Top Five Survey Sites That I Use to Make Money

Taking surveys online is a big scam, right? For the most part, yes, and that's what I thought until I figured out how it all works.

Basically, there are two types of survey offers out there. Both promise money, one actually delivers. Of the survey taking sites there are surveys being offered by E-mail List companies and then there are surveys being offered by Market Research companies.

The e-mail list companies make their money by generating targeting e-mail lists to sell. For example, a company would go to a place like this and pay them $70 for 1,000 e-mail leads to sell their product to.

These sites often are free to join, because they really don't care who's on their list, they just want a lot of e-mail addresses.

They have you take surveys to sort of narrow down what group you'll fit in, because it helps them sell their e-mail list. They'll often pay you maybe 50 cents to a dollar to take one of their surveys, but the unfortunate thing about it, is you're spending a lot of time on these surveys and only making a little bit of money, and the icing on the cake is that once you do a survey, you get bombarded with spam.

The only way you can make decent money with these surveys is if you sign-up for their offers or send them a bunch of your friend's e-mails for them to spam too.

Not worth it, in my opinion.

The other type of survey being offered are from market research companies. These companies are a little different.

Market research firms are paid to collect data about upcoming or existing products or services to see how well they would potentially sell. They often represent large corporations who can;t afford to put a product out on the market before testing it first, because despite how much money they spend conducting these surveys, they will spend thousands more developing and distributing the product.

For example, I did a survey about 2 years ago because Taco Bell was thinking about having a breakfast menu. Now, for a company like Taco Bell to do something like that they want to test everything from the menu to the item names, to the pricing, and they need people to figure all this stuff out. In this particular survey, I actually got paid to eat Taco Bell for breakfast. It wasn't very good, so I guess that's why you don't see it on the menu today.

Regardless, these are the surveys you want to get hooked up with. They tend to be a little more in-depth, but you'll get paid a lot more, get better surveys, and some of the stuff on there is actually a lot of fun.

Ok, so you can actually make a bit of money taking surveys (nothing to change your life, but a few hundred bucks that's really easy).

That fact is that large companies spend A LOT of money on market research, to make sure their product or service will sell, and you can be one of those people that make some of this money, but you just have to know where to look.

First off, most survey-taking sites ARE scams. You'll sign up, get an inbox full of junk mail and a few cents to take some long-ass survey. Not worth the time in my opinion, or the worst thing, is you'll spend 20 minutes on a pre-qualifying survey, and then find out you don't qualify and you waste all that time and don't get paid.

I've found that the best survey sites are actually paid ones, because let's face it, you're paying money to get access to these surveys, they have to deliver or they wouldn't have anymore customers.

The fees are usually pretty cheap, and I like it because it cuts through all the crap and you get the most money this way.

Here's what you want to do to actually make some decent money taking surveys:

1. Only Sign-up for paid survey sites
There are a few alright free survey sites out there, but you waste more time looking for them and the payouts are a lot smaller compared to the free ones. Sure, it sucks to shell out cash to just get access to surveys, but in the long run it's actually a much better deal.

I don't know why it works out like that, but I guess at the end of the day, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

2. Signup for multiple survey sites.
Even with the paid ones, you maybe only get 2-3 survey offers a day, sometime more, but if we're talking averages that's what you'll get. Since the survey sites rarely have the same surveys, if you sign up for 2 or 3 you just doubled or tripled your offers.

3. You will make the most money if you are a college student, a stay at home mom, or a homeowner.
The big thing with these surveys are that they want qualified candidates, i.e. they want people that might actually BUY the product or service the survey is about. By using a paid survey site, you're generally already pre-qualified, so you don't waste your time answering questions only to find out, thank, but no thanks.

4. Get prepared to answer the question about your annual household income ALOT.
I don't know what it is with surveys, but regardless of which ones you take, you'll probably be asked this question. I guess it's the survey's idea of an icebreaker.

5. Don't Lie
I know it's tempting to just make stuff up, but in the long run, what good are you doing? You really do get a shot at giving your say on what stuff comes out or looks like in the future. Wouldn't it be nice if the stuff in the stores was stuff you actually wanted to buy? Also, the big companies pay a lot of money to have these surveys put together for one reason, they are valuable to them. If everyone were to throw down lies, companies would probably stop doing them.

In the end, if you don;t like a product, just say so. You won't get penalized, or make anything less, just be honest.

6. Make a special e-mail address for the surveys
You don't have to do this one, but it's nice, because then I can keep all of my survey offers organized, and I know exactly how many surveys I have done, and which ones I need to do.

You won't make a fortune doing surveys. Well, you could, but it would probably be too boring. Either way, I do about 25 surveys a week in about 4-5 hours' time and I make between $200-$600 dollars a month.

It won;t replace a day job, but for the amount of time I spend on it, I do pretty well.

It's a great way to make some extra cash, for not a lot of time, just be smart about it, and you can do very well.