The trick is finding a mega-site that is reputable as well. Some of the best websites offering pre-screened surveys for cash, prizes and sweepstakes entries include Survey Scout, Surveys4Checks, which has contacts with many major companies that allow you to do surveys for cash and Maximum Paid Surveys, which offers you surveys and mystery shopping experiences.

The mystery shopping experiences are interesting. You have to live within a certain geographic area and you apply for the position just like you’d apply for a job, giving them you Social Security Number and references. You then get the “job” and go on mystery shopping experiences where you shop at certain stores and get paid cash to give your opinion on the experience. It’s like a regular job but you have to leave your home just to do it.

These sites also sometimes offer data entry positions where you get paid entering data by the number of entries you type in. It pays to be a good typist and a fast one at that because you really don’t get paid all that much per entry. Even so, it adds up and you can get paid doing data entry for one or more companies pre-screened by the mega-site.

The trick to making money on survey sites is qualifying for the survey. Even though there looks like a great survey out there, you have to fill out your demographic information that includes your age, income, household members, and any habits they ask you about. They may ask about your television watching habits, your purchasing habits, whether or not you have recently travelled and other personal habits. If you answer the questions to their satisfaction, you qualify for the survey and can make the money it offers. If you don’t, you’re out of luck. You’ve probably just waited 5 to 10 minutes of your time for nothing. This is what takes so much time in filling out surveys and it cuts into your actual moneymaking time.

For the best results, choose a survey that actually pays cash for the survey. Those that give you points often take a lot of points just to get the cash return on your time investment. Those that give you sweepstakes entries are really chancy. You can take a 20 minute survey and don’t really get anything out of it. Do the ones that really give you cash and you’ll really get the return on your investment.

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Now, you can take surveys for money and products online in the comfort of your own home and actually make some real cash or get some neat products out of the deal. There are sites all over the internet, some of which aren’t legitimate so you have to be careful which ones you take and which you quit after a survey or two. Any site, unless it is a mega-site that offers hundreds of surveys, should not charge you money to take their survey, and if they do, don’t fall for it.

There are, however, mega-sites that charge you a one-time fee to join their survey program but they provide you with hundreds of surveys in which you can participate. Some of the best sites like this include Survey Scout (http://www.surveyscout.com), Surveys4Checks (http://www.surveys4checks.com), which has contacts with many major companies that allow you to do surveys for cash and Maximum Paid Surveys (http://www.maximumpaidsurveys.com), which offers opportunities for data entry at home with certain companies and mystery shopping opportunities.

How much money can you make? The truth depends on how many surveys you take and which surveys you choose. Many surveys pay just five dollars or so but there are focus groups that can pay up to $75 just to give your opinion. The surveys take a while to fill out so you don’t make much per hour but if you have the extra time to kill, why not take a survey while watching television so that you can make some money on the side? The money can come to you as cash or can be provided to you via your Paypal account. Every little bit adds up so you can make hundreds of dollars a week just by giving someone else your opinion.

Not all survey sites are reputable. Some of the worst sites don’t give you the return on the dollars you pay in so that you can’t recoup the money you put in to belong to the mega-site.

There are hundreds of individual survey sites, many of which are reputable. They offer survey sites for teens and survey sites for people with special interests who can provide their opinion on specialized items or advertisements. There are a lot of surveys based upon movie trailers and movies that both adults and teens can participate in. Movie makers want to know what you’re interested in seeing and what you think of their trailers—perhaps the greatest advertisements that movies have. Giving your opinion for $5-$10 is easy and will help these companies know how to proceed.

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The trick is qualifying. The surveys each have their own qualifying statistics and you generally spend five to ten minutes telling them how old you are, who lives with you, how much money you make and whether or not you buy certain products or are a traveler. If you qualify, and it isn’t easy to qualify, you spend another 20 minutes or more filling out the survey. Only then do you get the cash from doing the survey.

You may, depending on who you are and your personal demographics, qualify for many surveys or you may qualify for only one out of ten or so you take the time out to fill out the demographic information. If you qualify for just a few surveys, even if they are the top paid surveys on the internet, you won’t make much cash.

