In this post, I’m going to talk about Swagbucks.com – a website
that allows you to earn gift cards for performing simple tasks by trading in
the Swagbucks you’ve earned (Swagbucks are the website’s currency). In the
online work-from-home community, Swagbucks is known for being one of the most
reliable sites out there. There are
essentially five main ways to earn gift cards on Swagbucks and none of them are
going to be powerful enough for you to quit your day job, but they will give
you some extra spending money. I earn a little over $100 a month through
Swagbucks on average and I use this to pay for most of the stuff I buy on
Amazon. Some months are better than others and I’ve seen reports of people
earning as much as $800 a month on Swagbucks but that is almost certainly not
the norm and requires a significant time investment due to diminishing returns. I spend maybe 30-45
minutes each day so when you break this down on an hourly basis my earnings
come out to less than $6//hr. For many people this makes Swagbucks not worth
their time, but since I use it during my downtime at my day job I don’t mind
the low payout rate (its a good way to kill time and I'm already in front of a computer). Even if you don’t think you’ll use the site very often
it’s probably worth signing up for anyways. They offer some really good deals
every now and then and there also some good ways to churn your credit cards
through the shopping portal.
So let’s breakdown the five main ways to earn with
Swagbucks:
Earn Method 1:
The first method we’ll discuss and the one I use most often is surveys.
Swagbucks offers many surveys to their users and in return, the users earn
Swagbucks currency. The payouts are not large, typically a 15-20 minute survey
will earn you 80-100 Swagbucks (with 100SB = $1). Both the survey payout and
estimated time it takes to complete can vary pretty wildly. I’ve gotten 1000SB's ($10) for a 5 minute survey before but this is extremely rare. There are a few
things you can do to make your survey payouts higher:
1.
First and
foremost, you’ll want to always answer your surveys truthfully. I’ve read
stories of people who pretended to be an elderly Latino woman because certain
demographics get better survey opportunities. But this means you would have to
answer every survey you take as if you were an elderly Latino woman because
Swagbucks and their partners will track the consistency of the answers you fill
in on these surveys. If in Survey-A you claimed that your profession was a
police officer but in Survey-B you said you’re actually a nurse practitioner,
they are going to see these inconsistencies and eventually ban your account. So
always be honest with your answers. Or at the very least, always be consistent
(but seriously I recommend honesty).
2.
You also get a
few extra Swagbucks for meeting a daily minimum goal (which changes each day
but is usually between 100-200 SB). If you reach your daily goal, you are
rewarded with a few extra SB. If you hit your daily goal seven days in a row
you are rewarded a streak bonus. There are four streaks you can hit in a month
and the reward is higher for hitting each one. So you’ll want to hit the daily
goal each day of each month in order to get all the streak bonuses and maximize
your earnings. This shouldn’t be too difficult if you complete 3 surveys each
day. By the end of the month, the daily and streak bonuses will end up being
around 800-1100SB’s (~$8-11) assuming you hit the daily goal each day.
3.
Third, there are
some surveys that will qualify you for special studies or in-home product tests.
Sometimes this can mean a half-hour phone call. Sometimes it will take place in
an online forum. It might also take place in person (if it’s a medical study
this is pretty likely). If you receive an opportunity like this, the payout is
usually quite high. For instance, I qualified for an online study about gaming.
I had to login each day for five days and answer a handful of questions about
my gaming habits. I ended up with $150 for maybe two hours of work. If you
factor in these opportunities, surveys can actually be pretty lucrative. Though
I would like to mention that you won’t see these very often. I receive an
invitation to a study very rarely, maybe 1 out of every 100 surveys. In-home
product tests are more frequent but less lucrative. You might end up with a
12-pack of some new flavor of soda or a new hair-care product.
