems to have improved quite a bit since the last time I logged in, which gave me a little more hope and inspiration to carry me forward. Swagbucks now has a daily goal, and if you reach this goal you will receive a bonus at the end of the month, if you reach your goal for a week or two or three or even the whole month in a row you will get even more bonus points.  Having a number to shoot for each day is awesome for me, because I can mess around and push myself up to that number, and when I hit it I can just stop. Whew. SwagbucksTV is also a HUGE improvement for me. For every 10 videos on you watch on their site, they will give you 3 points. It's not much, I know. But the videos are like a minute each, and they don't really quiz you or anything at the end. I turn on both of our computers to Swagbucks TV, select random videos on both computers and let them play in the background to rack up the points. Meanwhile, I watch real TV or a movie, read a book, write, or work on homework. It's pretty painless. You can earn  up to 75 points per day with this method, which will take a pretty long time, but it can help you reach your goal. 

Swagbucks has also introduced a new smartphone app that allows you to earn up to 50 points a day for watching videos as well. The app is even better than the website because it is 2 points for every 5 videos, which means you get an extra SB every time you watch 10. PLUS the app will run endlessly on its own, you don't even have to stop what you're doing to select the next video! Just watch for ads, because they play little ads in between the actual videos and if you have a ghetto cheap phone like mine, it gets hung up there sometimes and you do have to hit play again. But for the most part, I turn on the app and let my phone run until the battery dies.

So between these two things you can earn up to 125 SB per day just letting internet videos run while you're doing something else, but that would take a really long time to reach, and I don't typically have that much time to just sit around and wait for the meter to fill up. So there are other ways. Using their search bar to do normal searches on the web will sometimes (it is totally random) award you points. In the past few days of using their search bar I have gotten several wins for 8 SB, 10 SB and I even got one for 47 SB!! They are constantly doing promotions and events that allow you to earn double or triple points for searches, and these go a long way towards hitting your goal as well!!

There are surveys to complete, which they usually give you 50+ points for if you qualify and complete the entire survey. They are nice enough to try to pre-qualify you before you begin so you aren't taking shots in the dark to try and do these things. They also give you a point for each survey that you try but do not qualify for. Plus, they give you points for filling out profile questions. Tasks are usually little internet research jobs that are a little more detailed, but available to give you quite a few points if you have nothing better to do. 

Lastly, Swagbucks releases secret codes usually once a day that are worth free points if you put them in in time. The swagbucks facebook page regularly posts these codes, and gives you a time limit to use them. They can be anywhere from 4-10 points usually. And they work off of referrals, so if you refer someone and that person wins SB using the search bar you automatically get matching points. It pays to have friends sometimes. 

So why such a long post explaining Swagbucks?? Because I can turn these points into deposits to my paypal account. $25 in Paypal costs 2500 points. If I want to make $25/month, I need an average of 83 points per day. The goals that SB sets are generally between 70-110 points, so just by going for the goal I will get pretty close. And why all this work for $25 over the course of the month? Because I am playing on the internet anyways, and it is free money for sitting around. If I just let the SBTV run all day I would more than exceed my goal almost every single day. Surveys help me hit that goal in a fraction of the time. In fact, just the other day I did a 50 point survey that took less than 3 minutes to complete. Bam, done. Either way, minimal effort, and I'm still being rewarded. I am online a lot. I do a lot of research for school and personal curiosity. It is no different using the SB bar than it is using the Google one, except that this way I have a change of winning real money. If I maxed out my SBTV online and on the app every day I would have 125 points per day, and most everything is 500 points = $5 gift card. That means that if I really stayed dedicated to just the TV portion I could get $5 every 4 days without doing anything else at all on the site. 

Why do I care about $25? Because $25 is the minimum payment on our credit card. I don't like making just the minimum payment because it stretches our debt out to absurd lengths and adds all sorts of interest. Instead, I can apply this $25 to the credit card, and I have suddenly doubled my payment. I just saved on interest and sped up the whole repayment process. Our credit cards have very low limits for a reason, and making a $50 payment instead of a $25 payment goes a long ways when the balance is only $300.

But we are also trying to save money and trying not to eat out or spend unnecessary money on things we don't need. If I make $25 this month from doing regular searches on the internet and watching videos, I can buy a movie at the end of the month. Jason and I can get a gift card to a restaurant and maybe even go out. I can get an amazon gift card and put it towards my textbooks for class. I can save up all my gift cards from the year and use them for Christmas presents. There are tons of options on their site!!!  Of course, we are focusing on paying down debt, so the paypal deposit is a highlight for me because I can apply it to something directly. It isn't a huge extra payment, but I am adamant that every single extra penny that goes towards paying off our debt WILL make a difference. I used to make extra payments of only $5-10. $25 is a huge improvement by comparison. 

If I were to make no extra payments on our student loan of $881, it would not be paid off until January of 2016. If I make only a $25 extra payment each month, it will be paid off in May of 2014. That is HUGE!!! I can cut more than a year and a half off of this one loan JUST by playing on the internet and applying the rewards directly to the debt.  So it is a small contribution, but seriously, if you are struggling to find ways to make that extra little payment on your debt each month, consider rewards sites that give you points for surveys and things. There are a lot of them out there, and Swagbucks is just one of the better known ones. This money is not part of your regular income, it isn't anything that you should be depending on to survive, but if you can set aside the time to reach a daily goal, you can give yourself a great boost. 

Oh Yeah! There's no limit. You don't have to shoot for $25. You can shoot for $50 or $100 or only $10. I happened to decide on $25 because it is the smallest denomination that they allow for Paypal deposits right now, but if you are looking for gift cards or other things then there are much smaller numbers as well.  In any case, the more time you have to put into it, the better you will do. And sometimes the stars just happen to align and I make 2-300 points in a single day, while other days I only reach 30-40. It all works out in the end.

And I would be remiss if I didn't include my own referral info here:

http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/LumpyOatmeal