Showing posts with label rewards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rewards. Show all posts

Monday, August 1, 2016

How I Earned Over $300 in Gift Cards through Swagbucks

Christmas is less than six months away. It may too early for most people to start Christmas shopping, but it's never too early to start saving money for that fun Christmas shopping spree in November and December.

Since I started using Swagbucks, I have cashed in on over $300 worth of gift cards - mostly to Amazon but also to Starbucks because Starbucks is one of my expensive vices that I refuse to pay "full price" for.



Using Swagbucks is free, quick and easy! Here's the brief lowdown on Swagbucks.



Swagbucks is a "program" that allows you to earn points (they call them Swagbucks) for doing random tasks. These points can later be cashed in for rewards - they have all kinds of weird trinkets in their Swagbucks Store, but I prefer the gift cards. You can even request Paypal cash!

There are a bunch of other ways to earn Swagbucks, but these are the easiest and cost $0 to you. 



Ways to Earn:

Search Engine: If you use their search engine (as opposed to google, yahoo, etc.) you might earn Swagbucks for some of your searches. This is totally random and you're not guaranteed to win each time, nor are you guaranteed an amount when you do win. I've won anywhere from one Swagbuck to 27 Swagbucks for a single search.

NOSO: NOSO stands for No Obligation Special Offers. These can be found on the left side of the main Swagbucks page (literally says NOSO). Once you click, it brings up an offer, which I ALWAYS ignore, then you can click at the bottom of the page where it says "Skip." You do this a bunch of times until you get to the end where it lets you play a brief 10 second video to display a special phrase. Type the phrase into the provided box and voila! You got yourself 2 Swagbucks. You can only do this once per day, but I've gotten in the habit of doing it EVERYDAY!

Daily Poll: The daily poll is also found on the left side of the main Swagbucks page. It's just a quick survey. Once you hit submit, one Swagbuck is deposited into my Swagbucks bank account. Like NOSO, you can only do the poll once per day.

Tool Bar: If you download their toolbar, you'll randomly earn yourself one Swagbuck just for opening your web browser using the toolbar. I don't use the tool bar right now because I recently got a new computer and haven't had time or energy to download it, but I did use it on my previous laptop. It's an easy way to earn Swagbucks without doing anything.

Swidget: The swidget is a widget. Haha. I'm a teacher, I know you're not supposed to use part of the word in the definition! If you scroll down to the bottom of the page on my main blog page, you'll see the Swagbucks Swidget. You can check to see if there's a special code out in the cyberworld. If not, it'll tell you and you can stop looking. If there is one, it'll give you a hint where it is!

Special SwagCodes: Swagbucks often publishes special codes that are worth a certain amount of Swagbucks. When and where these codes are published is very random. Codes are time sensitive and case sensitive. It's best to just copy and paste them, rather than try to type them out.


Happy Couponing!
-Coupon Mama Massachusetts


This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may make money if you click them.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Sign Up For Kohl's Rewards - Earn Points for Rewards


Sign up for Kohl's Rewards!

Get 1 point for every dollar you spend

Get 7 savings offers every year

Get a birthday offer during the month of your birthday

Get a $5 reward for every 100 points you earn

It's free! You can tie it to your Kohl's charge, too, so that everytime you use your charge card, it will automatically add the "points" to your account. You DO NOT need a charge card to earn points

Happy Couponing!
-Coupon Mama Massachusetts

Follow Me on Pinterest

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Earning Online to Defray Gift Giving

A fellow blogger, Budget Savvy Diva, has been counting down the days until Christmas for some time now. As of today, there are 112 days left for you to scramble around searching for the best deals for Christmas gifts. That may seem like a lot of time, but I vowed to myself that this year I'll be done Christmas shopping by December 1st. We'll see how that goes!

In the meantime, however, I've discovered several ways to earn online that helps defray the cost of my gift giving and I'm happy to share those with you.

Some of these programs are available only to a specific demographic or during an allotted timeframe, while others are invitation only through a current member. Regardless, I encourage you all to check out and apply for these programs, as you never know when a spot might open up!



Online Surveys
There are a bunch of online survey companies and some are better than others. Some let you actually earn cash for taking surveys, while others let you accrue points which can be cashed in for gift cards and other goodies. Here are the ones I use.

Pinecone Research is my favorite of all of the survey companies I've worked with in the past. I earn $3 for each survey or product trial I complete. You have the option of getting a check mailed to you each time you earn money or you can have it deposited directly into a Paypal account. I took a survey yesterday morning and got confirmation yesterday afternoon that my $3 had been deposited into my account! The best part of Pinecone Research is I actually get to test out some of the products, rather than just see pictures and read about them. I've tried drinks, toilet paper and even dog food (okay, my dog tried the dog food!).