There are mega-sites that offer you the opportunity to pick out the top paid surveys and go for just those. They pre-screen all the surveys they offer and there are often hundreds of surveys to fill out. Some of the best survey sites for this include Survey Scout, Surveys4Checks , and Maximum Paid Surveys.

Some of the worst mega-sites include Paid Surveys Etc. , Make Money Taking Surveys.org and Gain Opinion.com. You need to pay into all of these sites in order to belong but some sites pay better than others and you get a better return on your initial investment of $40 or more.
The best sites often offer the best paying surveys, data entry positions and mystery shopping experiences—a wide variety of choices for making the best money on the Internet. Except for the mystery shopping, all the work is done in the comfort of your own home and take up only a few hours of your time each day. You can actually make as much money as you put into the adventure and you can take surveys for 6-8 hours, depending on which surveys you qualify for.

The best paid surveys online are those that pay actual cash for your work. Those that give you points toward cash don’t really pay that much in the end and those that give you prizes or sweepstakes for prizes really don’t provide you with a return on your investment, unless of course, you win—which is definitely a long shot. Take the cash-paying surveys first and expect to get a few dollars for filling out the survey. Each survey pays only a little but it adds up in the end.

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Any survey that promises you’ll make a ton of money doing their surveys is probably not legitimate and should be suspect. An exception is a mega-site that offers you hundreds of survey opportunities and for which you fill out actual paid surveys. Online scam operations will let you believe you’ll make a great deal of money in just a few hours of doing surveys every day. This just isn’t practical and we’ll explain why:

Survey sites (legitimate ones) need a certain demographic for their surveys, such as married women between the ages of 30-40. When you sign up for a survey, you don’t know if you’ll fit into that demographic or not. You therefore have to fill out a bunch of information about yourself, including your household information and your income level. If you don’t fit the demographics they’re looking for, then you are bumped from the survey, even after spending 5-10 minutes filling out the demographic information. You don’t get any money for just filling out your demographics and you will have wasted your time. You may do this for several surveys and an hour or so of your time until you find a survey that you fit well for and can actually take for cash or points toward cash.

The points you get often account for a small fraction of what it takes to get even $5 for taking surveys at their site. For example, one teen survey site pays $10 for 1000 points worth of work but each survey pays out only 25 to 50 points at a time. That’s a lot of surveys to fill out before you get your $10 in the mail. Other sites give you a sweepstakes entry point for a really nice prize but don’t tell you that a million people have entries in the same sweepstakes. While you may be comfortable with those odds, you shouldn’t be surprised to find out someone else has one the big prize.

Some people only go for cash surveys that pay out in cash for each and every survey you do. These are the best surveys to take as you get money deposited into your Paypal account or money in a check at the end of the month. Even so, many surveys pay only a few dollars for your opinion so you have to do a lot of surveys in order to get enough money to make it worth your time. Still, if you’re a fast typist and have connections to decent survey sites, you can actually make money and won’t get scammed.

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Once you get a survey, you will be offered cash, sweepstakes entries or prizes just to fill out the 5-20 minute survey. Then you are asked to fill out some more qualifying information, such as where you shop, what kinds of items you purchase or what your television habits are. After doing all of this, you may still get bumped from filling out the survey because you didn’t qualify in one way or another. That’s a lot of time to spend filling out survey pre-questions only to be told you didn’t qualify.

All this takes time and cuts into income you could have been making money on surveys you actually qualify for. One of the best ways to get around this are the survey mega-sites that have you fill out much of this information in advance so you only get those surveys you already prequalify for. You often have to pay a small fee to belong to these sites but at least the surveys you get are those you actually qualify for and have the potential to get money in return for.

Some surveys just seem to go on and on. They’ll give you a survey to fill out for ten to twenty minutes and then after filling out the survey, you are asked to fill out another survey for another 5-20 minutes. Even after filling out that survey, you are asked to fill out yet another survey. This goes on and on until you get tired of it and give up. You do get reimbursed for each survey but it isn’t much money or it is just for sweepstakes entries and you can easily get tired filling out each survey. Some surveys actually ask to monitor your internet use using a program you download from the company, which is for some people, an invasion of privacy. You never know what you’re going to get when you fill out a survey.

