What Is Swagbucks?

Swagbucks acts as a reward system, in turn for performing certain actions you get rewarded with a certain number of swagbucks points. Don’t worry none of the actions involve taking your clothes off, or not that I’ve seen so far! Once you’ve got enough Swagbucks you can redeem them for prizes. Prizes can come in a number of forms from electrical goods, to posters, to gift vouchers to even a entry into a Swagbucks raffle where you can win even more points. To be honest a lot of the physical items aren’t available outside of North America so as somebody from the UK I’ve stuck to redeeming my points for vouchers for now.

Each one of the following vouchers is worth £5 (just under $8) to spend at Amazon.co.uk As you can see I’ve not done too bad out of minimal promotion and just doing the web searches I do everyday anyway:-

How Do I Promote Swagbucks?

You’re looking at it. No seriously, the only promotion I’ve ever done in order to get referrals is the couple of mentions on this website. I’ve never paid for traffic for it or done anything complicated. I’ve mentioned it here because I use it and I’ve had a few people sign up under me. Other than that I’ve just used them to do a percentage of the web searches I’d do anyway.

But Can I Make Real Money With Swagbucks?

You mean you’re not impressed with my free Amazon vouchers?! Another of the voucher prize options is a Paypal credit. If that’s not real money enough for you then I don’t know what it. I haven’t done it because I don’t need a few quid that much, I’m much happier using it to subsidise the crap I’d be buying on Amazon but it’s your choice.

I don’t want anybody to think that they’re going to get rich using Swagbucks, you’re not. It’s a very easy, zero effort way of getting rewarded for something you’d normally be doing anyway. However it is real, it does work, they do pay, so for people that wanted to see some proof of Swagbucks delivering there you go. If you’re interested you can sign up for Swagbucks by following this link.

However, I’ve just received notification that they are changing their business model, instead of paying you for your searches they are going to give the money to charity on your behalf. Whilst that is all well and good it’ll kill the service over night. People use it because they want to earn money by searching the internet, not because they want to give to charity. There are plenty of other ways of doing that.

It’s been good whilst it lasted but the simple solution for me now is to change over to SwagBucks, I’ve already got a couple of hundred points from my referrals so it should take me no time at all to be redeeming some decent rewards.

You heard it here first, SwagBucks is the future of paid to search!

Minor Issues With SwagBucks

First of all this is very much geared towards US users. Whilst this isn’t an issue if you live with the good old US of A it is if you live anywhere else. SwagBucks do allow foreign signups (from the UK and Canada at least) but the prize pool is very much centred around US stores.

The second issue for people who are coming from My HomePages Friends will be in the way that you earn. Rather than paying you a fixed amount per search SwagBucks do a lucky lottery for each search you do. If you’re a winner then you win a number of SwagBucks that can then be redeemed for swag. There is a huge amount of swag on offer ranging from vintage collectibles to gift vouchers for many of the most popular US stores (Amazon, iTunes, even American Airlines!). Whilst you can’t earn cash directly, by offering gift vouchers it’s the next best thing.

The Good Bits About SwagBucks

Perhaps most importantly for anybody who thinks “scam” every time anything like this appears, SwagBucks are very much real. Professional website, professionally written browser search bars for all the most popular browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). They also use genuine search results from Google and Ask, this will be a definite bonus for those people who didn’t like the fact that My HomePages Friends use Yahoo!

So you are getting top quality search results from a reliable source, what about the earning potential? There is a “recent winners” feature on the website that shows how often people are winning with SwagBucks. From this it seems that bucks are given out on a fairly regular basis, in fact within a day of using it I’d won twice! Woo hoo! Only 1 buck each time but good enough to confirm that the system works. For a slack Sunday when I was hardly online I consider that a good enough result. I’d need longer to see the real potential with this, my goal is to see how long it takes to snag a $5 Amazon Gift Voucher – that should give me a better idea of how it compares to MyHPF. In terms of getting your prize most are redeemed within 3-7 days of claiming. That’s a whole lot better than the months it takes to get your money from My HomePages Friends.

Will I be Using SwagBucks?

Yes. There are a couple of things in life that I HATE paying money for – Xbox Live Points and Nintendo Wii Points to name 2. I’m a huge gamer and love lots of the old school stuff that is available through these consoles with points – I just hate buying games that I’ve originally bought in the past. Luckily for me SwagBucks have a 1600 points xbox card for 400 SwagBucks and a 2000 points Wii card for 405 SwagBucks. I’ll be swapping out the search bar on 2 of the family PC’s at least until I snag one of them – just don’t tell the wife!

