My 2-Minute Early Retirement Job

Looking for a side-hustle?  What if you could get a job that took 2 minutes a day and earned roughly $10 a month?  Would you be interested?  This job takes very little effort, and can be done while you watch TV.  No skills are required.  You can do this job at home, and you barely have to lift a finger.  Sound perfect?  Want a side-gig like this?  It’s yours for the taking.

Bing Rewards for Fun and Profit

I’m actually talking about the Bing Rewards program (Note: That’s a refer-a-friend link).  It really isn’t a ‘job’ in the traditional sense, but actually a rewards program for using the Bing search engine.  The program provides ‘1 credit’ for every 2 searches you conduct (up to some daily limits).  There are also bonus credits given daily.   Credits are then convertible into gift cards.

As everyone knows, Bing is not as popular as Google.  In response, Microsoft created the Bing Rewards program to incentivize the use of the Bing search engine.  The program rewards are given in the form of gift cards for places like Amazon, Starbucks, Macy’s, etc.  

Why do it?

For so little effort, why wouldn’t you want around $120 a year?  Millionaires are made $5 at a time.  I mostly use my credits for Amazon Gift Cards.  In fact, Mrs. Tako’s Christmas gifts were paid for entirely by Amazon gift cards.  

At the Gold reward level, 475 credits will buy you a $5 gift card.  I average around 30 credits a day, which in a 31-day month means 930 credits, or just 1 day shy of $10/month.  Add in cash-back programs like Ebates for extra discounts and you can juice this even further.

What’s that? You don’t want to use the Bing search engine?  It takes too much time to do all those searches?  Any more excuses?  While you were so busy complaining, I just made some money! 

Most advantages in life are small.  They may not seem like much at first viewing.  Repeated continuously, over time, that tiny bit of extra adds up to a LOT of extra.  

Mr. Tako suggests you give it a try – it only takes two minutes.  You don’t have to actually use the Bing search engine – you just need to generate ‘searches’ for credits.  

It’s super easy if you know the tricks…

Sign-in First

The first and most important tip is to remember to sign-in first.  If you don’t sign-in with your Microsoft Account, Bing won’t keep track of your credits.  Simply navigate to the Bing Rewards page and click the ‘Sign-In’ button.  Done!

Searching Without Actually Searching

To maximize your daily Bing Rewards credits, you’ll need to generate 30 ‘desktop’ searches for 15 credits, and 20 ‘mobile’ searches for 10 credits.  That’s a total of 25 credits a day for searching.  There are also 3-5 bonus credits for clicking on links in the Bing Rewards Dashboard.  

How do we do this for the minimum of effort required?  How does Mr. Tako perform 50 searches in two minutes?  By clicking….

Clicking is way easier than typing text into a form and hitting that search button.  How do you create searches by clicking, you ask?  Easy!   You need to learn about something called the ‘carousel’.  

The carousel UI widget exists just below the search bar for many kinds of Bing searches.  It displays things like popular news, or popular search items.

By simply clicking on those pictures, you will generate searches!  Easy, and very fast!  Here are a few of my favorite carousels to use for Bing Rewards:

• Popular now on Bing (Changes daily)
• Famous Astronauts (Just because!)
• Bing News (Changes daily)

Want to make your daily searches go even faster?  We can do that…

Block Images for Faster “Searching”

Images take up most of the bandwidth on a web page.  If you have a slow internet connection, this is very important!  The bandwidth required for text is tiny compared to the images, so the trick is to not load images.  Bing doesn’t care if you don’t load images – it still counts as a search!  

So how do we temporarily block images?  Well, there’s a Chrome extension for that: Block Images Extension for Google Chrome.  There are also numerous options for Firefox.

By installing the extension and simply clicking a button, we can block all images and load the page even faster:

It looks pretty spartan, but it still works!  The hardest part is finding the button to scroll right.  Just clicking on the far right of the carousel seems to do the trick!  Get your clicking finger going!

What About Mobile?

Ten of the daily allowed credits are suppose to be generated from mobile-searches.  Those must be done on a mobile device…right?  Not exactly…

Typically mobile devices are pretty slow – What if there was a way to do mobile searches on a desktop computer.  Time to learn about the User Agent String!

Simply put, a User Agent String is a small piece of text included in your request for a web page.  This text tells a web server what kind of web browser you are using.  It looks something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36

By sending the right kind of User Agent String, your computer can appear to be using a mobile web browser.  It’s kind-of like cross-dressing to use the fastest bathroom at a bar.  Not that I’d ever do that….

There happens to be a handy chrome extension to do just this:  User Agent Switcher for Google Chrome.  Numerous options for Firefox also exist.  

Just install the chrome extension, change your user agent string to be a mobile browser (I use Firefox on Android Mobile), and then start clicking.

Bing Rewards Automation

Your daily Bing Rewards job could go even faster with automation, except that’s not allowed in the Terms of Use.  Sorry.  Don’t do this, or you could get your account banned.  If it were allowed, the code to automate searches is simple.  Anyone with some basic coding knowledge could whip-up some automation up in a couple hours…hypothetically.

The Hardest Part

Those are my major tips and tricks for Bing Rewards.  I have the whole process down to less than 2 minutes a day.  The hardest part is just remembering to do my job!  Have more questions?  Check the Bing Rewards FAQ for further details.

I should also mention:  There are other reward programs like Swagbucks that are very similar.  I haven’t tried it much, but it looks like another way to generate a small amount of income online.  Good luck!

Got any great tips that I missed?  Please let me know in the comments.