Does it Pay to do Paid Online Surveys?

Paid Online Surveys- something I once tried before I got into writing online and truly following my passion, getting caught up in the wonderful free-living world of blogging, hubbing and fiction writing, and perhaps one day, freelancing.

Paid Online Surveys have been under a lot of scrutiny for years. It is also the subject of a lot of false advertising. People claim that you can make a lot of money, even enough to outdo any salary.

In my experience, this isn’t true. A lot of companies hype their advertising and promise a lot of things that sound good to the average person. They have to, because if they didn’t, people wouldn’t try or buy them.

• You get two types of survey sites, free ones and paid for ones. I once read the advice that if you’re going to go into doing surveys, only take the free ones, because then you haven’t got anything much to lose instead perhaps an e-mail account that has been swamped with spam and other stuff.

• Open another e-mail account and assign all your paid online survey invitations (if any) to this address. There are plenty of free webmail accounts that you can sign up for, like Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Webmail and others. You can also get e-mail with some cellphone companies as well, as long as you are on their network. They even send you text message alerts when there's new mail in you inbox. Then you can rush over and answer the survey quickly as they mostly have time limits.

• On these sites, they ask you a lot of personal information about your job, your lifestyle and other things, and you are encouraged to tell the truth about them. If you feel uncomfortable with this, then their advice is not to join, or else just leave it out if possible. Sometimes you get an option that states ‘rather not say’.

• There are many of these sites, and I was given advice to join up on many of them. I must have done about ten. It took a while to fill out all the forms and activate the accounts. Out of ten, only two really got me anywhere at all. I haven’t earned any money though.

The truth is that, contrary to what others would have you believe, the minimum payout is usually $50. You aren’t paid per survey though. You have to answer a number of surveys to get there first, and the surveys aren’t worth much. 

How you are paid is in market points, like an internet currency. When these market points reach a certain amount, you can redeem them for cash. The thing with most sites though is that each survey is worth a miniscule amount of points, but to reach the payout amount, you need hundreds or even thousands of points. This means that you’ll be doing quite a few surveys and you won’t get paid for it.
You have to receive a lot of survey invitations in your e-mail account, not just one every now and again. Of course, there is no guarantee that the site will send you any. Out of the ten sites I joined, two sent me invitations, seven didn’t ever get back to me apart from one time when the one sent me an automated birthday greeting e-mail, and one didn’t even send me the activation e-mail that I needed in order to join.

There are plenty of ways to try and make a little cash on the internet, and I’ve tried some, and read up about others, but Paid Online Surveys... some people rave about them (marketing hype) and others, like me, who’ve tried, come away feeling a little disappointed. I imagine if some poor guy signed up with a paid for site, he’d feel very disappointed.

I don’t like the way their system works. There’s discrimination based on what you do as a job and your class in society. Some people seeminlgy get all the invitations and others get nothing. And to think that we all went through that effort to sign up, and some of us even paid, and what do we get? An automated happy birthday e-mail.

You also have to pass a screening test before they actually let you move on to the survey, so you might get excited once you finally get an invitation, only to find that you’re ‘not eligible’ for the study. Most of the ones I got had to do with sports, and I’m not a huge fan of team sports like soccer.

Like I said, there are many ways to make some money on the net, and I’m looking into a lot of them, but surveys didn’t quite work out (at all) for me.

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