Swagbucks for Beginners

If you are not using  Swagbucks, or if you are not sure how it works, you can start off slowly and decide how much time you want to spend earning the free gift cards. It took me awhile to get the hang of it.

Until the end of June you can join and get an extra 50  Swagbucks when you use code “JuneBoom“ at the registration section along with the usual 30 free Swagbucks for new users, for a total of 80 Swagbucks.

It takes 450 Swagbucks to earn a $5 Amazon.com gift card. I have several of these in my account now. I use them for gifts throughout the year. I just apply the codes at Amazon.com and it comes right off my total.

If you are not familiar with  Swagbucks, here is how to get started:

Swagbucks has a search bar where you type in your searches just as if you were typing into Google or Ask.com. The answers you get, come from these two search engines. To reward you for taking this extra step, you get free points called Swagbucks.

One of the ways to redeem your Swagbucks is by getting free gift cards at retailers like JCPenney, Lowe’s, Barnes & Noble, Target and Starbucks. My personal favorite is Amazon.com. 

You can really get into this site and spend a lot of time on it  – or you can just do a couple searches a day and earn some free gift cards. There are all kinds of prizes, contests, and multiple ways to redeem and use your Swagbucks.

I recommend adding the Swagbucks tool bar to your computer.  Downloading and adding the toolbar  makes it so much easier to remember to search through their site.

You can find about 75% of what you are searching for by searching through Swagbucks. I still have to use Google or Bing to find about 25% of the information that I am looking for.

The site was a little confusing to me when I first started. I advise keeping it simple until you catch on, and then you can branch out and play games, enter contest, and do surveys.

If you want to just give it a try- just set up a free account and do two searches on anything like “iPod” and “tomatoes”. You don’t have to get into the sites or read anything or stay on them, you just need to do the searches to win the Swagbucks.

Generally, you are awarded your free Swagbucks after your second search, so if you try it, make sure you do two searches. These Swagbucks are awarded and credited to your account automatically. You will see a pop-up window that says “you have been awarded 10,20 or 30 Swagbucks. Then you just click on “return to search” and resume your surfing. It takes all of one second.

They don’t ask you for any personal information to set up an account, don’t require a credit card and I have not gotten any spam or unwanted emails as a result of using Swagbucks.

I know they are using this site to track my surfing habits, but I figure Google is doing that anyway, so I might as well get some free stuff for it. If this makes you crazy, then this probably isn’t for you.

I  subscribed to their blog because they often put extra Swagbucks codes in their blog posts. When you see a Swagbucks code, just return to your home page of Swagbucks and type the code in the bar that says “enter a swag code” above the word “gimmee“. That’s it -more bonus Swagbucks for you. Always make sure that you are logged in to your account before you start so you get the proper credit.

You can sign up through my site at the bottom of this post. You will get 30 free Swagbucks to start and they award me 10 for referring you, or you can just log in to Swagbucks.com. You can put the Swagbucks widget on your Facebook page or blog and earn referral bucks too. I find it pretty painless and I don’t like anything too complicated.

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