Paid Surveys - A quick buck?

OK - Here we go. Everything that seems good has its own rumours being spread all around the world. Online paid surveys are one of those. I want to clear this up once and for all, so everyone knows exactly what paid surveys are.

• Anyone can participate in online paid surveys, even those without any experience. Anyone. Including teenagers, old people, the lot. Just so long as you can use a computer.

• You are not going to become a millionaire. Sorry, but it’s the truth. However, participation in online paid surveys will provide some relief to the burden caused by bills. You may not earn a lot, but at least there is a small sum of extra money to spend.

• Not all companies offer cash payment. Some pay with small gifts and samples of their products. Thus, one must read carefully of what the companies offer. If they are offering useful products such as household items and food, the participant can save a bit of money.

• You have to pay for getting a list of survey sites. This is just a complete lie. Although there are sites asking for payment, it is likely that these are scams. You don’t need to pay and it takes a bit of time and effort to find the free websites online.

• You can get incredibly wealthy. You can earn money, and you can get quite a bit if you put in time and effort, but paid surveys are not going to make you into a millionaire. I can’t express this enough.

• All online surveys are scams. This isn’t true, and is a myth caused by many actual scams that are dotted all over the place. The truth is that there are tons of companies that use the internet for market research. For these companies, the fee that they give to people for filling these in is small compared to the valuable information that they get from you.

• Paid surveys are just an oppotunity to fill your inbox with spam. Untrue. Legally owned companies will not do so, so you have to look for the right companies before signing up. There are always bad people dotted around the place, and it is best to do some research on the companies beforehand.

• You can cheat the survey sites with blatant lies. In the long run, this doesn’t work. The guy at the survey headquarters is going to get a bit confused after reading one survey in which you tell him you have a £2,000,000 house, and another in which you tell the company that you live on the street. So do try and be honest: it helps.

So the bottom line is - find the right company! I’ll put up some recommendations soon.

I’ve had it with the internet. Nearly every day, I get bombarded with emails telling me how to grow my ‘pen1s,’ or how to make £100,000 in the next 20 seconds or whatever. And, for a short while, I actually believed people when they told me that I could make money easily (Hurrah!). Basically, every time I read an advert about making money, I got taken in by it. And generally these schemes turned out to be, in short, crap.

I’ve tried every trick in the book to make money on the internet. And the fact is - short of following a proper business idea, the chances of anyone making millions over the internet while doing very little work are pretty much impossible.

But there’s good news! At least, there is for me anyway. I’ve actually managed to make quite a bit of cash on filling out online surveys. Yes, it’s deadly boring and, yes, it sends you to sleep quicker than a stun dart, but it has made me quite a bit of cash over the last few months.

So, I’ll do you a deal. If you listen to my rants about the internet and surveys, and generally let me express my distress at actually having to do a bit of mindless work to make money over the internet, I’ll give you some tips on how to make a nice little earner from filling in online surveys. Because, bizarrely for an internet scheme, it actually works.