So on this Thanksgiving Day, I am going to post a summary of my earnings from various money earning websites. I figure it is good for me to post this sort of thing somewhere just so that I can look back and see how I did versus previous goals. I know that usually happens closer to New Years, but that will likely be taken by other yearly stuff that this doesn’t entirely fit with. Plus, to be honest, I really am thankful for these sites as they have helped me get by some hard times!
First, the grand daddy of them all… Swagbucks. So far this year I have earned $345 in Amazon Gift Cards and another $50 in Gamestop Gift Cards. I will likely earn another $40 in Amazon for the month of December which will bring me to $445 in earnings on the year. Not bad at all! I’ve used that money to aid the purchase of my Wii U, a couple of games, 4 TB in Hard Drive Space, and presents for friends and family.
Going into next year, I am wanting to increase my earnings to at least $600. For one, I think I got my system down this year better which is giving me a higher earning rate. I think the average month brings me in around $35 without trying hard. That alone should keep me at about $400 for next year. In order to gain the remaining $200 increase, I am planning on using SBTV more using a trick I just learned. This year I generally only get 9 points a day on it, but you can earn 120 a day. My goal is to get at least 50 points per day just on SBTV. Another method is that Swagbucks launched a new Android app called EntertaiNow. This app works similarly to their already existing TV app, it seems to gain a bit slower than the current one but has a max of over 100 points a day instead of the 50. Also it seems to be a little lower maintenance from the little I’ve used so far. My intent with this new app is to use it as a supplement to the existing one, switching to it after I earned my points per day on the existing one. To be honest, I don’t expect huge gains here. There are days i don’t get all 50 from the original, and many days I just barely do it. I am hoping for about 10-20 points per day from that. Lastly, Swagbucks has updated their daily goals. To be honest the daily goals almost single-handedly were one of the reasons I got my act together on the site. They give you between 500-600 bonus points every month just for getting the goal. So I work very hard to make sure to get it. Now, they introduced a second tier to the goal. Generally if you make say 80 points in a day you get 8 bonus points for that day, but the second tier will add a goal of 90 that gets 9 points. This is not a huge addition, but will gain me an extra 30 points per month at the very least. And points are points.
A sort of side goal that I’m not really counting on is that I’m hoping to also gain at least one referral in 2014. I’ve never had a single one, and from what i hear, they get you a decent amount of points if they are active. You get up to 1,000 points from your referrals but I think it’s like 1% of their earnings up to 1000 points. It isn’t great but it isn’t bad, it’s essentially $10 per referral. I have a few friends who have seemed interested in free money so I’m going to see if I can convert one. Also, if you’d like to sign up, use my link and that works too. =P
Next up… ebates! Ebates is still my favorite site even though I don’t get much from them. Just because they give cash with not much effort. This year I earned $64.83. To be honest I don’t think i’ll make this kind of money again next year. A big reason I earned so much was because of my Wii U purchase and my new charter account, both of which gave me money. I think they gave me a bonus $10 or something for doing it via amazon gift card rather than check. I wish they gave more back from amazon, then my earnings would boom exponentially, but of the categories they give back on the only one that seems like I’d get money back on ever would be Toys, and then just for gifts. Still I do all my groupons and newegg purchases through ebates, and it gets me a little back.
My next most used site is Bing Rewards. I have only earned $25 from Bing Rewards this year. I must say this service when I first signed up was quite good. But they have weakened it over the years and now always remains most likely to stop using if I find a better secondary search. Essentially, I get the daily free point (used to be 5 to 15 free points every day!), and then search on bing for a few hours after earning my swagbucks search. I rarely do 30 searches a day to get the max of 15 per day. If I did max it every day I would earn $60 I think, with maybe an additional $5 per year. This isn’t great and my goal of it was to just get $5 every month which I missed. Heck even referrals are soft, at 10 points per referral with a bonus 200 if that referral gets silver status. Swagbucks give $10 per, Bing gives $2.50. I did discover the best money is to get the $5 Tango card which can then be turned into Amazon cards. Their other cards sell for more and can’t be used in many places. I did also discover to make sure you use your cards you get right away! They expire! (if bing rewards couldn’t be any worse!).
I just started back up on MyPoints over the last month. I consider them a non-factor to be honest. They do a lot of the same shopping things as ebates & swagbucks but at worse rates. They also have opportunities, coupons, toolbar, surveys, but always not great rates. However, they do have an email they send out daily that gets you points for clicking on a link. Sometimes two… each gets you 5 points and is minimal effort so I’ve been doing that. The most I probably would ever get off that alone is going to be about 2500 points a year which is a little more than 1 $10 gift card at amazon. So yeah, not great, but no effort so why not. On the bright side, My Points does send you physical gift cards, unlike swagbucks, at no additional cost. So these can be used as presents in and of themselves which is kinda nice.
There were a few other sites I have tried in the past, most I stopped for varying reasons all related to too much effort for little reward or swagbucks did the same thing better. I did recently decide to give rewardTV another attempt with an emphasis on saving to get things in an auction rather than wasting on sweepstakes. The sweepstakes aspect of that site always made it kind of worthless.[1. It takes a lot of work to complete their surveys, and your chances of winning are so low that you probably did all that work for nothing.] Prize Rebel I recently found out about so I will give that one a trial. It seems mostly like a survey site which more often than not aren’t worth it cause they only give you real points for answering the way they want, but if the rewards are good enough it might be worth lying for.
The last one i am going to try is GiftHulk. I’ve tried it before, well kind of. I didn’t actually put a lot of effort into figuring it out. But I always hear really good things about it so I want to give it a real try. A quick glance makes it look identical to swagbucks. It could be a good secondary to bump Bing out of the picture. I am also open to sites pushing swagbucks down the totem as well!
So there you have it. This is what I’ve done and where I’m going. I have a new computer to buy and my goal is end of May and this is the primary source of funding. So hopefully I can afford it on the cheap because of my money saving efforts. Do you know of any other good sites that are fairly easy to get money? If it’s new and looks good I’ll use your code, just post it in the comments!