Swagbucks

Winning Swagbucks
First: Sign up! (you get bonus swagbucks by signing up using this link)

It is safe to give your address, email and/or phone number to Swagbucks. Everything they've done since I started using them has been trustworthy. However, beware of their partners in the special offers section. I'll get to that later, see "Intermediate" section I wrote.

Next, the best way to win is to make it your default search engine. This page tells you how to make it your default search engine for each browser you use. The more you search, the more you win. Note: you will not win on every search, it is random.

Then get involved! Swagbucks has swag codes. These codes are time limited codes which you can redeem for swagbucks. If you follow their facebook, twitter and blog, you'll get them all. (There are shadier ways to get the codes, you can search for sites that post them. Be warned, this does go against their TOS)

Lastly, get friends to join. You get up to 1000 swagbucks for each friend you refer. Every time they win a swagbuck, you win one. This is NOT a pyramid scheme since they cap it at 1000 for each referral.

THE DOWNSIDE of Swagbucks:
Swagbucks has a lot of advertisements. Their sponsored results are useless, spammy, and make an otherwise awesome search engine bad. There is a fix, and it is fairly simple. There is a Swagbucks adblocker. (I do not believe this violates their TOS because you are only blocking advertisements)

To block ads using Firefox:
First, install the greasemonkey addon. This is approved by Firefox itself, so rest assured it is safe. It just manages scripts. After installing that and restarting your browser, here and install this script. All it does is block ads, and I verify that it is safe. I've been using it since May(of 2010).

To block ads using Chrome:
Lucky you! You have it easy. Just install the script on this page. Congrats, you're done.

To block ads using Internet Explorer or other browsers:
I'm sorry, but you aren't using what we call "modern browsers". You have to put up with the advertisements (many are fine with this), or switch to a different browser. If you're considering a switch, consider Google Chrome. It is by far the fastest, safest, and most reliable.

Referrals
One way to get a bunch more SB is to get referrals. You can spam your friends to join, create a blog like me(lot of work, little return, so please send them to my guide and have them sign up), or there is a new one use method I figured out. Sign up for Google Adwords. As long as you haven't used the service before, if you call them, you get a free 1 time $100 promo ad credit. Design an ad for Swagbucks, but with your referral link. I've gone through $50 of my ad credit, and I have about 10-15 referrals so far. The ONLY discouraging this is that many sign up, but never use the service. Please, if you figure out how to get around this, let me know in the comments. Good luck, let me know how this idea works out.

Swagbucks Games
There are 2 ways to play, which they explain in the instructions. You can do free play, where you pretty much play for fun. You get random awards of 2SB sometimes.
OR, you can play tournaments. You have to pay to enter, but if you win, the payout is more than what it cost to enter. I've played a few. Won some, lost some. If you actually play enough to get good at a game, then do a tournament, you have a good shot at being the winner. Let me know in the comment section below about your experiences.

Daily Poll
I find this to not be worth the 3 seconds it takes. Swagbucks has a daily poll, and if you vote, they give you one swagbucks. If you were to convert that to cash, it would be similar to $.01

NOSO
Again, not worth the effort. This is a no obligation offer. You can skip past all the advertisements and they'll give you between 1 and 3 swagbucks.

Special Offers
Worth the effort, but you better be careful. The free special offers are usually scams or worse. If you do decide to complete them, do NOT give your real email address unless you like spam, and I'd recommend being careful about what other legitimate contact info you give them. Do NOT download any software for these. Most are some version of spyware. If you are very careful, the special offers are very useful.

SwagTV
My last post on this was that these weren't worth it. Now that they have implemented the swagbucks meter, that has changed. See the below post titled "New!". They are now most definitely worth it. Granted, the quality of these videos isn't very high. You'll likely lose a few braincells. Don't say I didn't warn you!!

Winning Statistics
These seem to change often, especially as more features, but for the moment winning caps per day are as follows:
1. SBTV - 25 wins
2. Swagbucks search - 4 wins
3. Swagbucks Games - 5 wins

Due to some changes that have been made, I believe SBTV deserves its own section. Using this alone, you can very easily make $25 in Amazon giftcards per month. Here's how it works. Every win on SBTV is worth 3 swagbucks. You're limited to 25 wins per day. 3*25 = 75 swagbucks per day. 30 days in a month x 75 = 2250SB per month. Each $5 Amazon giftcard costs 450 swagbucks. So 2250/450 = 5 $5 giftcards.

Yes, the videos are amazingly boring, however you can get it to autoplay without having to watch...it does violate their TOS, so use at your own risk.
Go here if you think it's worth the risk: ezswag.com (ask where the ezwatcher is in the chat, they keep moving it)

Important!! You can block SBTV entirely and still get credit for it. This saves bandwidth and gets rid of the sound it makes. If not using an autowatcher, you'll have to choose a new video every time it credits. Just install adblock for Chrome or Firefox. For me it blocked the videos by default, but if not, just tell it to block the element just outside the video. Again, do this at your own risk, I'm quite sure this would violate more TOS.

**From now until the new year they have doubled the amount of Swagbucks you're allowed to earn per day. The limit is now 150sb per day. However, to achieve this, you'll have to watch 500 videos, at roughly 30 seconds each(videos are more than 30 seconds, but meter moves at 30 seconds). It would take roughly 4.2 hours to get 150 sb.