Are Paid Surveys a Scam?

I just knew it had to be too good to be true. The paid survey site claimed I would get paid $5 just to take a simple online survey. I had been searching the web for easy ways my wife could make a little extra income by working at home. She home schools our 6 children and doesn't want to work outside the home. With 6 kids, she also doesn't have a lot of time. In my search I stumbled across a Market Research Site claiming they would pay me for my opinion. I figured it was worth a shot, even if my initial reaction was that it was probably a scam. After 10 minutes of answering simple questions on a special web page, they said they would send me a check for $5.

Too good to be true? Ten days later the check arrived. I had actually forgotten about it until my wife brought me the check and asked what it was for. As I explained it to her, it dawned on me: this was a perfect fit for her and her schedule. I did the math. I had "earned" $5 for a ten minute survey. That comes out to the equivalent of $30 an hour. Not bad for a job my wife and I now sometimes do in our bathrobes!

Let's be honest. Unless you want to make a career out of it, you aren't going to make tons of money from online surveys. You won't get rich quick. And although you can make the equivalent of $30 an hour I described before, remember that you won't be doing surveys 8 hours a day, so you can't necessarily predict exactly how much extra income you can make. But you can make money, and it is really easy.

The fact is, thousands of people just like you make money every day by taking surveys online. Here is why: businesses spend over 2 billion dollars each year marketing their products. They want their advertising dollars well spent. So before they start a new ad campaign or launch a new product, they hire Market Research Companies to gather input from regular people like you. There are more than 800 market research companies in the US alone, and many of them do their primary research via internet surveys. You just have to get hooked up with the Market Research Companies and let them know you want to participate.

How Does it work?

Once you sign up with a Market Research Company (MRC), you supply demographic data about yourself. This is all done safely through secure internet connections. When the MRC has a survey ready to go, they check your demographic data to see if you match the profile of the target market. If so, they email you a survey invitation. This invitation will tell you the subject of the survey, approximately how long it will take to complete and the amount of compensation. If you are interested, you click the link and start taking the survey by answering various questions on your web browser.

Does it cost anything?

No and yes. Let me explain. The Market Research Companies will never charge you anything. They need you for their research and the companies that are hiring them are paying them money to give away to you. The problem for you is finding these MRC’s to sign up with. Unfortunately, if you sign up with only one MRC, you may only get one or two survey offers per week – or less! A lot depends upon the demographic data you provide. That means to be successful, you need to sign up with multiple MRCs. The more marketing companies you sign up under, the more survey offers you get, and the more money you can make! My wife and I personally have signed up with over 110 Market Research Companies and we get multiple survey invitations each day. We pick the best ones and sometimes end up declining more surveys than we take. That's the beauty of it. You work at your own pace and according to your own schedule.

A problem still remains: How do you find all these Market Research Companies to sign up with? Try a Google™ search for “Market Research Company” and you come up with over 21 million sites! Trying to wade through the search results and find only those that will pay you for taking surveys quickly becomes a daunting task. Even narrowing your search to find MRCs with “surveys” only pares the list down to 7 million hits. In other words, you can go out and try to find these companies on your own, but plan to spend many hours online over the next several months figuring out where to sign up with legitimate paid survey sites. I know. Being the cheapskate that I am, I tried to do all the research on my own. After two weeks of frustration, I had found a total of 5 legitimate Market Research Companies to register with. Whoop dee doo! Plus, I ended up having to cancel my email account because I got so flooded with SPAM by signing up with some less than reputable firms posing as legitimate MRCs. I learned my lesson!

My thought was: Wouldn’t it be better if you just had a ready list of Market Research Companies who are looking for people like you to sign up? That’s where Survey Database Sites come in. If you are serious about making some extra money taking online surveys, you need to sign up with one of these companies. They have a list of MRC’s that you can sign up with and usually give you a summary of how each company works and the type of surveys they typically offer. The Survey Database Site charges a nominal one-time fee for their service of gathering and maintaining a the list of reputable Market Research Companies. Considering that you might spend hundreds of hours on your own to compile the list they already have, it is well worth the price. I know it was for me. At first I hated having to to spend money to get a list that I felt I could have come up with on my own (even though I had really gotten nowhere - I'm just stubborn that way). But after the first couple of surveys, I had already recouped my money and the rest is history. I don't regret it one bit.