Opinion Outpost is my second favorite of the survey companies. You earn points for each survey you complete and the points are equivalent to a cash value - 10 points = $1. They recently changed the redemption policy and there are pros and cons to it. There are more options now to redeem your points.

You can unlock an Alawar Game with a minimum of 30 points.
You can request a $50 Restaurant.com gift card with a minimum of 100 points.
With a minimum of 50 points you can donate $5 to the American Red Cross.
With a minimum of 50 points you can also get yourself a $5 credit to Amazon.com.
You can get a Citi gift card (like a cash card) for a minimum of 150 points.
You can request a check with a minimum of 200 points.

I'm pretty sure it used to be a minimum of 50 points for a check, but it was a pain in the butt to keep going to the bank to cash $5 checks. One major downside of Opinion Outpost is that sometimes you can get halfway through a survey and then it determines that they already have enough responses from your demographic and that you're disqualified. Some questions AND surveys are also very repetitive. On the flip side, even if you're disqualified, you can "spin" the slot machine to win points anyway.

ERewards is another survey program I use, however, the available rewards aren't as great as the two previously mentioned survey groups. I also learned that it takes a long time to earn enough points to cash in for anything. You can earn Hilton Honor points, along with a host of other hotel chain and frequent flyer points. You can earn yourself gift cards (right now Express is the only available one) as well as magazine subscriptions and the like.

CVS Advisor Panel is part of the CVS Pharmacy stores. It's great because I feel like I'm answering questions about something I know a lot about and that my answers might actually make an impact. And the icing on the cake is that I earn CVS Extra Care Bucks (ECB) for finishing the surveys! One con is that I don't get very many survey offers!

Online Point Accumulators
Some websites allow you to earn points just for doing random tasks. Eventually these points accumulate and can be cashed in for some nifty stuff!

Swagbucks is simply a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, but way better because you can randomly earn points called Swagbucks, which later can be redeemed for prizes. The simplest way to use Swagbucks is to switch your homepage to the Swagbucks homepage and use their search engine whenever you would have used Google or Bing or Yahoo or whatever. In addition to this, you can earn points by entering special Swagcodes which are left by the company all over the place like on their Twitter page, their blog or their Facebook page. You can earn Swagbucks by taking their daily poll, completely no obligation offers or by even printing coupons from their page then redeeming them at the grocery store!

My favorite part about Swagbucks is that for every 450 points I earn, I can get a $5 Amazon.com giftcard. I can't explain to you how many gifts I've gotten for free or really cheap on Amazon thanks to these gift cards! There are tons of other prizes, including gift cards, electronics, baseball cards, etc. available. The sad part, however, is that there's a limit to how many of a single prize you can cash in on during the month and it takes about 15-20 days for the gift cards to show in your account. They're typically e-gift cards, so you won't ever get a hard copy, just a code in your account to apply at the other website.

Superpoints is my newest addiction! It's another way to earn points that you can cash in for prizes, like gift cards. It's easy to earn these points. You get points for setting up your profile, referring friends, spinning the "lucky button" and watching videos. Points rack up quick, especially since once you hit a certain membership level (it took me a day) you earn points whenever your referrals earn points! Once you get enough points, simply keep ordering up those great gift cards!

The one key element to Superpoints is that it is invitation only, and each member only has so many invitations available in a given time period. If you're interested, here are some invitation codes you can use:
Invitation 1
Invitation 2
Invitation 3
Invitation 4
Invitation 5


Cash Back Websites
Believe it or not, some websites give you cash back for shopping at retailers THROUGH their website. This is great if you were already planning on buying certain items - you might as well just get a few bucks back here and there!

Ebates is sort of like a rebate website. You make a purchase at, for instance, Walmart.com, but you click on the Walmart website through Ebates' website and you land yourself 2% of your purchase back in your pocket. And I'm pretty sure that new members can earn themselves a $10 giftcard to one of a host of retailers by making a qualified purchase within a set time from signing up. I just got myself a $10 Home Depot gift card which will be a stocking stuffer for hubby (geesh, I hope he doesn't read this!).

ShopAtHome.com is very similar to Ebates, but they have Wild Deals which usually end up meaning you get your purchase for FREE (after you get your cash back check).

The reason I say cash back websites are good if you're already planning on buying the item is because it can take months before you get your cash back. ShopAtHome requires you to earn at least $20 before they'll send you a check, so depending on what you're buying, that could take awhile. They also only send out checks on a set schedule, so even if you're over the $20 minimum, it could still be months before you get your cash back.