Surveys For Money 101

Being a paid survey taker for a long time now, I would like to help protect people who are new to answering paid surveys from scams and frauds. I was a victim of these scams once, and I don't want it to happen to YOU or to anyone who wants to earn money from home this way. So let me take just a minute to warn you about paid surveys. I'm going to show you how to avoid being a victim of fraud.

First things first, the only thing required in answering paid surveys is time. You don't have to have an advanced education or anything like that to answer surveys. You need not possess any special skill or expertise to answer them. If you ever buy stuff, they want to know what you think! All you need is an opinion and the time to fill out the surveys. And let me emphasize this: NO money is required to start answering surveys. I'll show you where to find paying surveys for free.

Avoiding Scams

When you sign up with any paid survey site, be sure that you're signing up for a legitimate one. You should not sign up for the sites that require you to pay money or to provide your credit card information. There are a lot of these. Don't be fooled by them. The list of paying survey sites is free.

Be wary of marketing ploys by sites that want you to pay for a list of paid survey companies. They don't give you any additional information that you can't get elsewhere. These are usually scams. They just want your $34.95 and they'll tell you anything to get it. So if you see a site telling you that you can actually make thousands of dollars by just filling out surveys, hit the back button. It's a scam. Survey income can be good, but not that good.

What Can You Expect to Earn?

I am not saying that you cannot earn a lot of money by answering surveys. Actually you can, if you have a desirable demographic profile where the best surveys are applicable to you. It's not hard to qualify though. The top two categories that survey companies are looking for are: 1) Men, and 2) Moms.

The amount of money you earn is ultimately based on how much time and effort you devote in answering surveys. So if you take two to four hours of your time each day, you could realistically be making around $1500 to $2000 at the end of the month. Regular earnings made by people who spend an hour or so each day by taking surveys are around $750 to $1500.

Maximizing Your Earnings

To maximize your earnings, surveys sent out to you should be answered and sent back to the paid survey company as soon as possible. In addition, you can also sign up to as many legitimate survey sites as possible so that you can get the maximum number of surveys, it's free anyway.

Here's another little secret that most people never realize. When you first sign up with some of the survey companies, you just get several $2 and $5 surveys. But this is the weeding out process the survey company takes you through. If you stick it out and keep at it, they soon realize that you're a serious survey taker and they pay much more for your opinions. I've done several $20 surveys, $100 focus groups and my favorite so far was a $75 phone survey I completed in 45 minutes.

Answering paid surveys is really a great way to earn extra money. All you have to keep in mind is that you should be wise in choosing what paid survey sites to join. Don't be a victim of those scam sites. Whatever you do, don't pay to get paid.