I signed up for the Swagbucks Blogging Network, so expect a post about it every once in a while!

I’m a huge fan of Swagbucks and I’ve written about them before. The have had two big changes as of late: they changed the swagbuck values (1 SB before is now worth 10 SB), and they’re added a nifty Online poll part to the site. For answering the easy question of the day, you get free Swagbucks to use for whatever you want. If you have a great poll idea, submit it to Swagbucks, and they use it, you get 100 SB! It’s an easy way to rack up some extra points.

Since I signed up for Swagbucks, I’ve made $35 in Amazon cash, $5 Paypal, and donated money to Nashville flood relief. It’s a really great way to get a little spending money or other stuff just for using the internet like you normally would. You can also earn SB for anyone you refer, up to 1000 SB per referral. It’s really easy to get enough points for a good prize.

Some examples of prizes and values:

• $5 Amazon: 450 SB
• $5 Paypal: 700 SB
• Assorted posters: 1000 SB and up
• USB Turntable: 28,199 SB (I need one of these!)

LINK: Swagbucks

Got some time to waste at your computer? Give Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk a try. It’s run by Amazon and it’s full of thousands of little tasks for you to make money doing.

If I was bored in class or in my dorm while I was in college, I would wander over to MTurk and search for easy tasks; generally words like “poll” or “survey” bring up some that only take a few moments. If you don’t see anything there, just browse the first few pages to see if anything strikes your fancy. While you only get a few cents per task, remember that 10 tasks that pay 5 cents that take 10 seconds to do makes you 50 cents. The little amounts add up after a while.

How do you get your earnings out of this Amazonian jail? At $10, you can deposit it to a bank account you link with Amazon Payments, or you can change your earnings to Amazon gift credit at any amount. If you’re a college student who needs to buy books, or someone who just loves buying books in general, this is a great thing to do in your spare time.

I signed up for MTurk in 2008 during the second half of my junior year of college. That year, I made over $60. That all went towards my school books, and paid for half of them as my books were never that expensive in the first place. In 2009, I made almost $80. (Yes, I did pay attention in class too!) I don’t devote as much time to MTurk now that I’m not sitting bored in class with an Internet connection anymore, but I still can’t complain with something that helps me get stuff for even cheaper on Amazon. I need something to help pay for books to help me job search! Haha.

Have you tried out MTurk? Is it worth your time or just another gimmick to you?

Want to get a little bit back for doing the stuff you do already online? Check out SwagBucks.

Every time you search using SwagBucks, you have a chance to win anywhere from 1-5 Swag Bucks, which you can use to get some free stuff. If you follow them on Twitter, you can usually find codes for some extra ones, and the same goes for their Facebook page. Besides that, they have partnerships with some online stores, and you can earn 1 Swag Buck for every $5 you spend. Lastly, you can trade in old electronics and video games for Swag Bucks (though I must say, I usually don’t think the values are a deal).

So what good are these things? Here’s a taste of the kinds of things you can turn them in for:

• Assorted mp3s, 1 SB
• $5 Amazon gift card, 45 SB
• $5 via Paypal, 70 SB
• 4GB Zune, 1975 SB
• PS3 console, 3588 SB

I think it’s at least worth a try. I’ve gotten an Amazon credit or two from them already.

LINK: SwagBucks