Beginners Guide to Paid Surveys

Doing paid surveys can make you extra money and it can be a fun and interesting experience. People can and do make money doing paid surveys and I’m going to give you a ton of information so that you can get started today. You can see examples of the surveys that I get in my inbox everyday. These photos are from my personal surveying inbox:

(click the photos to see them enlarged)

First and foremost you should make a new email address that you use only for doing surveys. If more than one household member is going to do surveys they need their own email address that is used only for doing surveys. This also eliminates spam in any personal or work email inboxes and if it ever becomes necessary you can delete your surveying email and get a new one. I use Google’s Gmail. It is safe has some good features so that allow you to sort the emails in your inbox and allows you to check your mail with external programs like Outlook Express and you can use it effectively with multiple accounts. Secondly make sure that you have a virus program and preferably a browser protection program as well. I use AVG’s Free Virus and a combination of Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware and Adaware by Lavasoft.

Second I recommend that you get Roboform. It can save you a lot of time because in doing surveys you have to type in the same information over and over and over again. With the pro version of roboform you can create unlimited custom fields that can fill in a majority of the information requested from a lot of sites automatically. The pro version of roboform is the only survey/sweeping tool I have ever paid for and believe it is worth the money.

Several keys to more successful paid surveys:

If you are doing surveys for income purposes try to get your whole family involved. The rules are different for each paying site. Some allow surveys by individual email address and some restrict panelists by using the IP address. Some sites could care less and tell you to share their survey link with the world. Usually when you sign up there will be a set of rules somewhere that tell you whether or not they allow multiple family members to participate. The reason that you want to get your family involved is that as an individual you might get a survey from a site that pays $3. If you get your husband and 2 kids on the same site they might also be asked to do the same survey so that your income goes from $3 to $12 for maybe 5-10 minutes of work. Also surveys are based on demographics so you and your kids might get to do the survey but your husband gets excluded. The more members in you family that are signed up for surveys realistically the more money you can make per month.

Try to do every survey you are sent. So many paid survey sites use points now. The points are used either to build up for a cash out or as rewards for gift cards or as currency in various sweepstakes. As you do surveys you will learn which sites have the best points-to-cash ratio so that you can do the cash paying ones first, then the best points, and then the others. The lower paying sites might not give you cash but most do have a sweepstakes or a giveaway that they enter you into. These can be quite valuable and a surprise win could make your month or even year financially. Another reason to do every survey is that some sites test you. If you enter the little or no cash surveys faithfully they often are recording your entries and you begin to see surveys with sweet cash rewards in your inbox from sites you hadn’t put much faith in.

When you start signing up to receive the surveys don't sign up for all of them at once. Some sites send 3-4 surveys a day, others maybe once a week, others maybe once or twice a month. Sign up for a few surveys and wait a day or two and sign up for a few more and so on to stagger out the initial emails you get.

Many survey sites have profile builder surveys that are usually on the site itself after you register and log in. It's well worth taking the time to do these profile builders because it allows the sites to streamline what surveys you can be eligible for. Receiving 15 surveys but only qualifying for 3 of them is discouraging but with the profile builders you might receive 7-8 and qualify for all of them.

Be prepared for the spam that will come your way. Survey sites use advertising to boost their revenue like any other web based business. You will receive spam. That is why you have a separate address to use ONLY for doing surveys.

When you do the actual survey make sure you click through to the very end of the survey. These sites pass you back and forth on their servers and you want to make sure that you get full credit for your time. Also at the end of some surveys the site that you are signed up with may have a game for extra entries in a sweepstakes or ask you to click a button to receive credit.

Keep your computer cleaned out and protected. Update your virus and malware programs every few days and please do a virus scan AND a scan for malicious browser files each week. If you don’t use a backup program at the very least learn how to make a system restore point. At this point I also use Glary Utilities and Ccleaner with the reason being that virus and malware programs do not clean out the temporary files, images, videos, ads that build up in your computer from viewing hundreds of sites each week. Every time you view a site it leaves a little bit of itself on your computer so that the next time you visit it doesn’t have to take so long to reload it’s information. On the other hand someone is on the other end constantly updating those sites so that when you revisit them the data is different. Your computer reads this new information but DOESN’T rewrite the information in the temporary files. It just makes another file usually. Over time these build ups of left over scrap clog your computer just like a clogged sink in your home and you have to clean it out.

Update your free Adobe programs available at Adobe. You will get surveys that ask you to look at photos, watch videos, review websites, evaluate any number of products. If your programs for viewing these files isn’t up-to-date you most likely will get ¾ of the way through a survey only to be blocked and booted because a majority of survey interfaces won’t allow you to go back to a previous page. One recent survey for $5 asked me to watch an episode of Deadliest Catch and then gave me questions about the commercials I watched.

Be prepared to be frustrated. Some surveys are only previews to see if you are eligible for longer surveys and you can get 99% into completing a survey having spent 15-30 minutes doing it only to find yourself looking at a screen telling you that you aren’t eligible for that survey. I’ve been there… a lot. It isn’t fair and I’ve complained to the companies that do it but I haven’t seen a change yet. I think it’s unfair for me to spend 10 minutes answering questions truthfully and honestly and not be rewarded. You will learn which sites pull these fill and end surveys and put them on your questionable list.

Be honest when you are doing surveys. It is tempting to try to give the survey the answers you think it wants to hear because the money they are offering is sweet but after having done this I admit it rarely works out. There is one current survey at OCX that is about purchasing a vehicle that I swear I have done 30 times. I have answered it in a variety of different ways and I think I only got one payment for it. Your answers on survey sites is often tracked and they can check your previous answers and kick you out if they think you are trying to hedge your answers.

Be prepared to answer the same survey multiple times because a lot of these sites only link you to higher paid sites that actually run the survey.

I’m sure that I will think of more things to add and others who do surveys for income hopefully will leave comments to help me tweak this guide to keep it relevant.

Get started with my Paid Survey Quick List!!!

Thank you for your time.

Jason