Click to Give - Give to Charity for Free!

This review is a little different from the others. It is not about how you can earn money, but about how you can help others in need. The way it works is there are ads you click. You can click on each ad once a day. Each time you click on an ad, a small amount of revenue is generated. I don't see the amount specified on their website, but on most PTC (pay to click) websites the payout is usually $0.005 or $0.01. Usually that money goes to you, the clicker, but with Click To Give that money is sent to a charity. I just timed myself clicking on the ads and it literally only took 13 seconds to click all six ads. I think you can spare half a minute of your day.

You have to register before you can click, but you never even have to confirm your e-mail. There is also a rewards program, but instead of gift cards and merchandise you spend your points to give even more to charity.

These are the 6 ads and the charity each one supports:

Animal Cruelty - ASPCA
Feed the poor - Feed the Children
Stop child abuse - Childhelp
End homelessness - The National Alliance to End Homelessness
Impact kids cancer - The Children Cancer Center
Sponsor children - Romina G Mendieta Montano

Something else that bears mentioning is that there are other ads on this site. Normal ads, meaning you don't have to click them. They use these ads as a means to generate revenue to run the site so that all the money generated from your clicking can go straight to charity. Please add Click To Give to the whitelist of any adblocker you may have running. Additionally if you are using TopLine, you will want to disable it for this site as well. To do this, go to your account display settings and add clicktogive.com to the excluded domains. Make sure you click Save All Changes when you are done.

Bing - Search to Earn Credits

In case you haven't heard of it, Bing is Microsoft's search engine. It is a re-vamped and re-branded MSN Search. If you've never used it, it's actually pretty decent. It provides results that are on par with Google's in my opinion, and it's definitely improving. If you want to try a side by side comparison I suggest trying out Bing It On. I tried several search results on there and was surprised to see Bing come out the winner in 3 out of 5 of them, and the other 2 were ties.

As an incentive to use their search engine, Microsoft has started a rewards program. To sign up, you link either your Facebook or Microsoft account. When you first start out, there is a "tour" you can take of Bing with various different things to click on that all reward credits. After that though, the main way to earn credits is through searching. You get 1 credit per 2 searches up to a maximum of 15 credits per day (20 when you get your status to gold). There is also a "daily offer" which is basically just a special search, but you get an extra credit when you click it.

There are not a whole lot of rewards to choose from, but it's very easy to cap your credits each day. Just head over to the Bing rewards page and click the daily offer. From there, just click on different related searches on the side until you get your credits for the day. The best reward is probably the $5 Amazon gift card. You can see in my screen shot that I had 76% of the needed 525. Since I took that I have cashed in for my $5 card which I received the next day and I am now 12% towards my second card.

There are 3 status levels - member, silver, and gold. Getting to silver and gold is easy, but it takes a little bit of time. There really isn't a benefit of silver over member except for a one time 50 credit bonus. Gold however gets 5% discount on Microsoft points, 5% discount on Xbox Gold subscription, and a 10% discount on all other items. So that $5 Amazon card that used to cost 525 credits becomes 475 credits.

Again, like several other methods I've talked about, you aren't going to be making a ton of money from this. However; it's easy, doesn't take a lot of time out of your day (2 - 3 minutes usually), and you get a free Amazon gift card every few weeks.

Swagbucks - Very Little Effort

I figured with Swagbucks I'd start small and ramp up. These are the things you can do that will take very little time. You can do all of these in about five minutes time, and you'll end up with roughly 20 Swag Bucks if there is a Swag Code available, and about 15 if there isn't. If you come back and search again later you can end up with 30 - 35 SB for the day with almost no effort. If you do just these methods and nothing else, you should be able to average a $5 Amazon gift card every two weeks.

• Search using the swagbucks search. You have a random chance of winning some SB - usually in the 5 - 15 range. Friday is Mega Swagbucks Day and your chances of winning larger amounts of SB increases. Amounts of 15-30 SB are more common. The most I've won is 60 SB. You can only win points from searching roughly every 5 hours it seems like, so don't spam. In fact, if you search for gibberish or just search way to fast in general you'll get temporarily blocked.
• The daily poll. Just a few mouse clicks and you get 1 SB.
• NOSO (No Obligation Special Offers). Shows you about 4 or 5 ads or offers. You don't have to complete them. Just click Skip or Next Offer a few times and you get 2 more SB.
• Use the Swagbucks toolbar. Google does not allow toolbars to be installed for Chrome, but will work for every other browser. If you use Chrome, I recommend you installing Firefox just to install the toolbar in. This gives 1 SB each day.
• Swag codes. These are codes that are put out by the Swagbucks team on Twitter, Facebook, or their blog. You can see if any codes are available by clicking Swag Codes on the widget below.

