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Can You Really Make Money By Taking Surveys?

By Andrew Jamaz

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 24Jan2007 Word count: 476 Viewed: 397 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

I saw an interesting question online recently... "Can you make money from surveys?" It would be nice, wouldn't it? You spend five minutes doing a survey and earn $5. That's a very handsome $60 per hour… fantastic money for sitting at your computer checking boxes when you get a spare half-hour. So, can it be done?

Well, let's look at it objectively. Demographical information, as collected by surveys is valuable marketing information. If a company can find out what brand of soap people prefer and why, they can make sure that their next soap product will be well received. Lots of money is being spent to collect that kind of information. Therefore, money may well be available to participants. You give up your data and time in exchange for a few dollars per survey. It sounds like it could work.

But, if you're getting paid to take the survey, you would immediately fall into a specific demographic of people who have signed up to take surveys in order to earn cash. While some marketers would want to poll that demographic, most won't. They'll want to poll their customers, their resellers, their target markets. Perhaps polling people who have signed up in order to earn money will bias their data.

Then there's all the possible scams, schemes and cons that relate to the "get paid to take a survey" market. There are a lot of companies who promise you "rewards" for taking surveys... rewards that turn out to be "points" which you need to accumulate to exchange for "prizes" that you may not even want. Even legitimate surveys may take a long time to complete. If one takes 30 minutes and earns you $3, is it worth it?

By the way, be very careful to read the small-print when you sign up to take surveys. Otherwise you may well find that your name/email address will be sold to many more companies. It may be wise to get a free email address and use that when you sign up, just to be safe.

Finally, there's the outright scam of asking you to pay to join and then not supplying any surveys, or not paying you for completed surveys. I wouldn't recommend you paid to join for any reason. If you're valuable to the company sending out surveys, they should pay you to join… at the very least it should be free to join.

It's possible there are quality companies who pay cash for people to take surveys... after all, as I said at the beginning, your information is potentially valuable to marketing companies... but you will need to be very careful about the company you select. And please, don't believe the hype that taking surveys is an easy way to make money... if it was, everyone would be doing it.

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