Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Long story short, I like Swagbucks. I’d recommend it to others (using my fancy referral code here) and was able to make over 60,000 swagbucks (i.e. $600) in the first three months of signing up.

Long story medium-length, Swagbucks is an online reward-earning program that gamifies taking surveys, uploading receipts, signing up for apps, shopping, playing games, and completing other various online activities.

I’ll admit, the first thing I googled when learning of it was “is Swagbucks legit?” Since using Swagbucks requires you to disable your ad blocker (so it can feast on your yummy, yummy data) and much of the site offers incentives to “explore” different sites, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t accidentally clicking into a wormhole of computer demise. I determined that I was not and with that, was on to earning the swagbucks.

So you have some context, 1 swagbuck (aka SB) is equivalent to $0.01 when redeeming them for money via Paypal. When you redeem SB for gift cards, you sometimes get a little more bang for your buck, but that conversion rate isn’t constant and in any case, make sure you read and understand how whatever you earn and redeem your swagbucks for might impact your taxes. The Swagbucks site has a page that explains what earnings and redemptions are taxable and their tax threshold. As with everything, there’s always taxes.

To start my Swagbucks journey, I signed up using someone’s referral code. This gives you and the referrer an additional 300 SB bonus when you earn your first 300 swagbucks (I did this within the first 48 hours — it’s definitely doable) and also gives the referrer SB bonuses equivalent to the amount that is 10% of your SB earnings for the life of your account.

My earliest swagbucks were earned through small SB reward offers that were each 100 SB or less: magic receipts, installing the Swagbucks browser extension, and sign-ups. I’d suggest doing the same because only having high SB rewards activity from the start seems to set off alarm bells. I’ve read numerous stories of people having their Swagbucks accounts shut down because they immediately dove into the higher paying offers rather than built up a repertoire of small and steady use. After about a week, I got into the offers worth a few dollars and by the end of one month I had completed an offer for 25,000 SB ($250).

Throughout my Swagbucks experience, there are three rules I’ve learned to follow to make the most of it:

1. Save information

Take a screenshot of an offer when you decide to pursue it. This way you can refer back to the reward amount that’s due, its terms for completion, and any other fine print that might change or become inaccessible after having clicked through and signed up for it.

2. Follow up

Set calendar reminders and track when you should receive your rewards by. Most offers state that you have 14 days to contact the Swagbucks Help Center for further investigation if your rewards are not credited within the offer’s allotted time frame. DO NOT MISS THIS TIME FRAME. Of all the offers that I’ve completed, I’ve had to follow up on about 10% of them. There’s no reason to miss out on easy money because of tech flaws.

3. Value your time

There are offers on Swagbucks that are pointless. Their only goal is to entice you to click or download whatever they’re for and make their requirements to achieve any SB as difficult as possible. An example of one is a mobile game offer I completed for 10,000 SB ($100). It took me 19 days to meet its reward requirements (with a deadline of 20 days) and ate so much of my time and focus that I refuse to state the name of the game it was for. They didn’t pay me enough for that shi*t or more advertising. Anywho, don’t bother with those offers. Swagbucks is best when you work smarter, not harder.

The most useful factor of Swagbucks is that for every offer you contemplate completing, there are millions of other people doing the same. If you ever wonder if an offer is actually the attainable cash cow it claims to be or is simply a frustrating energy vampire, there is bound to be a Reddit post or online article to tell you all about someone’s experience with it.

Now, go forth and make some swagbucks!