Earn Method 2:
The second way of earning is to watch videos. I never do this because the
payouts are insanely low and the videos they make you watch buffer slowly and
are littered with advertisements. They also slow down my browser. From what
I’ve read, there are people who pretty much only watch videos and think surveys
are a waste of time so to each their own. The only effective way of earning
through videos that I know of is to setup a “device-farm”, a.k.a buy a dozen of
the cheapest cell phones you can find and have them each set to play the
Swagbucks (and similar sites’) videos all day and night. Best case, each device
would earn you 10 SB/hr. The main issue with this is you often have to interact
with the video playlist (click on the screen and hit next) to keep it going so
it’s not a passive way of earning. I don’t see this being a realistic option
for people with a 9-5 job, but if you work at home and don’t mind maintaining
10+ mobile devices this can earn you about $1/hr.
Like I said before, I don’t
think watching videos is worth my time but if you can figure out a way to make
the videos run 24/7, completely passively, then I don’t see why you shouldn’t.
Earn Method 3:
The third way of earning we’ll talk about is by completing the “Discover”
offers. Swagbucks has many partners who will pay you to complete all sorts of
offers. We can probably break the offers down into a few different categories:
1.
Offers that require basic info such as email address,
name, address, birthdate, etc: These
are usually pretty quick and the payouts range from 5-40 SB. There aren’t a ton
of these and they can be very hit or miss in that they don’t always credit the
promised payout. One partner in particular that I would recommend staying away
from is Lifescript. I have completed maybe 10+ offers from Lifescript and never
received a single payout.
2.
Offers that require a download (usually a smartphone
app): I generally stay away from
offers that want me to download something. It’s tough to justify a payout that
equates to less than $0.50 in exchange for the off-chance the download is
malicious. That said, downloads are usually one of two types.
a.
The first are
apps that are simply trying to build a user base. More often than not these are
mobile games. These have low payouts (usually single digit SB’s) and some will
even require you to reach a certain in-game threshold (level 5 for instance)
which can be quite time-consuming. The time required to earn these small amounts makes app downloads usually not worth it for me.
b.
The second are
apps that want to track your data. Things like what websites you visit and how
you use your phone, possibly even your text messages. I vehemently recommend
against downloading such apps. They often try to lure you in with payouts in
the 300-500 SB per month range. But, you will be foregoing your privacy. If I
could put a dollar amount on selling my privacy it is much, much higher than
$3-5 per month. Even if you don’t value your privacy now, you might someday
down the road. So again, I would advise against these.
3.
Offers for free trials/samples of a product or
service: There are lots of offers for
free trials and free samples on Swagbucks. The free samples are extremely unreliable.
Often they will ask you to provide basic info which includes an address so that
they can send you a free sample of whatever it is they are marketing (most
often it seems to be haircare and beauty products). I’d guesstimate that 95% of
the time you are not going to receive the free sample and instead will be
victim to a barrage of spam emails (looking at you, Lifescript). For this
reason I now completely ignore “free sample” offers.
I’ve had much better luck with free trial
offers. So far I’ve received a free month of Hulu, free Uber ride credits, and
a free credit monitoring app that alerts me any time there are changes on my
credit report. None of these cost me anything so it was nice to receive some
Swagbucks for products and services I wanted to try out anyways (Hulu and
Uber). But I would also like to caution that there are definitely some sketchy
free trials. I’ve seen offers that claimed to be free but they wanted me to provide
a credit card. If it’s truly a free offer, then they wouldn’t ask for a credit
card. I just close the page anytime I come across these.
I also participated in an offer to become
a driver for Uber. I ended up with 750 SB’s (~$7.50) just for providing them
with valid information and applying to be a driver. Then I received 8,000 SB’s
(~$80.00) for completing my first drive (plus I got the normal Uber rate for
driving). And now I actually drive for Uber on the weekends to supplement my
income from my day-to-day job so it ended up being the best “free” deal I’ve
come across. Offers like this are extremely rare but definitely worth keeping an eye out for.
4.
Paid offers and trials: There are quite a bit of these on Swagbucks. Some of
them are worth taking advantage of but I would say most are not. They usually
go something like this: You sign up for a product/service and in return you
receive a certain amount of SB’s. I tend not to participate in these offers
unless the SB’s I will receive outweighs the amount I’ll pay for the product or
service. Occasionally I’ll see an offer for something I wanted to buy anyways
such as an offer for Hefty trash bags I recently participated in. The deal was you buy Hefty trash bags at Target (something I needed to buy anyways) and you get
500 SB’s back. So offers like these can end up saving you a fair bit of money
but they are only redeemable once.
