Swagbucks & Ebates Tips

Swagbucks – What Is It & How Does It Work?

So, you know that Ebates is my favorite website for saving money, but my (close) second favorite site is Swag Bucks. I’ve been a member of Swag Bucks since the beginning of October, and I’ve earned enough for ***Updated *** $550 in Amazon Gift Cards for free, with just a little effort. Seriously, just a tiny bit.

Winning Swag Bucks allows you to use those points to purchase items in the Swag Store. The best bang for your buck is the $5 Amazon Gift Card at 450 Swag Bucks. You can only get 5 like items a month, so that’s a possible $300 in Amazon Cash per year FOR FREE if you max out every month.

Today, I’m going to give you some tips on how to make the most of Swag Bucks in order to get your FREE Amazon Money too.

First and foremost, Swag Bucks is a search engine. Like Google, you can search for anything and everything. Unlike Google, you get Swag Bucks for random searches throughout the day; usually 4 times a day, separated by a few hours. This is by far the easiest way to earn Swag Bucks, and you’ll win between 7-12 per search. I search in the early morning, just after lunch, early evening and once before bed. You don’t always win on the first search, but keep trying, spell things wrong and take their suggestions, look at different pages of results, go to a page and then hit the back button. After a while, you’ll see it’s kind of predictable when you win. There have been more instances recently of people winning 22, 32, and even 49 per search. Fridays are Mega Swag Bucks Day, where it’s likely you’ll get higher SB for searches. I haven’t really seen it, but there’s the possibility! Make sure you do your 4 searches each day for maximum bucks!!

Other ways to win Swag Bucks:

Daily5: Take the Daily Poll (1),Follow the Path on the NOSO (skip everything, enter the Captcha Puzzle – get 2), Invite a Friend (1), Download the Toolbar and earn 1 SB every day! The toolbar is totally safe, and gives you a quick way to remember to do your searches and earn you bucks. You can search Swag Bucks right from the toolbar. UPDATE September 2011 – They are no longer giving 1 Swagbuck for visiting the Trusted Survey Page. Now, you get 1 Swag Buck for each Survey that you do not qualify for, up to 6 per day!
Complete the Profile Quizzes on the Trusted Survey Page: As a new member, you need to fill out these profiles so that they can get surveys that you will qualify for. These profiles are worth 100 or more Swag Bucks, so it’s a good idea to do them when you are a newbie.
Qualify and Complete a Survey: These seem to be more rare as you use Swag Bucks more, but every once in a while I qualify. You can win 50-200 SB depending on the survey. I once took a survey, got SB, and the company called me for a focus group where I earned $100 cash for 45 minutes of giving my opinions. Sweet! ***Update – I’ve been qualifying a lot more lately. It seems to be about once every few days. Remember, for each survey that you don’t qualify, you get an entry into a Swagstakes for 1,000 Swag Bucks!
Daily Deals: Swagbucks has several Daily Deal sites like Eversave and Tippr. They are under the Daily Deals button. Purchasing these puts you well on the way to getting your Amazon Gift Cards! They used to have Groupon and Living Social on there, but I haven’t seen them on my Daily Deal tab for many months. You’re city may be different!
Swag Bucks TV: You can earn a max of 75 SB a day using SBTV. If you have the toolbar, the easiest way to do it is click on the Watch SBTV button, and it will bring up a little screen that you can push down in the right corner of your screen and hit mute on your computer. You have to click on each video, but after 10 videos, you get 3 SB. I like the E! Channel. The videos are short, about 1 min a piece. I can let it run while I’m blogging!
Special Offers: These are things that you can do to earn SB, but I don’t do many of them. Some of them I think are shady. I generally will do the ones that only require you to like something on Facebook, because after it credits I can unlike it, and I’ve earned 15 SB fairly quickly. If you have a junk e-mail address, you can rack up a lot of SB by signing up for email blasts.
Codes: These are my favorite. Swag Bucks puts out Swag Codes at random times throughout the day. These codes get you anything between 4 and sometimes 20 SB at a time. There’s usually one in the afternoon after lunch, but not always. You’re not supposed to tell people what the code is; you’re supposed to hunt for it. You can check my Swag Bucks Widget here on the blog (that black box on the right with my total in it) to see if there’s an active code. Click the Swag Code button. ***Update – I’ve been trying to keep you posted of active codes on the Blog’s Facebook Fan Page!
Tasks: These are jobs that you can do to earn some major bucks. They take some major time.
Coupons: You can print coupons from Swag Bucks, and you get 10 SB for each redeemed coupon. It takes about 12 weeks to get credited. It’s kind of annoying.
Referrals: When you have a friend sign up through your link, you get matched for their search wins up to 1,000 Swag Bucks.

