How to get the best out of surveys!

Filling out surveys is a fairly popular way for people from all walks of life to make a bit of scratch on the side. Survey sites have caught a bit of flak over the past few years, with some sites charging for membership without even providing enough surveys to make back the membership fees, some not paying their members or cheating members out of their commissions, and some dodgy dealers were charging exorbitant amounts for ’survey lists’ that were either outdated or just a list of links to all the free sites the user could have found with a quick google search.

But, luckily for us, these days survey sites are generally pretty good, and if you know what to look for in a site, and how to avoid the few scammers that remain, you can easily make a little cash on the side with survey sites.

What to look for:

• It should be free. Don’t pay someone for the privilege of doing their market research for them, they should be paying you. If a site charges for membership, this is a good sign you should look elsewhere, there’s plenty of legitimate sites that don’t.
• It should have a referral program. Lets face it, filling out surveys is pretty boring. After the first 50, the magic just seems to disappear. Good survey sites will have a referral program where you can get your friends and family to sign up, and you’ll make a small commission on what they make, and if they do the same, you’ll make some money off what those people make. Confused? It just means if you get lots of other people to sign up, you’ll make money off any surveys they do, so you won’t have to spend hours and hours filling the suckers out in order to make anything more than bus fare.
• It should have a range of offers and actions to perform. As I mentioned above, surveys can get really boring really fast. Most modern sites will have a range of things you can do to earn your commission, such as trying out software, reviewing free samples, playing games, and of course, lots of surveys.
• Incentive programs. Good survey sites will reward you beyond the monetary incentive for doing all that work. Some sites will offer you credit towards consumer goods for each survey filled out, others will have prizes for most surveys done in a week, most referrals, and also for random users, just to keep things fun and interesting. Just a warning, this is a tactic used by some of the scammers too, so keep your wits about you.
• Community. A forum where you can keep in touch with other surve-jockeys, compare notes and provide feedback. This is epecially important, and keeps the site owners honest and accountable and the members informed.

The beauty of filling out surveys online are along the same lines as any sort of online work: You can do it any time, day or night, so they are great for anyone on a schedule.

You also get paid per survey, so it’s not something you have to sit down and devote hours upon hours to (although some people do!), you can fill out a few every now and then when you get a spare hour to kill. If you can manage a few a day, with payments of on average 2-6 bucks a pop, you can earn yourself a nice amount of extra money at the end of the week.

Survey sites are never going to make you huge gobs of money. Many limit the amount of surveys you can do per day or per week, so signing up with a few different reputable surveys sites will be necessary if you want to make more than just a bit of pocket change.