Until now, FatHeadDog has been on the fence about the search and win site Swagbucks. I never seemed to “win” any points on searches, never entered the bonus “Swag Codes” in time and generally just failed at returning the investment of my time.

But now that I’ve gotten the hang of Swagbucks and figured out my best strategy for winning, I’m a big fan and tickled with the dozens of free Amazon.com gift cards I’ve scored from the site.

First off, here’s the premise of the site. You earn “Swagbucks” for searches performed on their site (as opposed to searching on Google). Points range from 7 to 50 “bucks” earned. You can redeem these points for thousands of prizes, but the best value, by far, is the $5 Amazon.com gift card for 450 bucks.

Here are a few pointers for winning:

Search Early, Search Often

1. Perform your searches approximately three to four times a day, several hours apart. I search first thing in the morning, after lunch, late afternoon and in the evening.

Once You Win, Walk Away

2. Once you win bucks from a search, its fairly unlikely you’ll hit it again, so you can save your next search for a few hours later.

Search Deep, Not Shallow

3. When searching, try related terms to the original you searched, and click through all the pages of results. Also, you can try searching photos or videos for the same term. To me at least, it seems searching “deep” wins better results than searching “shallow” with dozens of unrelated terms (which, by the way, can penalize you if Swagbucks thinks you’re not performing “natural searches”).