How Much Can You Make Taking Online Surveys

There is no particular dollar amount you can count on, but the following advice assumes you want to earn as much cash as you can, and you also want to have access to the cash payment within a few days after completing a survey instead of waiting until you accumulate a pre-set amount.

Targeting the Best Online Survey Sites

You want to use sites that pay cash immediately, preferably into PayPal or as a check, as opposed to offering "rewards" which are points that can eventually be redeemed for cash or merchandise, gift cards, sweepstakes drawings, or other non-cash arrangements.

Be aware there are very many sites offering non-cash payments, and relatively few that give out immediate cash, so be diligent in your search. And please remember you're in this to earn, so your time must all be paid time: you need to be very selective about what you will and will not do for a survey company. Surveyors will naturally try to get the most free input possible from you while you're simply trying to find a paying survey, so it is your job to keep that to a minimum.

Finding Your Best Fit

Some experimentation will be necessary, because whether you sign-up through an aggregator site that serves as a gateway to the actual survey companies, or with the individual survey sites themselves (which is recommended, because there is no good reason to let a middleman share in your earnings) you will need to answer questions in a screening survey that lets the surveyor know your demographics, so you will be asked to complete the appropriate surveys. For example, one survey site might have questionnaires targeted at mothers, so non-mothers will be immediately screened-out.

You may wish to create more than one demographic profile per site to increase your chances of being chosen to take surveys. Note that the surveyors often limit user accounts to one account per household, which would mean you could have only one account with that particular company.

Many sites state in their terms and conditions that they will terminate your account (and sometimes also confiscate any money that was owed to you) if they discover any of your information is false, so keep that warning in mind when signing-up.

Keeping It Safe, and Simple

On the other hand, since your personal information should always be safeguarded when navigating the web, you will usually want to go through an anonymizing process to shield your IP address when you use survey sites. And please - for your own sanity - set up a spam-collector e-mail address for each site you sign up with, rather than using your real personal address, for two reasons.

First, if you have a different address for each company, it will be easy to tell who is responsible for deluging you with spam, which sometimes happens if you mistakenly set up an account with a less-than-trustworthy site. That will let you know the company is careless with your information, and even worse, has no compunction about wasting your time, which usually means that site will not produce good earnings for you.

Second, when you decide to terminate your account with a site that doesn't work for you, you can prevent that company from wasting further time by simply closing that e-mail account at the same time.

Don't Let Surveyors Waste Your Time

Remember: your time is valuable, and every minute you spend dealing with unwanted advertising is time you will never be paid for. The same is true when you sign up with an aggregator that takes your personal information, but fails to pass your demographics on to the survey companies that send you surveys.

If you ever find yourself having to provide demographic information repeatedly when you receive survey work through a site, you are essentially performing unpaid work that you should have been able to avoid by using the aggregator site. Aggregator sites collect this demographic information to serve as a pre-screening device to ensure your only other data entry consists of answers to paid surveys. And if it ever occurs that you not only repeat your information but then find you are screened out of a survey for any reason, take it as a strong signal that wherever that happens, it's not a place where you can make the most money.

Try, and Try Again...Weed Out the Weak Links

There will be a lot of trial and error involved in selecting the sites that keep unpaid questions to a minimum, and the process will seem slow and frustrating at first. But when you have tried all the sites that offer cash payments and eliminated the ones that waste your time or somehow never pay off, because you're never selected for surveys or the company's accounting of what it owes you doesn't match the amounts you have carefully logged as part of your personal bookkeeping, the handful of sites that are left will be the reliable earners, and you can settle down to making some spare cash.

And that is what paid surveys offer, a way to earn some extra spending money each month. Before the global recession, it was easier to find higher dollar amounts per survey, but the persistently large numbers of unemployed people mean there is a great deal of competition to answer surveys, which drives down wages.

How Much You Can Earn With Online Surveys

There are many people reporting various levels of earnings from taking surveys, but a number that appears consistently in realistically reported experiences (currently) is fifty dollars per month. You may sometimes make more, but if you make that number your target, you'll quickly discover the type of time and effort required to reach that goal. Some individual surveys pay as little as ten cents, for example, so if you find yourself on a site that offers you ten-cent surveys that take fifteen minutes each, remind yourself thats's an hourly wage of forty cents, and move on to the next site.

Working out how much a survey pays as an hourly rate is an excellent rule of thumb to help you decide whether to accept or refuse a survey. Once you perform that mental action often enough it will become pretty instinctive.

Generally speaking, if you want to earn a decent amount in a month, you should not take a survey for less than a dollar, but you will have to examine the offers you're getting and decide on the floor amount that feels right for you. Each person may think of it a bit differently - just be realistic as you project earnings.

You can't control how many surveys one site offers you, but you can sign-up with as many dependable sites as you have time to manage...and that, dear friend, is the key to making more money online taking surveys.