Online surveys are a great way to pad your paycheck on your own time and
with minimal effort. To find legitimate sites, go through the
registration process, and become eligible to take surveys, follow these
instructions.
Find Legitimate Survey Sites
- Never pay up front. Some companies will ask you to pay a small fee up-front for access to survey lists, which is absolutely unnecessary. Check Terms and Conditions, FAQs,
or any other area on a survey company’s page containing information on
how the company operates. (If such information is hard or impossible to
locate, consider it a red flag and cross that site off your list.)
- Make sure you will be paid in cash.
There are tons of surveys on the internet that can be completed for
cash (or points that you exchange for cash), but some only pay in gift
cards or enter you into a sweepstakes. (Others offer some combination of
these, which may be to your benefit.) Be sure you know exactly how you
will be rewarded by checking a sites FAQs, Terms and Conditions, etc.
- Some companies offer prizes or products (or let you accrue
points that you can trade in for such). Many of these won’t be as useful
or valuable to you as cash, but occasionally you will get lucky. Just
be sure to price-hunt any items before accepting them (or investing
valuable energy into trying to earn them). You should also be fine-print
savvy. Some websites will say you won an Xbox360 or a new laptop, for
example, but if you look carefully, you’ll usually find an asterisk near
the "you won" part. This means you have to do something (like buy other
products) before you even get to talk about your prize. Don't fall into
these sorts of traps; they're ridiculously difficult and not worth it.
- Read the Privacy Policy, which is usually found at the bottom of a site’s homepage.
Who will your information be shared with? Always look for a statement
along the lines of: “Email addresses given to our company will never be
sold, given away, or shared with any third parties without your
consent.”
- Check for age restrictions.
Online surveys can be a great way for teens to make pocket money, but
not all sites allow it. (Many allow it if parental permission is given.)
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Look for a minimum payment amount.
Most sites won’t allow you to cash in until you have accrued a certain
amount of money, which reduces the number of transactions they have to
process (and, of course, gets people to invest more in the site). Make
sure the amount required is fair before diving in (twenty dollars is
common) and, more importantly, if you don’t like a site and plan to cash
out soon, make sure to time it so that you don’t have to do a lot more
surveys to unlock your cash.
-
Look for sites that have good ratings.
Finding a reputable survey-site aggregator (such as GetPaidSurveys or
or BigSpot) that allows members to rank the companies they’ve worked
with is a good way to do this. Don’t take any stock in reviews or
testimonials that are self-posted by survey sites.
Register with Survey Sites
- Make a dedicated email account just for surveys. This will keep junk mail out of your normal inbox.
- Register with legitimate companies.
You will usually be required to provide basic information such as your
name, email address, birth date, gender, and address. (Later in the
process, you will also need to provide PayPal information – usually
associated with an email address – so that you can receive the money
you’ve earned.) This is a good time to review the Terms and Conditions and/or Privacy Policy if necessary, as you will be asked to legally agree to them.
- Check your email to verify.
After registration, companies will email the email address you’ve
provided to verify. Open this email and activate your account to
confirm.
- Add the site’s email address to your address book. If an incoming address doesn’t match one in your address book, your e-mail account might mark it as spam automatically.
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