Getting Started

There are quite a few Survey Database Sites out there. Online surveys are getting to be big business and everyone wants a piece of the pie. I initially signed up with PaidSurveysOnline and was very happy with them. Many new and (sometimes) improved sites have sprouted up since then. When I was asked to write this paid survey review for OnlineBusinessReviews, I was able to sign up with over 10 different sites to make comparisons before writing this review. At the end of this article we will give you our own ratings of the top Survey Database Sites.

There is no good way to know which database site is better except by trying them out. Unfortunately, you can't try them out until you pay, and signing up for all of them would be foolish and a waste of time and money unless you are a writing a paid survey review like I did. What I found is that most of the Survey Database Sites contain most of the same Market Research Companies in their databases. Some of the sites bloat their numbers by including links to non-Market Research Companies that instead offer free stuff for clicking on ads or reading ad-ridden emails. I didn't find any of that information very useful. So just looking at how many MRCs they have in their databases can be misleading.

Several things that do distinguish the Survey Database Sites from one another are customer service, site layout and database "freshness." Database "freshness" means that the site owners are constantly looking for new Market Research Companies to add to their database and do actually update their list frequently. They also listen to complaints about any bad sites or dead links and remove those companies from their list. This regular maintenance keeps the list "fresh." That's important because you will never be able to sign up with all the companies they list immediately. Usually you will sign up with a few here and there and over time build up your membership in many different Market Research Companies. It took about 4 months before my wife and I had joined the 116 MRCs that we currently belong to. We still look for any new companies that catch our eye, and since the Database Site memberships are lifetime memberships, we check back a couple times a month to see if there are any new offerings. The sites that keep their lists fresh begin to stand out in this respect over time. In our reviews, SurveyScout gets our top nod for database freshness.

How you get paid

Some Market Research Companies reward you with points (redeemable later for merchandise), prizes or cash. Most people are interested in the cash options, but don't overlook those sites that offer both cash and prizes. Sometimes they will offer gift certificates of greater value than the cash reward. I belong to some panels that give gift certificates to restaurants for my opinions (my wife loves these). One company pays me with free music downloads, and I use these as rewards for my 11 year old son when he gets a good grade or does his chores without being asked. So don't think that you can only sign up with companies that offer cash.

One type of payout that I many people don't like are the surveys that reward you by entering you in a drawing. But the fact is, since a lot of people feel the way and don't want to "waste their time" on them, the odds are actually pretty good of winning. People might change their mind if they actually won one of the $10,000 payouts. The bottom line is this: if the idea of deferring compensation and taking a chance that you will be a big winner somewhere down the line doesn't bother you, then there are a lot of extra opportunities out there for you. It becomes a matter of preference.

Since most people prefer cash payouts, I recommend you sign up with the Market Research Companies that offer cash payout's first. You can always add other ones later after you get an idea of how many survey opportunities you are getting and how much time you are finding to put into it. If you want to try out my free sample survey sites, you will find that most of them are sweepstake based or offer small cash payouts, but it is still a good way to figure out if signing up for one of the big database sites is right for you and survey-taking fits your style.

When you take a survey that has a cash payout, a check is generally sent out shortly after you complete the survey online. Some Market Research Companies will keep track of your surveys completed and send you a combined check at regular intervals, like every two weeks, for example. Some MRCs will pay you almost instantly if you have a PayPal™ account. If you don't have an account with PayPal™, it is easy to set one up. But if you prefer not to get one, just sign up for those companies that pay by check only.

One area that confuses beginners at first concerns who is actually paying you. Even though you pay a membership fee to a Survey Database Site (like SurveyScout, for example), they do not conduct the surveys and they do not issue you any payments. I have to admit this confused me at first too. The Survey Database sites are selling you a list of Market Research Companies. That's it. They provide a service of gathering all this information, much like a yellow pages directory puts together a list of local businesses. The individual Market Research Companies on the list are the ones who conduct the surveys, and therefore they are the ones who issue payments to you. Since you will probably sign up with multiple MRCs, you will be getting paid with a lot of individual checks. The tellers at my bank are used to me bringing in 20-30 small checks (between $5 and $30) every time I make a deposit.

One last point before I move on. If you live near a large city and don't mind doing "in person" surveys or interviews, you may have opportunities to make some larger paychecks by participating in focus groups. I don't have time to go into this in detail, but what happens is this: you receive an invitation to go to a company headquarters or to a neutral site (like a convention center). You interact with a group of people and give your opinions in a live setting. The pay for focus groups varies widely, but the reward is generally substantial. I have personally participated in a number of small local focus groups with payouts of around $50 each. I recently received an invitation for a focus group that paid out $200 plus lunch for 3 hours work on a Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately you had to provide your own transportation and the event was in San Francisco, about 500 miles from my home in southern Arizona. But the point is, if you live in the right place and have the time and desire, focus groups can significantly boost your earnings.

