How I Earn Gift Cards with My Points

Because the “Make Your Own” crowd is also usually the frugal folks crowd who like to find ways to save a little money or make a little money, I thought I would share today one of the things I’ve been doing for several years now that’s a pretty simple way to earn gift cards online.  I’ve tried a variety of things over the years but the one program that I’ve always stuck with is the MyPoints Program that works the best for me.

(Note: the links in this post are my affiliate links, but as mentioned above this is a program I’ve happily used myself for over nine years and am comfortable recommending to others).

The reason the MyPoints program has been the best fit for me is that I can still earn points towards gift cards even if I’m not doing online shopping which is how so many of these programs work.  But let’s face it, I’m basically a thrift store shopper! Sure, I order things online here and there too, but the bulk of my shopping happens either at the grocery store or a second-hand store. Instead the main way I earn points with MyPoints is by clicking through their emails which I’ll talk about more below.  Email is something I check at least twice every day so it’s been something super simple for me to do.

I usually just let my points pile up and finally cash them in for gift cards at the end of the year and use them for Christmas purchases. Perhaps I’m not earning as many points as is possible to do, but it’s always been enough to get a few gift cards with minimal effort on my part, and that can be a nice little bonus at the end of the year.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in doing too, you can read on and I’ll share some of the ways you can earn on MyPoints and what my experience has been with each of the methods.

How Can I Get Gift Cards With MyPoints?

Here’s a list of some of the ways I’ve used to earn gift cards on MyPoints.  The ones I use the most are at the top of the list with some of the other methods following after that:

Click Through the MyPoints Emails

Several emails will come from MyPoints every day and many of them (but necessarily all of them) will say “Receive 5 points” at the bottom. When you click through you will earn 5 points.  Of course the hope is that you will go there and then do some shopping or sign up for some other offer. For me, the truth is that I have never shopped or signed up when clicking through these emails, although I have learned about some interesting new vendors I did not know about before. But the reality is I click/tap through, get the five points, and then close out that page and go right back to my email.  These 5 point emails are how I earn the majority of my points.

Average points to earn each month with this method:  150 – 200

Vote in the Daily Poll

Each day there is a daily poll and you can earn 1 point by answering. Again, this is a pretty painless way to get a point. An email comes every day too that says “MyPoints Member Benefits” that you can click through to get to the Daily Poll (as part of the Daily 5 which I’ll talk about in a minute).  I usually do this every day.

Average points to earn each month with this method:  30

Point Perks

Every few days, MyPoints will do a Facebook post giving a link to a page on their site where there will be a Point Perks Code to type in (or sometimes the Facebook post has the code already in it). When you type in these Point Perks Codes on the MyPoints site, you will earn a few points (usually 2, 3, or 4). The codes are usually only good for 2 or 3 hours so if you don’t see it early enough, you’re out of luck.  I’ve found the best way to take advantage of these is to “Like” their Facebook page, but then also under the “Following” option, select “See First” under the news feed options, and also select “On” for the Notifications.

Average points to earn each month with this method: 12 – 15

So those are the three main ways I earn points every month with MyPoints because those are the very predictable ones that don’t take much extra effort on my part and don’t require any extra shopping. The remaining items on this list have more unpredictable points earning because it’s much more dependent on how much time or effort you want to devote to it.

Click below to check MyPoints out now:

Other Ways To Earn with MyPoints

I’ve listed above the three main ways I earn points using MyPoints.  However there are additional ways to earn points which I’ve included below.

Search and Earn

There’s an option on the MyPoints site to use their search engine for your internet queries. (Currently this is found under “More” and then “Search and Earn”.)  However the points you earn here are totally random. Most of the time you’ll earn nothing, and then suddenly it’ll say “you’ve earned 35 points!” or some such number. Sometimes when I’m on their site I’ll do a few queries and see if anything pops up.  I don’t have any proof, but it does seem about every 10 searches or so, some points will pop up.

