CHOOSING A SURVEY SITE TO WORK WITH

To reach our goal of gaining income, we have defined our task as:

                  1. Find and sign up with the good survey makers

                  2. Avoid wasting time with the bad ones.

If you "Google" 'paid surveys' you will find over 8 million six hundred thousand "hits", sites about paid surveys. 
 Prominently displayed will be advertisements such as this:
Free List Of Paid Surveys Why Pay ? When you can get it for Free. Make $50 in 10 mins. SurveyMonster.net

[Comment: Yeah, right. $50 in 10 minutes. This is pure hype. A typical $50 survey will take you 20-30 minutes or so. So what is going on here? How can they pay to run this Google ad to give away a "Free List of Paid Surveys" (survey makers)?]

What is happening here is we have a supposedly "free" site offering you lists of survey makers to sign up with. You can bet your boots that every survey maker on their list is paying THEM a commission to recruit YOU!  Why do they want to recruit new people? Because the ones they had, got tired of working for nothing and quit.

Why are they paying commissions for recruitment? Because they are low-pay and no-pay survey makers and no one will recommend them! So rather than pay participants, they pay recruiters!  The "Free" site is getting paid for  recruiting people! The people they recruit will NOT gain any significant income. They will hang around for a few months, trying, then finally leave in disgust. So more will have to be recruited to take their place!

If you want to earn income with paid surveys, you have to find and sign up with the good survey makers that pay in cash or equivalent. These generally do NOT pay recruiting fees - they don't need to. The only survey makers you will find in those "Free" sites are the ones who pay high recruiting fees to the site owners. The
higher the fees the more often you will find them. And, generally speaking, the less desirable will be the survey maker! ;-)

So the moral of this story is: If you want to find and sign up with the good survey makers and avoid wasting time with the bad ones, stay away from those free sites. There is nothing to be found there but time wasters! Now do you begin to see why some people have trouble making anything with paid surveys? Those free sites look very attractive to "newbies" and the unwary. And those sites keep on raking in their recruiting fees... by recruiting the unsuspecting who are being set up to fail. So how DO you find the good survey makers?

It is very clear that paid surveys are big business, with billions of dollars involved. There is no doubt that many
millions of dollars are going to pay survey takers every year. But while some survey takers seem to prosper and do well, others have bad experiences with it, don't make any money and end up feeling frustrated and deceived.

So what's the real story here?  Are paid surveys a good thing to get involved with or not? That question is a lot like, "Is marriage a good thing or not?" The answer is, it depends, almost entirely, on who you get involved in it with! The people in successful marriages chose their partners well and then did what was necessary to make the marriage work well.  Fortunately for us, making money with paid surveys is MUCH easier than making a successful marriage! :-) With paid surveys, success depends almost entirely on which survey makers you get your application on file with.

Certainly, you have to be diligent, respond quickly, fill out the questionnaires completely, giving them your best shot, telling them what you really think about the subject, and all that. And you have to have your name and data on the lists of the maximum number of good survey makers. But all that is secondary.  And it won't make any real difference if you are signed up with the wrong survey makers to start with.  I KNOW that's a "dangling participle", but right now I don't care. Stick with me; I'm trying to make a point here! ;-)

So what do we know about these survey makers? Which ones are we looking for?

There are over 700 survey makers in North America and over 3,000 worldwide.

++ Of these only the top 15 - 25% always or usually pay and are worth dealing with.

++ The middle 40-60% are more or less legitimate survey makers that run the spectrum from sometimes pay to pay with discount cards and things of dubious value, to seldom pay, although all promise to pay...

++ Maybe 15 - 30% are NOT even real, legitimate survey makers at all, but sales companies using "surveys" as a gimmick to get your demographic data (and trust, in hopes of future income) to sell things to you and to sell your data to other sales groups.

O.K. The above is a pretty fair assessment of the current situation out there.  So now we have a reasonable understanding of the environment and the terrain we need to deal with.

Now we, as prospective survey takers, don't mind doing the work and giving our opinions, but we do want to get paid for it.   So our job, our task, our challenge in getting started, is to identify, locate and sign up with The GOOD survey makers. That means ALL of the always pay survey makers and down the spectrum to include the usually pay and pay reasonable amounts more than 50 - 70% of the time.

It takes just as much effort and work to sign up with a good survey maker as it does a bad one. So we want to:

1. Identify the current probable "category" of a survey maker BEFORE we sign up, whenever possible and

2. Know that there are some bad apples in the survey maker barrel and know how to identify them so that we can flush them out with the ... garbage, as soon as they show us who they are. That is the essence of what we need to do to make money with paid surveys:

                      1. Find and sign up with the good survey makers

                      2. Avoid wasting time with the bad ones.

3. Set up our filters so that we can identify the bad ones when we experiment or otherwise find  that we have inadvertently signed up with one anyway. That is our problem, that is our challenge.  They say that a problem, well diagnosed, is half solved.

You are now way ahead of 99% of the people who start out to make money with paid surveys! Most are clueless as to what the terrain looks like and what the real goals are. Now that we have a working definition of our principal challenge, we will break the solution(s) down into "bite sized" pieces and deal with each one of them separately in coming editions of this newsletter.

Click HERE to find out how we classify our Survey Companies
 
Glad to have you with us! This should be fun!  ;-)