Your Questions Answered!

Good Morning Swaggernauts!

Today I am going to answer a couple of questions I see on the Swagbucks Facebook wall & discussions pages.

First things First! If you haven't already signed up for a Swag Bucks account, there's no time like the present! Just go to the swidget on the right there, press the Sign Up button on the bottom right. Fill out a short form, confirm your email, and get 30 swagbucks to get you rolling! Then come back here and start with my second blog post, "Beginner Tips for Swagsurfing!", for tips on how to get started! 


1: My question is, how much time would you estimate you spend acquiring swagbucks? Maybe you could give an idea of how much time it takes to earn 450 points or other levels of points.  (Thanks Christina for a great question!) Well, let's look at this from a "worst case scenario" sorta view first. How long would it take you to get to the $5 Amazon gift card level if you did nothing but search & watch Swagbucks TV? For this answer I am going to look at my ledger, and see how much I earned yesterday, leaving out the three swagcodes and the 100 sb survey. I got my average of  three search wins, and three Swagbucks TV wins. I got decent wins all day, two 10s and an 8, but you can't count on that so let's be conservative and say I got an 8, 9, 10. That's 27 swagbucks. I know SBTV wins are supposed to be between 1-5, but I have never gotten anything below a 5. Three SBTV wins at 5 a pop, thats 15 more bringing the total to 42. Then there is the daily four (toolbar, NOSO, polls, survey visit) for 4 swagbucks. So, 46 swagbucks through the minimum of effort. At that rate it would take a mere 10 days to earn a free $5 Amazon.com gift card! 

Now, let's look at what I *Actually* earned yesterday!  It was a slow day for me, researching for my blog (web hosting for future ideas, lookin for a good WYSIWYG editor, etc!) so I didn't do Any special offers, other than the 1 video I watched on the gWallet slider. I did however get a survey- Don't count on those every day. I only get a couple a month. That survey was for 100 swagbucks. I got three codes for 6, 6, and 7. (119 sb) Three wins for 10, 10, and 8. (147 sb) one video for 3 (150 sb) and my Daily Four which brings the total for yesterday to 154 swagbucks.  I don't usually get surveys, but I do however usually do special offers. Even with the current trend of offer company difficulties, I would say 150 swagbucks a day is pretty average. That's 4500 swagbucks a month. Sounds about right to me! If you look at my current swagbucks total on the swidget to the top right, That amount reflects what I have earned since I bought a ton of prizes at the beginning of October. My account was just about at ZERO after ordering five $5 AGC and three $5 PayPal deposits. So I have earned almost 3900 swagbucks this month. Entered a couple of swagstakes too so, 3900 is fairly accurate, and there's still 4 days left in the month, when I usually make a final push for swagbucks! Keep in mind, I have really backed off of special offers this month due to frustration with the offer companies, and I still managed to net 3900 swagbucks! If I had been at my usual pace, I'd probably have enough right now for a $50 Amazon card (not that I would buy it, gotta keep funding PayPal too, for Netflix and hopefully Web hosting!)

2: Ok, but what about the time involved part of that question Jen? If I won the minimum of 3 wins a day and 3 SBTV wins, how much time would I spend in a day trying to do that?  Well that's not an easy question to answer, because wins are so random. I have personally fallen into a Fairly predictable pattern but even I get shaken up sometimes, not winning til late at night. But let me relate an average for me. I usually have my search wins spread out pretty evenly through the day. I don't try to search all day. I get up and search "Swagbucks Facebook" and a couple other things I need to do. This morning I won on Blogger, coming here to post. I will put SBTV on while I cook breakfast and do dishes. Usually get one win. I will come back and search something every couple of hours, just one or two searches. Takes very little time. As for SBTV, I will watch no more than 5 in a sitting- if I haven't won by then, I'm wasting too much time. Usually I win within 4 videos. So I would guesstimate I spend less than 20 minutes total a day doing searches, and a bit more watching videos. 2-3mins per video, I watch 20 videos a day tops but often less. And I usually half watch those videos while I am physically busy doing other things anyway. WARNING: Watching SBTV while Cooking or Doing Dishes can be dangerous to your health or your dinners flavor! I have broken a dish, burned myself on an epic pancake flip fail, and tripped over toys while carrying the computer between rooms LOL. Spreading it out has been the key for me. It's helped me to chill out for one thing :P and made my wins much more regular and predictable. What does it all boil down to? If I was Only searching and watching SBTV, then I would spend less than an hour a day getting that 46 swagbucks figure we got in the first question.

3: I know there is a code, and I'm on the Swagbucks Facebook page looking for TSG's post about it. How can I find it through all the dang "Thanks, TSG" spam?? Ugh!   The answer to this comes from swaggernaut Hope Stuart in the General Info for Newbies thread. Major Kudos on this one Hope! When you are on the wall, swimming in spam, look at the "Write Something" box. Under the "Share" button you should see the word "Filters". If you click that, you will see three options - "Swagbucks + Others"  "Just Swagbucks" and "Just Others".  If you click on the "Just Swagbucks" option, all the spam will disappear and all you will see are posts from TSG. That makes it a ton easier to find his code posts, or anything important he may be saying. Then you can switch it back whenever you are ready to see the other posts again.. maybe after all the "Thanks, TSG!!!" posts have died down :P

OK that's gotta be all for this mornings post. My son is about to eat his socks he's so bored- time to go to the park!

Please post questions for me here, on my discussion thread at the FBSB forum, in swagmail (JennySweets), or friend & PM me on facebook! Your questions feed the blog, and I guarantee if you are asking it, someone else is asking it somewhere too!

And as always, HAPPY SWAGSURFING!