8/03/2007

Paid Survey Guide for Beginners

If you are new to the paid survey world, please follow my step-to-step instructions to get a quick and good start:

1. Remember do NOT pay anyone to do paid online surveys whatsoever. Legitimate paid survey and market research companies will NOT charge you to do paid surveys and get paid.

2. Set up a dedicated email account. You will get lot of emails and you need a separated email address for survey invitation emails. Note: you'll need to turn OFF your spam filter or set the spam filter option to "do not delete emails in spam folder immediately" -- otherwise you might miss survey emails.
3. You might want to open a free Paypal account. Many of survey sites offer their payment via Paypal. It's free to send money, and free to accept payment if you have a basic account (a low transaction fee apply for Premier and Business Accounts to receive money), and it is usually faster than check payment.

4. Sign up as many legitimate paid survey companies as possible. Remember legitimate paid survey companies are FREE to join and have strict privacy policies (You will not get spams).

5. Tips on avoiding scams:

* If you come cross a new survey site, please be sure to check privacy policy. If you are not happy with their privacy policy or they don't have a privacy policy, stay away from them;
* Be aware the difference between paid surveys sites and get paid sign up offer sites. The later sometimes say they are survey sites, in fact they are not. They are the sites you get paid for signing up offers, and sometimes you need to pay or provide credit card information while sign up non free offers.
* Stay away from the websites promoting known scam or spam "survey" sites - usually those sites claim they have a list of 300 or 400+ paid survey sites (in fact there are not hundreds survey sites that pay! I signed up about 200 sites, but over the course of almost 3 years, only around 70 sites that have paid me or at least send me a survey!) - They are just promoting anything they can find for commissions, no matter its scam or spam.

6. Tips on doing surveys:

* Be honest with your personal profile information when sign up with survey companies;
* Response survey invitations quickly. Most surveys have quota and some fill fast, especially high paying/easy to qualify surveys.

7. Tips on getting paid:

* Make sure keep the invitation emails for the surveys that you qualify and completed, especially those online interactive surveys/focus group. You want to have prove for your participation when there is a problem.

8. Finally you have to be patient. This is very important for survey beginners. It takes a while to get paid since most survey sites have minimum payout requirement and it takes time for them to process payment. Also it takes a while to receive more surveys - for me, it is until after 2 months, I started to receive and quality for more surveys, including those "high-end" surveys such as interactive online surveys and focus groups.


4 comments:

WAHMom said...

Hello, this is Mei Lynn. Thank you for posting my article. Could you also publish Author information - Information about me and my website MySurvey123.com?

Anonymous said...

well,create your own GPT website

WAHMom said...

Hi,

I just found out that you stole my article (about paid survey scams) and published on EZine.com. Please remove that article otherwise I will do whatever necessary.

Mei

WAHMom said...

This is Mei Lynn, author of this article. Please check out my website about paid surveys.