Watch Videos

Frankly, the video earning is kind of a time suck for not many points. The only time I do this is if I am sitting and knitting and can just have it running beside me.  The playlists usually have 15 videos in them however you don’t have to watch them all the way through. You do have to get to the point where it shows a check mark on the video that it’s been watched (usually after a minute or so) and then you can move on to the next one. You have to go through all the videos to get the points. Again, the only way I do this is with the speakers off, and letting it just run beside me as I do some other quiet activity, but monitoring it enough that I can click through to the next video as soon as I can.

Surveys

Surveys are also a rather frustrating use of time as you can click through a bunch of the questions and feeling like you were actually doing the survey, only to find out a few minutes later that you didn’t qualify and you get bumped back to the main survey page again. Sometimes you do earn a few points for at least attempting. This will only feel like a good use of your time if you are frogging around with it while you watch TV for instance, or are otherwise just filling in some down time. Nevertheless, there are some surveys that can earn a lot of points so I do check it out from time to time.

Print and Use Coupons

You can also earn 1 point for each grocery coupon you print and 25 points for each one you redeem. I used to try a little harder in this area, but I truly don’t find many coupons here that I need or would use anymore. I now much more prefer to use my local grocery store’s coupon/perks program. However it’s another area to check out where you might be able to earn.

Shopping

Yes, yes, I suppose this is really the main purpose of MyPoints, but it’s an option I seldom use.  But on those occasions when I am in fact purchasing something online directly from a retailer (for instance I need to occasionally order tall size clothing from JC Penney), I try to remember to click through the MyPoints site first to get the points. Amazon is on their list of retailers, however there are so many exclusions of what qualifies that I seldom bother to check it first anymore.  The amount of points rewarded is usually based on the amount of money spent (for instance 5 points per dollar spent). So even though the majority of my points are earned without any shopping, from time to time I do take advantage of this category.

Sign up for Offers

This is something I would suggest only if you have an email devoted to just junk mail. Once you sign up for these offers you have to be vigilant about unsubscribing again if you don’t want them filling your email box, and I’m always a little paranoid that they are going to get me on other sales lists I don’t want to be on either. But there are points to be earned here if you are willing to take the results.

Daily 5 / Monthly Goals

There’s a Daily 5 option where if you do five of the tasks listed you earn an additional 5 points.  These used to be easy to do, but things recently changed and now it includes too many things I don’t want to spend time doing. There are also monthly goals you can set to earn bonus points but again, usually not worth my effort as I don’t do many of things listed.

Click below to check MyPoints out now:

What Dollar Amount Gift Cards Can You Earn Using MyPoints?

There are over 75 different retailers and restaurant gift cards to choose from in the “Redeem Points” rewards area of their site. The amount of points needed for the cards will vary. I’ve used Amazon as an example here as that’s one of the more versatile and popular options people are interested in.  (Note: this is as of April, 2019 – The amount of points needed changes from time to time).

Amazon Gift Card:
$3 Card – 480 points
$5 Card – 790 points
$10 Card – 1,580 points
$15 Card – 2,370 points
$25 Card – 3,950 points
$50 Card – 7,900 points
$75 Card – 15,800 points

Check out it here – – > Use MyPoints to Earn Gift Cards

Is There a MyPoints App?

Like I said earlier, I’ve been doing this program for nine years, and in fact MyPoints has been around since the 1990’s and for this reason this might all seem a little old school to the smart phone crowd who prefer apps like Ibotta.

What’s worked for me is to just put a shortcut on my phone to their site, and I find the MyPoints site to be very mobile friendly.  I can usually access the things I want to using this method.

As of this writing, MyPoints has just recently come out with an app (and I installed it and gave it a try) but could not find some of the familiar things on it such as the Search and Earn.  For this reason, I’m just sticking with the shortcut method on my phone.

It’s Worked For Me!

Well you made it to the end of this post and hopefully it didn’t feel like one long advertisement to you!  Once again, this is a program I’ve used for nine years now, it has worked well for me because it doesn’t rely totally on shopping, and that’s why I’m comfortable sharing this info here with you today.  I basically just click through their emails, do the daily poll, and watch for the Point Perks. Just those three little things will allow you to earn some gift cards.

And of course if you want to do more, there are certainly ways that you can!

Here’s the link again if you want to check it out. I hope you enjoy it too!

Check out it here – – > Use MyPoints to Earn Gift Cards