Tips for success

Before I close, I would like to leave you with a few tips for success. These are some things I have learned from my time "in the trenches" as a paid online survey taker.

1. Create a unique email address for taking surveys. Your invitations to participate in surveys will be coming via email and it is best to keep them separate from your personal or other business email.
2. Sign up with as many Market Research Companies as you can. This is truly the worst part of the process, but make it a goal sign up with at least 5 new companies each day for the first week or so. By then you will be getting survey invitations and you can monitor your whether you would like to get more invitations or if you already have enough.
3. Take the time to build a profile with each Market Research Company. When you register with a MRC, you'll be asked various questions which will make up your personal "profile". This gets tedious after awhile (you wish you could do it once and let that be good for all of them) but since each research company has its own focus and works independently from the other companies, it is another one of those necessary evils. As you fill out your profile, be honest - this is how they match you up with the particular surveys and focus groups that they are offering.
4. Set realistic goals for yourself. Remember, you will not get rich quick (or at all) with online surveys, but you will make some extra money. If you only have one hour per week to devote to surveys that's fine - just don't expect to make a full-time income. You will get out of this what you put into it. When you are realistic about this, it takes the pressure off and allows you to have some fun with the surveys. After all, it's still pretty cool to get paid by answering a few questions on the computer, wouldn't you say?
5. Check your email frequently. The reason I say this is because my wife used to be one of those persons who checked her email every other day or so, with no regularity. When she first started doing surveys, she missed out on most of them because she didn't open the email invitation until the survey was closed. You see, they usually send out more invitations than the number of respondents they need. If you try to take the survey once they have received their desired number of responses, you get a friendly screen saying that the survey is closed. And guess which surveys close fastest? You got it - the high paying ones. The more frequently you check your email, the better chance you have to take the "primo" surveys.
6. Get an auto form filler . One final bit of advice -- it can be a real drag filling out all the forms for each MRC. But you don't have to anymore. There are several browser toolbars you can use to automatically fill forms for you. Try searching for a web form filling extension for your browser. There are several out there, but one of the best rated is RoboForm which has a free version. I find it handy for lots of other tasks too. Be sure and get something, though, otherwise you will quickly burn out from filling all those forms.
   

In closing

My wife and I enjoy taking online surveys, and getting paid for taking them is a great bonus. We don't make a ton of money taking online paid surveys, but I make enough to keep my golfing habit from draining our family budget and my wife loves the extra money that she can use to pamper herself (a luxury she never had before). If I want, I can readily make an extra $300 per month using a few spare hours each week taking surveys. When I'm too busy I pass on a lot of the survey invitations I receive, but if I need a little extra cash, I find it easy to fit in a couple extra surveys here or there. My wife takes a different approach and makes a regular habit of taking surveys during her breaks from home schooling and in the evening after the kids go to bed. Her income still varies from month to month, but her earnings are more consistent than mine due to her persistence and diligence (not a big surprise if you know my wife - what a gem she is).

I highly recommend you sign up with one of the Survey Database Sites listed below to get started (especially my new FREE database site, PaidSurveyMall.com). Don't make the mistake I made and try to do all the research on your own. These companies have helped a lot of people get connected with the many Market Research Companies out there, and if they didn't do what they promise, they would be out of business. Since I have personally joined all of these sites, I can assure you that you cannot go wrong with any of them. If you are worried about wasting money, please note that all of the sites I have listed below have a minimum of a 90 day money back guarantee. So you really can't lose anything. Just Added: If you are skeptical about joining one of the database sites below, here is a 'sneak preview' of some popular survey sites that pay cash and prizes. I have gone through my list and found 10 easy-to-join sites that will get you started. If you think it seems like fun, come back here and sign up for one of the sites below. Remember, the more sites you join, the better. Go to Joel's free Survey List.

I wish you the best of luck on your new "job" and hope you have as much fun as I do!

Joel Thomas is a Christian Pastor who lives in S. Arizona with his wife, six children and a dog.
Joel also heads up a mission of mercy to impoverished children in Sonora, Mexico and is a
syndicated columnist for theGadgetShoppe.com You can reach Joel at joelthomas@cox.net