Section 1: The Idea It doesn't really matter how the idea was presented to you, now you are curious and you want to know if you can really get paid for filling out surveys online. Get paid 25-75 dollars an hour! Work 15 minutes a day! Make $1,000 a week! I've even seen advertisements for $200 dollars an hour! With claims like these I was pretty skeptical, but also very curious myself. So I started researching the possibilities, and the scams on the internet. Section 2: The Research At first I was overwhelmed with information. After much effort, the conclusion I discovered is, you can make money taking surveys online. I found literally hundreds, possibly even thousands, of companies that were willing to pay for consumer’s opinions. The great news is that every one of these companies is free to join! The downside is there is no way someone could locate enough of these companies in a timely enough manner to actually make money. Even if you could locate enough, it takes so long to register with each company that it is practically impossible. Each company wants all the same personal information that the last one did, and you have to give them all your information before they will start sending you surveys. Section 3: The Lesson Learned After I found and joined about 20 companies over a three day period, I started to research one of the survey companies that kept coming up in my searches. The website offered a 90 day money back guarantee, so I figured I had nothing to lose. Upon signing up I got to take a welcome survey that was worth $25. So my membership fee had already dwindled to something I was more comfortable losing. The website offered me amazing support, and in my first 30 min I was able to sign up with more companies than I had in the three days prior. They had such an easy-to-navigate database I moved right down the list. The biggest difference in speed was one of the resources they provided with my membership. I put my information into this program once and with the touch of a button it filled in all the blanks for me! Section 4: Success As for making $200 an hour that has not happened to me yet, but I don’t mind. I have been able to participate in two focus groups that paid me $150 for an hour and a half of work! I've only taken one survey for over $60 and it took me nearly two hours to complete. I've found comfort in making all my money in $25 surveys because they usually only take me about 20-25 minutes. I also love taking phone surveys as they can be really fast and very lucrative. I don't make enough at this point to want to quit my day job, but I do believe it's possible to work up to that point (I already work at home as a Certified Personal Trainer so I don't plan on quitting). I've only been filling out surveys since January and I made 1,800 dollars in June alone. That was with about only three hours of work a day. Because of that I've been able to work less lately at my full time job. I'm also getting to the point where I can pick and choose to complete only the higher paying surveys. Section 5: Freebie Tips My advice to anyone interested in joining a survey company is to put forth as much effort as you can up front. The more companies you sign up with, the more survey invitations you will get. Don't get frustrated when you're not getting paying surveys back. I didn't get a real paid survey until almost three weeks after signing up. I'm glad now that I didn't give up. Be as specific as you can when providing information. You could also list someone else in the household as the main survey taker. My wife gets more paid surveys than I do (woman shop more) that’s just the way it is. Also, don’t skip prize surveys. Prizes or gift cards are just as good as money to me and pretty easy to win because people skip them, like my wife! My biggest piece of advice is to work hard, just like I would tell my clients, you're hard work will pay off. Set goals, and work to accomplish them. If you want it to be a real job you have to treat it like a real job.
The year was 1999 and the internet advertising industry was booming. Seemingly out of nowhere, a company named AllAdvantage appeared, offering to pay people for running and viewing an ad bar on their desktop computers (known as ''pay to surf''). Alladvantage was backed with millions of dollars of private investors money and wasn't afraid of throwing it around either. Initially offering users 50 cents per hour to run their ad bar, their membership numbers swelled into the millions in a short amount of time. Yet in less than just two years, AllAdvantage went out of business. Why? Even at it's peak, the internet advertising industry wasn't bringing in enough revenue to justify what Alladvantage was paying its members. Even after AllAdvantage adjusted its payout model, they still quickly burnt through all their venture capital and quickly went the way of so many .com busts.
The ''pay to surf'' concept wasn't limited to AllAdvantage. Copy-cat companies started popping up in droves within just months of AllAdvantage's launching. The end result was the same as nearly every company ended up going bust within a few years of their inception. Some companies made payments, others were fly by night companies which took their members earnings and vanished. Fast forward to 2006 and you'll find no major pay to surf company still exists that actually pays users to surf the net. However, some other types of ''get paid'' site still thrive. Incentive shopping sites, which offer their members cash back to complete offers and shop online, such as MyPoints and Netflip are quiet popular and have solid business models which allow them to stay afloat.
A popular spinoff which has transpired since the collapse of pay to surf has been pay to read e-mail sites, where advertisers will pay users to read email ads. These types of sites are plentiful on the net because the scripts that run these sites are available to anyone and rather cheaply at that. Unfortunately, easy entrance to a business always results in many of those businesses failing because the owner simply doesn't understand the work involved in following through over the long haul. Low barriers to entry also creates opportunists, out to make a quick buck with no intention of honoring payments promised to their members.
Years ago, it was a daunting task at best to research a site to make sure it was reputable. This was the case until end users started to create websites and forums where users themselves could report disreputable companies and which companies withheld payouts. These sites have accumulated thousands of visitors and members. Their stated aims are to name the offending companies, and to urge others to stop using them. Through its easily accessible lists, users can quickly identify which programs are disreputable, or of questionable integrity. These lists are populated by the visitors of the sites, who do their part by reporting bad companies and using the popular discussion forums to its full effect. The sites have been successful in identifying a large number of disreputable companies, many of which have had to close down such was the damage caused to their reputation from being listed. The swindlers, thieves and the dishonorable among the get paid site owners had better watch out as it is never long before they are reported and their scam is exposed.
Both Brad Mccleary & Stan Brock are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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