As well as this as you’d expect SwagBucks do operate a referral program, you basically win 1 point for each point that your referral wins up to a maximum of 100 per referral. Whilst I’m not a big fan of caps like this the 1-1 ratio is very genrous so I’ll not complain too much. Besides if you can keep a steady flow of new SwagBucks members heading over their way you should be able to do very well out of it – especially if you attract mostly US traffic.

SwagBucks is totally free to join through a simple 2 minute submit and confirm process. Once signed up you can start earning straight away. If you are in the US/UK or Canada and looking for a “paid to search” system then SwagBucks is well worth a go!

Sign Up To SwagBucks Now!

United Kingdom
France
Germany
Italy
Spain
Australia
Thailand
Singapore
Indonesia
Philippines
Vietnam
Malaysia
Canada

Sorry but if you’re from anywhere else then your fellow country folk have taken away the option of using My Homespages Friends as an income source. It’s a bit of a bummer for people like me who spent the time to promote the service in a niche that is dominated by US traffic but I guess that’s just the way things go. On the good news front at least they are making the commitment to pay out any money already owed to those people whose accounts are going to be closed becuase of this. They could have just closed the accounts and that be the end of it. At least by making the commitment to pay people what they’ve already earnt with MyHPF they are showing themselves to be genuine.

In the time I’ve been using My Search Funds they’ve had problems with their Meta search engine but the good news is that things are now sorted. Whilst it didn’t hurt any earning potential it did raise questions about future plans. In a move to rebrand My Search Funds have now become HomePages Friends. As part of the re-launch they’ve now also teamed up with a permanent search partner in the shape of Yahoo. This is excellent news for future stability and shows that they are in fact a serious business with long term plans. I can’t wait to get my first payment from them and will be posting proof as soon as I get it.

For those not in the know HomePages Friends pay you for doing the searches that you do anyway. It works by installing an extra search bar in your browser, every time you use this to search you get paid (no popups, spyware, extra ds). Average payment for each search is around 2p-3p (or $0.04 – $0.06 US). What I’ve learnt since using it is that I don’t search as much as I thought, even so I’ve quickly built up some nice earnings with them. Before you ask, you are paid a percentage of the advertising revenue that they generate from Yahoo so it is a pretty future proof plan, certainly as long as Yahoo are still around! The key with earning money with these systems is to get your friends on board, HomPages Friends will pay you 3 levels of referral, so you’ll be earning from your friends, friends, friends searches. As I’ve found already the numbers soon start to stack up. When I joined My Search Funds there were about 70,000 members, when I look today I see that HomePages Friends has over 100,000. This is growing quickly and it’s the early adopters that will benefit most.

HomePages Friends has quickly become one of my favourite totally passive income earners. Why not give them a go, you’ve literally got nothing to lose?

My Search Funds is a service that could make you a very nice amount of cash each month, there are a numbers of reasons why I’m backing this one but I’ll go into that later. First of all I’d better explain a little. Have you ever heard of Agloco (A Global Community)? They had a toolbar that they said would result in them paying you to surf, the more time you spent surfing the more money you’d make. It was a bad idea, badly executed and to the best of my knowledge nobody made a penny out of it! My Search Funds is a sort of similar idea but with very different execution, this one really works. They are going to pay you for something that you do every day, but the difference to Agloco is that they really are going to pay you! And these are the reasons I’m going with it:-

1. Their toolbar integrates seemlesly into your Firefox/IE7 Browser, with no popups/ads slowdowns or anything else nasty.

2. They are paying you to search the internet, just as you currently do every day.

3. Excellent quality search results, no impact on your search experience.

4. You can see your earnings accumulate on a day to day basis

5. Payment terms are easily understood and they will pay you either direct to your bank account or via Paypal.

AND FINALLY, THE BIGGY

6. They allow you to earn 10% of your friends earnings, 5% of their friends and finally 2.5% of their friends. This has true multi-level earning potential.

The real power in this system, and where it is similar to Agloco, is getting your friends on board. It’s really not that hard a sell, you search as you always do but get paid a percentage of the advertising revenue that you’re making the search engines. It’s totally free to join, only takes a few minutes to sign up and it has zero impact on how you currently use the internet. In fact it’s important that you only use it as you would search at the moment i.e. no fake searching to generate revenue (you’ll just be wasting your time and bandwidth) I started letting people know about this yesterday and have 11 friends signed up already. If they use it as an “average” person would, let their friends know and them their friends then in about a months time I should have some nice passive income from My Search Funds.

On my first day with My Search Funds I did 13 searches with the search bar and made £0.29:-

The search bar just ads another option to the search options in Firefox, no extra toolbars or popups:-

It’s a great system, install and forget, you’ll be earning money for what you currently do for free in no time. To get started you can sign up as one of my friends by following this link.