Subscription offers can be a bit dangerous
because they will automatically renew themselves. So if you aren’t diligent
about cancelling them then they will cost you more than the SB’s you earned for
signing up. One way to combat this is to complete the sign up process with
prepaid Visa gift cards. Conveniently, you can redeem your Swagbucks points for
a prepaid Visa gift card. So the basic workflow would go like this:
I.
You see an offer
that pays 10,000 SB’s (~$10) if you sign up for a recurring subscription
product that costs $5 per month.
II.
You redeem 5,000
SB’s (that you already earned) for a $5 prepaid Visa gift card
III.
When you are
prompted to fill in your credit card information on the offer page, you simply
fill in the number on the prepaid Visa gift card instead of using your credit
card.
IV.
You collect
10,000 SB’s for a net profit of 5,000 SB’s (~$5).
There
are risks to doing this though. For one thing, some of the offers will deny
your sign-up if they detect you are using a prepaid Visa gift card. A bigger
but less likely risk is that they revoke the 10,000 SB’s they gave you (and
possibly keep the $5 from your prepaid Visa).
In
summary there are definitely ways to make a few extra bucks if you take
advantage of these offers properly, but it is not without risk. The best thing
you can do is read up on the Disclaimer attached to each offer and look for any
fine print on the offer’s webpage in order to be sure you aren’t violating any
of the terms.
5.
Cashback portals and churning: The last thing we’ll talk about is Swagbucks’
cashback and churning opportunities. Swagbucks is one of the major “Cashback
Portals” in that if you visit a website directly from their site and buy
something, you’ll earn cashback. The cashback opportunities can be quite high.
For instance, at the time of this writing, Swagbucks is offering 8% cashback on
purchase made through Hotels.com and 11% at Expedia.com.
Not only does this mean Swagbucks is a
great place to visit before you plan on doing any shopping, but its also a
decent portal to churn your credit cards through. If you haven’t read our posts
on Churning yet, I highly recommend you do so.
So how do we use Swagbucks to
help us Churn credit cards? Well it just so happens that one of the websites
Swagbucks provides a cashback bonus for is Giftcards.com. Currently the rate is
1% on all purchases made at Giftcards.com if you visited the site through the
Swagbucks portal. While this isn’t much, it does help to offset the fees that
are tacked on when purchasing Visa Gift cards. Assuming you’ve already read up
on our Churning posts, the workflow goes like this:
I.
You sign up for a
credit card with a $625 signup bonus after you spend $4,000 in the first 3
months (Such as the Chase
Sapphire Preferred)
II.
In order to meet
the minimum spend, you plan on purchasing Visa Gift Cards and using those to
load cash onto your American Express Serve ONE VIP card.
III.
We will use
giftcards.com to make the purchases because they offer $500 Visa Gift Cards for
only $500 + $6.95 fee.
IV.
Instead of
visiting the website directly, we visit it through the Swagbucks.com portal
which will give us 1% cashback on our purchases. This means we get 507 SB’s
(~$5.07) in cashback for our purchase, partially offsetting the $6.95 fee.
V.
We could do this
8 times to meet the minimum spend of the card and the total net costs to us
would only be 8 * ($6.95 - $5.07) = $15.04. To me this is pretty acceptable
because then we unlock the $625 in rewards. Thought I would never recommend
meeting a minimum spend solely by purchasing gift cards (you are likely to have
your credit card account cancelled) but that’s a topic for another day).
So I hope you’ve learned a
thing or two about Swagbucks and the various ways to make money on the site. Like
I said earlier, I personally collect about $100 from the site in an average
month and I think that’s very attainable for most people.
If you haven’t signed up
already,
Here is a link to my referral
page: http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/rybosome
And here is a non-referral
link: http://www.swagbucks.com/
Thanks for reading,
Rybos
No comments:
Post a Comment