Do you enjoy expressing your opinions on anything that pops into your mind? Can you be clear about what you think? Can you do it from a computer, in the comfort of your own home? Do you like money? If you answered yes to these questions (you answered yes to these questions), online surveys might be a good idea for you. They won’t replace your regular salary, but they may help you pay a few household expenses.
You may feel like it’s not worth it early on, given the amount of time it requires at first and the amount of money you pull in. But that should pass and the cash should come more readily once you get used to working multiple survey sites and learn how to make the best use of your time.
To get started: Find respectable survey operations. The biggest red flag on a scam is when a site asks you to pay them for access. Never pay to take surveys, or to get a list of survey sites. Survey providers should be paying you, not the other way around.
The next step: If you want cash payment, weed out the sites that only offer sweepstakes entries, gift cards, or retail rewards points. These things are fine, of course, if you’re fine with them, but they won’t help pay the bills. Here are a few examples of respected cash-based sites: Toluna, Opinion Outpost and SurveySpot, all of which use dollars-per-points formulas to determine payouts.
Now that you have a list of reputable, cash-based survey sites — and hopefully a long list — register to take surveys at every site on it. There’s a quirk in the survey-taking world that makes it important for you to have as many survey sources as possible. That quirk is that you’ll have to pre-qualify for most individual surveys, and for many of them, you won’t. So you’ll need to have something waiting in the wings.
Finally, watch your inbox fill up with surveys and start filling them out. Once you pre-qualify, you’ll spend anywhere from five minutes to an hour on each one, with pay varying based on length and other factors. Don’t go too fast but don’t go too slow either, because there may be other surveys waiting for you.