Swagbucks - Earn Reward Points and Redeem Them For Free Stuff

At a very simple level, Swagbucks is a site that allows you to accrue points (called Swag Bucks) by various methods, and then you can spend those points in their store. In the month's time I've been using Swagbucks, I've accrued enough points to order $40 worth of Amazon gift cards and have entered a drawing for a Wii U. I'm about a day away from getting another $5 Amazon card. Click the banner above to go to the Swagbucks page and create your account. You can use a traditional username/password, or you can log in through Facebook; it's up to you. There is a plethora of ways to earn Swag Bucks, and I'm going to categorize them by how much effort each requires.

The gift cards I've earned. Click for a larger image.

Very Little Effort

• Use Swagbuck's search engine
• NOSO (No Obligation Special Offers)
• The daily poll
• Use the Swagbucks toolbar
• Swag codes.

Moderate Effort

• Watch video promotions
• Swagbucks TV
• Shop and Earn

Active Effort

• Surveys
• Coupons
• Special offers
• Daily deals
• Tasks
• Trade in
• Games

It sure is Swagbucks, it sure is.

Each day there is a daily goal meter on the Swagbucks main page. The goal it displays depends on the day of the week and if you reach that goal you'll receive a 10% bonus. Today's goal was 90 and I earned about 100, so I'll get a bonus 9 SB. The bonus is credited at the end of the month. If you meet the daily bonus 7 days in a row you get an additional 25 SB. Meet it 14 days in a row and you get an extra 100 SB. Go 21 days and get an extra 200 SB. If you manage to go the full month you'll get 300 SB. I usually do just enough to reach the daily goal.

So that's what Swagbucks has to offer. It seems like there are a lot of ways to earn Swagbucks, and there are. You can mix and match the different ways to create your own system. Over the next few days I'll be writing more in depth about all the different methods as well as sharing what I do. This will hopefully arm you with enough information to make your own decisions about what's worth your time and what isn't.

Paid Viewpoint - A 3-5 Minute Poll Every Other Day

I love Paid Viewpoint. As far as sites go that let you do surveys, it's the most user friendly one I've come across. Instead of a long survey every few weeks, they send you a small survey around every other day. When there is a survey to take, they will e-mail you. Just click on the link, answer a few questions, and you're done; the whole process takes about 2 minutes.

Paid Viewpoint is the market research survey site built upon 4 principles:

• We pay cash for every completed market research survey.
• We never screen you out once you've been invited into a survey.
• We've cracked the code that takes "boring" out of the survey answering experience.
• Privacy – we never ask you to register your real name or complete physical address.

Emphasis on the second point. Many times at other survey sites, I have been 15 to 20 minutes into a survey and I click the next button only to be told I don't fit the demographics they are looking for and I've been disqualified from the survey. No points, no rewards, nadda, zip, zilch. This never happens with Paid Viewpoint

Example traits survey question

There are two types of surveys: traits survey and biz survey. A trait surveys asks questions about you personally and pays $0.10 for completing one. These are used to increase your TraitScore. You always want to answer these truthfully because they will re-ask some of the same questions in later surveys and if you choose a different answer the second time your TraitScore will go down. The higher your TraitScore, the more likely you are to receive a biz survey. The biz surveys are a little longer - probably closer to 5 - 6 minutes, but also pay much better. I've been with Paid Viewpoint for about a month and so far I have received four biz surveys, so that's about once a week.

The higher your TraitScore, the more often you will receive biz surveys, and you also get paid more. So you'll start off slow and after building up some momentum you'll be earning at a higher rate than when you started. I think my TraitScore was at 600 when I started. This is what is stated explicitly on the website about the value of your TraitScore

Your goal is to achieve a TraitScore of 9000 or better. That will place you in the top 10% of PV members and means you will earn more for each answer.

There's two important questions you might be wanting to know the answers to right now: How do I sign up? And how do I get paid? Well, signing up is easy; just click on the banner at the top of this post. It'll ask for some basic demographic information. Make sure this information is correct, because some of the traits surveys will ask you a question like, "I'm female and I live in Montana." and you'd have to choose the answer (if you were me), "False, I'm male and live in Florida." They ask for a phone number, but this is only to make sure that you don't register multiple times. I believe they text you a verification code, or you can have an automated robot call you with your code. You'll also have to enter your Paypal e-mail adress, which brings me to question two of how do you get paid. You can cash out to Paypal anytime after you reach $15. Also, did I mention that they pay you for answering the demographic information when you sign up? Yup, anytime they ask you a question you get paid. You'll start out with a little over a dollar just by registering.

As far as pay to time ratio goes for online surveys, Paid Viewpoint is excellent. So far, if I average the value of all my surveys I get $0.25 per survey. 20 of them took 2 minutes, and 5 of them took 5 minutes, which comes out to right at an hour total. I've made $6.31. Yes, it's below minimum wage, but I never promised you'd make a fortune. I am usually checking my e-mail, or maybe Facebook while I do this. It takes away literally no time from my day. So what are you waiting for? Sign up and get started now!