Swagbucks

Summary
Initial Cost: $0

Cost down the road: $0

Time Investment: 2 minutes / day + Use their search engine 2x / day (morning & night)

Payout:  $90+ / year

Make Money Online?

Swagbucks is a type of Paid To Click site with a fun twist to it.  They randomly award you "swagbucks" for using their search engine which in turn uses Google's search engine.  The search results are a little different because they have a lot more sponsored links in there.  Another way to win swagbucks is by hiding special codes in their blogs, special offers, videos, surveys, etc.  When you find these codes you enter them into the swagbucks home page and they reward you with X amount of swagbucks.

What do you get out of it?
Once you get so many swagbucks you can redeem them for prizes.  The most valuable item is the $5 Amazon gift card.  Getting the Amazon gift card for 450 swagbucks basically increases the value of your swagbucks.  If you look at all their other "prizes", a swagbuck is worth about 1 cent or less.  If you get the Amazon gift card, your swagbucks are worth more than a penny each.

What do you have to do?
Using Swagbucks search engine is the best way to easily earn swagbucks without any effort.  If you use their search engine as your normal search, you will earn enough to make this worthwhile.  To get more swagbucks you can do daily polls, trusted surveys, watch videos, and do special offers (free and paid).  You can also go through their site and earn swagbucks when you purchase items on their affiliate sites like bestbuy.com and others.  You can also earn up to 1000 swagbucks when you get friends to sign up. You get 1 swagbuck for each swagbuck your referral gets by searching.  Swagbucks often post codes that give you free swagbucks just for paying attention to them.  I am usually busy doing something else so I check websites for updates.  For example, http://swagbuckscodes.gather.com/swagbucks.

My Experiences
On average, I get about 20 swagbucks a day.  Once a day i take a daily poll and click on the "survey" link.  I never take the surveys anymore because I never seem to be able to finish those.  Anyway, this gets me 2 swagbucks in about 30 seconds.  I usually get an average of about 5 swagbucks a day from various codes that are posted.  You can get notified of new codes from individuals and websites that watch for these codes.  I also have Swagbucks TV on in my browser when I use the computer.  This on average gets me 5 swagbucks.  Of course, the most important activity is to use their search engine, which usually rewards you about 7 swagbucks in the morning and another 7 or so at night when you do a search.

What's the catch?  
Well, swagbucks makes their money by showing you advertisments, special offers, offering you surveys, allowing you to trade in recyclable electronics, etc.  Bascially, they are making money by you just using their site.  They don't need anything but your clicks.  They do ask for your address which is mostly so that they can send you your prizes if you get a material thing like an iPad or T-Shirt.

Like any "easy money" opportunity, please research this and do your own homework.  At the time of this writing, from my research, this is a great way to make some side income.  Things can change and/or reveal themselves to be scams later on however.   After doing your research, if you decide to sign up you can click on the banner below..




Scam or Legit?
If you still don't believe me, I've found a whole lot of people asking and writing about swagbucks.  This should help:

• http://www.moneycrashers.com/swagbucks-review-is-swagbucks-a-scam-or-legit/
• http://help.com/post/275473-is-swagbuckscom-a-scam
• http://www.mooladays.com/2011/01/05/is-swagbucks-a-scam-what-are-swag-codes/comment-page-1/

Update: Swagbucks is owned by Prodege, which in turn is featured as one of the top 10 internet companies.