Paid Survey. Will You Do?

During the internet boom of the late '90s, you could find all kinds of money-making websits that pay you to simply click links on their websites, or install a small banner on your computer and let it run when you are surfing the internet. Easy money indeed. I can still remember a couple of names, such as Alladvantage.com, Surfing2cash.com, and Utopaid.com. Sometimes it made me wonder how these compaies can make money by paying you do nothing other than clicking some links. Sure the advertisers got some traffic to their sites, but what else did they gain? I never bought anything through those links and I believe I am not alone.

After the internet bubble burst, these companies all vanished.

Now if you want to get some free money, it won't be an effortless job and the payouts don't come close to those of the go-go days. Yet, free money is free money.

One way to get a few bucks once in a while is to join some survey panels and do online paid survey. The trick is you have to qualify. These surveys usually come with a screener and you will only get paid if you pass the screen and complete the survey. The payout is anywhere from $2.00 to $6.00 per survey. If you don’t qualify to take the survey, you will get an entry to the sweepstake.

From my short experience (I only started to do survey this month), I like Brand Institute and SurveySpot. Brand Institute only sent me two surveys so far, but they were all paid surveys. I got several survey invitations from SurveySpot, as well as from Greenfield, every day, but most of rewards are sweepstake entries, which I am not very enthusiastic about.

The other one is the so-called paid email. The paid click arrives in your mail box every day and you can earn 3 to 5 cents by clicking the link. I currently use SendEarnings and InboxDollars. Both of them also offer sign-up bonus.

Relatively speaking, paid email sounds easy and requests much less time. Some surveys, on the other hand, can take you up to 40 minutes. That’s kind of long for only a couple of bucks.

If you have some spare time, it may not be such a bad idea of getting some extra cash, like an email from Survey Explosion says:

… if you just want to have fun and make a little extra cash then you can start slowly and put just a few hours per week into this effort.

If you really have a lot of time

… if you want to replace your current job income with survey income then you will need to put as many or more hours into this effort to be successful.

That I will never do.

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