See, there are lots of ways to earn Swag Bucks. This looks like a lot, but it really doesn’t take very long. If you do your Daily 5 when you do your first search, you can be done in 10 minutes. I try to earn just over 100 Swag Bucks a day. I can do this without referral matches by doing the items above. I always make sure I get my Search Wins and do my Daily 5 every day.

Check the Swag Bucks Facebook Page for hints and clues. There, you’ll see if people have won doubles (won on 2 searches), triples (3 winning searches), quads (4 searches awarded), or even quints (rare). Usually you won’t win doubles or triples unless someone else has, so it’s useless to search until its confirmed on Facebook that there are multiple wins per day. You can usually win right after midnight too. The Facebook Page is also good for hints on Special Offers that are easy and when codes are out (lots of “thanks for the code” comments.

You can only get 2 like items from the Swag Store each day, and 5 like items each month. So if you’re like me, and you only want the $5 Amazon Cards, keep earning your Swag Bucks and roll them to the next month.

Swag Bucks is great, because you can get Amazon money for free with just a little effort, and pay for all of your Christmas presents or use them to get free diapers! What could you do with $300 in Amazon money that you got for free? I think I may save up for an iPad!!

Ebates – How Does It Work?

I think Ebates might just be my favorite site. After all, their slogan is “Where It Pays to Shop Online.” What’s not to like! I’ve been a member since June 2008, and I absolutely love it! I’ve received over $1,400 in quarterly cash back payments, just for buying things I would normally buy. Who doesn’t like money?

My friend Blakely told me about Ebates that June. I was skeptical. I thought it was a scam. I thought it would spam me. She assured me that it wouldn’t. I signed up that month, and I started shopping. I just bought things that I would normally buy, like wedding presents, birthday presents, Christmas presents, clothes; little things here and there.

How Ebates works is simple; they are a web portal. You go here, sign up, then search for the store where you want to order something. Let’s choose Old Navy for 2% cash back. I click on the Old Navy link, and a new window pops up telling me that they are taking me to the Old Navy website. The website I want pops up, and I start shopping! Everything is just like normal. It’s the normal Old Navy website, everything is in the regular place, I can even pay with my regular credit cards. As long as I complete my transaction while on that website, I earn my cash back. At the end of each quarter, Ebates calculates how much cash back you’ve earned in that period, and they write you a check for that amount. Checks are mailed on the 15th of February, May, August, and November for the previous quarter’s cash back amount. That’s it! Super easy right?

Ebates has over 1200 stores; places you’ve heard of and new stores to try out! Each store has a different cash back percentage. Sometimes, Ebates has promotional deals where they raise the cash back for a period of time. They always have a theme where several stores are raised and sometimes doubled or tripled! Right now, there’s a Valentine’s Day Theme, which includes stores like Sephora, Nordstrom, Godiva, FTD, and Blue Nile. There’s also a Daily Double; one store where they double the cash back for one day only. Recently, the Daily Double was Old Navy. Instead of doubling the normal 2%, they did a 20% cash back day! Guess who placed an order?

I’ve been known to purchase gift cards through Ebates to places like Home Depot or Crate & Barrel, and then use those gift cards on planned purchases in the store. That way, I can still shop in the store, but I also get my cash back! You can also do this to budget for a large purchase. For instance, we needed a piece of furniture for under our TV. I found one at Crate & Barrel. I went to Ebates, found Crate & Barrel, and purchased gift cards every time we got paid. When I had enough in gift cards to purchase the console, I went back through Ebates, back to Crate & Barrel, and purchased my furniture! I got my cash back for each gift card, plus the cash back for the console!! That cash back pretty much paid for the tax and shipping on the order!

You can also earn extra cash back by referring your friends. This is the real reason I’m writing this post! You get $5 for each referral that signs up and makes a $20 purchase. Occasionally, they have a special deal where if you refer 3 or more new users, you get $30, or if you refer 500 users, you get an iPad.

Ebates is a great website where you can earn money just by doing what you normally do anyway, buy stuff online! There’s no spam, there’s no scam, just cash back! It makes checking the mailbox fun again! You even earn $5 in Cash or a $10 gift card to Target, Home Depot or more just for signing up and making your first purchase! It’s easy! Sign up today and start earning!