Let’s get something straight…

Sigh…

Part and parcel of running a blog that thousands of people read every day is the fact that you are going to get some mental midgets flaming you in the comment areas.  We understand this, and the warm happy glow that our wonderfully cool visitors leave us with is more than enough to offset the head-shake inducing idiocy of this vast minority.

We want to make sure though that these angry little people don’t actually have anything legitimate to gripe about.

We’ve been very successful with Swag Bucks.  Just look at our Proof section.  Now we don’t put this stuff up to gloat, but rather to inspire people that they can do the same thing.  If you actually read our site you’ll see that time and again this is what we’re saying:

Anyone can do what we’ve done.

We’re not scamming you. We’re not keeping a secret formula to ourselves.  We’re not trying to “trick” you into using our referral link.  We’re not saying you can get thousands of dollars in Amazon gift cards in a short period of time without doing any work.

If you’d like it put more simply, here’s our story…

We joined Swag Bucks in January of 2009.  We searched every day and got about 2 or 3 Swag Bucks for our efforts (remember, this is the old Swag Bucks).  We thought to ourselves, “Gee selves, 2 Swag Bucks a day times 30 days in a month… That’s enough to get an Amazon gift card (45 Swag Bucks) once a month!  That’s $60 in free stuff in a year… just for using Swag Bucks.”

Then we realized that Swag Codes existed.  That meant an extra Swag Buck just about every day, so long as we kept our eyes open and acted fast.  that would add up to a few more gift cards over the course of a year.

Once we were signed up for a month, and received absolutely no junk mail, and realized how simple (and kind of fun) it was, and had some proof that it worked (a nice shiny $5 Amazon gift card), we told some friends and family about Swag Bucks.  In our second month we signed up 13 people.  Some of them became frequent users like us, others tried it out and found it to not really be their cup of tea.  Our new referrals gave us about 10 Swag Bucks a day, including our original 2 or 3.  That meant we could, conceivably, in a good month, get $25 worth of Amazon gift cards!

We were so pleased that people signed up under us, that we started a Facebook group so we could pass around hints when Swag Codes appeared. Everybody was happy

Around this time we realized what every Swag Bucks user eventually comes to realize.  That is, if you really want to get a LOT of Swag Bucks, the only guaranteed method is through REFERRALS.

This is no secret.  We’ve mentioned it many many times here on the WLSB site.

We scratched our heads and thought of ways to get more referrals.  One method that we used for a few months was to go on popular sites like Yahoo Answers and give advice to people who had questions about Swag Bucks.  For our troubles, we popped our referral link in there, and we got a few referrals that way.  It was a lot of work however, answering dozens of questions every day, and posting emails to friends when Swag Codes came out.

So we decided to start WeLoveSwagBucks, and do it all under one roof.  We started off giving advice and tutorials, and notifying people when we found a Swag Code.  We put our referral link in every post, and over many months of  daily effort, our referrals slowly increased. (Pay particular note to the words in italics )

Once we received our first Amazon order with our free gift cards we made an unboxing video and put it on Youtube.  This opened our site, and our referral link, to a whole new group of people.  Our referrals continued to slowly increase.

With each new purchase we added another unboxing video, and each and every day, whenever we found a Swag Code, we would pass it on to all the friends we’d made since we started.  This includes you

Today we have over 700 referrals, and referrals make up about 93% of the Swag Bucks we get every day.  (Just as a side note, Swag Codes make up about 1%).  Our referral link is all over our site, and our Youtube videos.

We are very thankful to everyone who signed up using our link, and we want to give something back.  Something like this site.  We hope you get a lot more Swag Bucks and Swag Codes as a result of visiting us.

Another thing we’d like to give you, and this is where we come full circle, is the knowledge that any Swag Bucks user can do the exact things we’ve done if they simply have the determination to stick with it.

Lots of users have done it.

Every user can do it.

So if you choose not to do it, and want to be angry at us folks who choose to make the effort, that’s perfectly fine.  We’ll continue to delete your silly, angry, whiny comments.

For the rest of you, enjoy the ride, good luck, have fun, and we LOVE the company we keep.

11 comments March 19, 2010