Earn On The SideCash In Your Spare Time

(This is an overview of Swagbucks and Search and Win.  For tips on how to win more Swagbucks visit this page. )

I know this has been around for a little while now and many people may already know about it, but for those of you who don’t, this can be a great way to earn rewards for doing something you probably already do on a daily basis.…search the internet

I know there are a few different sites for this, but the one I use is Swagbucks.

Using Swagbucks is easy, you simply sign up, and the next time you need to search for something on the web, instead of going to Google, you go to Swagbucks and use their search engine. About once or twice a day you will randomly win between 1-5 Swagbucks. Accumulate enough Swagbucks, and you can trade them in for great prizes or gift certificates.

Prizes range from 36 Swagbucks for a $5 Starbucks gift card to 7999 Swagbucks for a flatscreen TV.

From my experience you can expect around 1-5 swag bucks per day, which will give you about $5 in prizes per month if you are searching frequently.

You can really start to earn prizes quickly if you refer a friend to Swagbucks. Each time one of your friends win, Swagbucks will give you the same number of Swagbucks that your friend won! So if you have 10 referrals signed up and each of them is winning an average of 2 Swagbucks a day, you would earn 660 swag bucks in a month.  That is enough for over $90 in prizes for spending about 5 minutes a day searching!

In June I earned $35 in Amazon Gift Cards from Swagbucks!

How accurate are the search results from Swagbucks?

Swagbucks gets its results from a combination of Google and Ask.com. This makes them pretty good, but I do feel like Google alone gives better results. For me, if I am just searching for something simple I use Swagbucks. If I’m doing some intensive search I still use plain old Google.

Swagbucks offers two ways to integrate its search engine into your browser. If you have Internet Explorer you can download the Swagbucks toolbar. If you have Firefox, you can easily replace the search box within Firefox to use the Swagbucks search engine. That way you don’t have to go to the Swagbucks website whenever you need to search.

Does Swagbucks accept International Members?

Unfortunately at this point Swagbucks only accepts members from the US, Canada and the UK. However, there is another site that I have been using that I will write a full review about later.

Homepages Friends, formerly MySearchFunds is another Paid to Search site based out of the U.K.  They accept members from many different countries and pay cash in the form of Paypal transfers to people who use their search engine.  Results are provided by Yahoo and you can usually earn about $1 a day (although earnings are stated in British Pounds).  You also receive a percentage of your referrals earnings and even their referrals earnings.  So sign up your friends to really start bringing in the cash.

My Recommendation:

Use Firefox and Google Toolbar. I am a huge fan of Google toolbar for all the nice features that it gives. I also don’t really like having any other toolbars cluttering up my browser. With Firefox I replace the browser search box with the Swagbucks search engine, and then still have the Google search box on the toolbar. That way I can use Swagbucks for most of my searching, but when I just want to use Google, I still have it there. To get Firefox with Google Toolbar click here:

Has anyone been using Swagbucks or another paid-to-search site? Leave a comment and tell me how it’s going! Happy Searching!

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