You've seen the advertisements while you surf online. I'm sure you've seen the posts about it on forums including at the popular MySpace website. You may even know someone who's tried it before. But, can you make money with surveys? In my journey to make a living online and at home using the internet I have tried this out for myself. At one point it was the only thing I was doing online. Here's what I think about using surveys to make money and what I've found is possible. First, the major players are PaidSurveysOnline and SurveyScout. Most of them offer much of the same thing. The main thing you should look for with any of these websites is an offer to a large directory of other surveys sites you can join. This is because no single website will have enough surveys at any one time to keep you busy enough. The more websites they give you access to, the better. You'll want to use their directories and join as many varying and different survey sites as possible. I suggest you have an email address set up specifically to take surveys with. Most email hosts will send the mail you get straight to your Junk Mail folder so you'll need one set up so that incoming surveys is all you will get. Despite carefully allowing only certain sites to email me with surveys I still had to filter out mail from certain sites. I was getting at least forty new emails a day once I got everything rolling and had signed up for everything I wanted to do. What can you expect to receive after you've taken this step? "Survey" it seems is a broad term and means different things to different people. I got many questionaire type surveys which were interesting and entertaining to fill out. I also got the special offer type where to get money I had to fulfill a certain amount of offers where I could receive free stuff, money in my account, or points that would enter me into monthly or quarterly draws. This too, is subject to what type of survey you want them to send you. Personally, I left the focus groups and telephone surveys alone. The focus groups pay the highest but it wasn't something I was interested in doing. A lot of the surveys they send will be time dependant, so if you don't respond to them in time you may be unable to take it or the survey itself may end, having already received the number of people they were looking for. These companies are getting their surveys straight from the people who need the information and are looking to fill spots so they can test and ask questions, so being quick to get to a survey you want to take is important. Some surveys are looking for a specific demographic of people. You may or may not be eligible for certain surveys depending on what they're looking for. This is normal. Companies are product testing and doing market research looking for people of all shapes and sizes from many walks of life. This is why you join lots of other specialized survey sites all at once so the offers keep coming in to take another one, and why you should look for a site offering a large directory of places to join. They often know of the obscurest places on the internet to join to get into the databases of companies using surveys, making them well worth the money if this is what you want to do online to make money. The downsides is that some places will call you whether you wanted them to or not, and even let you pick the best times to call you. Many sites let you decide on calls but most don't have that option. There is nothing wrong with phone surveys, but if you get a call for one when you're not in the mood to take one you may find yourself screening your calls. It can also quickly require a lot of time at the beginning. Most things do that give any real return and this is no different. If you want to do surveys for part time income then you will probably not notice too much of a difference in how much you are "at work" from before. Full time income really feels like it requires full time sometimes. The money and opportunity is there for anyone wanting to use this to make some money. If you're prepared to dedicate some time to this, work through the start-up point where things are slow, and give your opinions all day to market research and focus groups then this is probably for you. The time dedication is the hardest part to work through at the beginning. This DOES work, I still have a free trip to Las Vegas available from using a Paid To Shop type service. Any of the above websites I recommend for this, particularly SurveyScout, but remember what is written here, joining only the types of surveys you want to do and are clear if and how you want to be contacted. To your success. |