Even so, there are companies that really want to know your opinion on things and will give you points toward cash and/or actual cash to give your opinion on everything from Tupperware to movie trailers. They want a particular demographic of people in each survey so you won’t qualify for every survey but if you want to be able to fill out a lot of surveys, you need to join a lot of survey registration sites.

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Fortunately, there are still ways of getting paid to do surveys. You can register at dozens or hundreds of reputable survey sites and can wait for a survey which fits your demographic to come your way through the email. There are sites that you pay into that cost up to fifty dollars that have hundreds of survey opportunities for you to register with. It takes several hours to register for each individual survey site within the big mega-site and then you wait until a survey fits your particular demographics and comes to your inbox. Take the survey and you get points towards cash or you can get the cash right away. The cash can come through Paypal or through a monthly check sent to your home. You can get paid $5 to more than $20 to fill out a survey that will take you 20 or more minutes to fill out.

This all means that you will not make a decent income from filling out surveys but, if you are interested in extra cash or just like filling out surveys, you can make a small amount of money that will buy you at least a few things. Not a decent income, to be sure, but you can still make a bit of money. You will need to set aside quite a bit of time in order to make enough money to make it worthwhile but if you have nothing else to do, it can be fun.

Think of filling out surveys as a bit of a game that you play on the internet and it won’t seem like so much of a chore. You can find out what companies are interested in and even get a chance to preview products or movies that aren’t even out yet. You can get a handle on the latest trends just by filling out a company’s survey. Sometimes a survey will ask you to watch a specific television program and comment on it or they send you a product to try and keep for yourself, along with getting money for filling out the survey. The products can be food items or they can be household items that have lasting value. That’s what’s so interesting about filling out surveys. You never know what you’re going to get.

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The way you get paid to take online survey questions is that you must register at a survey site and preferably at several survey sites. You give your personal information such as your age and income level and how many people live in your home. You are then “approved” to take the survey or are told you don’t qualify for the survey. It is sometimes free to join a survey site, while other sites have you pay $40 to $50 to join. Those sites have pre-screened the surveys so that you are getting legitimate surveys to fill out.

You still need to register to fill out each individual survey and you will be asked several qualifying questions that take up to five minutes before you are informed that you qualify or don’t qualify for taking the survey. This can take up a lot of your time and you don’t get any points or cash to fill out the qualifying questions. This is something that’s best done while you’re watching television or listening to music so you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time. You either qualify to take the survey right away or you give them your email address and then they email you a survey when one comes up that matches your qualifying information.

This can take a lot of time and effort and you can conceivably fill out qualifying information for dozens of surveys before one comes back to you that you qualify to receive points or cash for filling out the survey. This is why they say you only get about 50 cents an hour filling out surveys. Nevertheless, if you like the internet and like filling out survey forms, you can have a lot of fun doing this and it won’t feel like such a burden.

The best way to make sure a survey site is legitimate is to sign onto a major site that screens surveys for those that are legitimate. It may cost money to do so but you stand a greater chance of getting a survey that will actually pay you some money for doing the surveys. Many of these sites list five hundred or more different surveys or corporations that request surveys. You register for each one of them and wait for surveys to show up in your email inbox. Once you have registered, the rest is easy and the surveys come to you.

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You have to register for the sites that have the surveys and rarely do you get to fill out a survey right away.  Instead, you wait until a survey comes to your email inbox and then you have to wait further to see if you really qualify for the survey.  This involves filling out your demographic information (sometimes all over again as you’ve filled this stuff out at the main site), which includes your age, household information, your income and sometimes where you live.  Surveys also sometimes ask your television watching habits, your purchasing habits or other information to see if you fit the demographics of someone they want to fill out their survey.  Sometimes, after 5 to 10 minutes of filling out this information, you just don’t qualify and they’ve wasted a bit of your time.

If you do qualify for the survey, they will tell you what you’ll get for filling out the survey and will usually tell you how long the survey takes to fill out.  Then you take the 5-20 minutes it takes to fill out the survey and get the cash, points or sweepstakes entry the survey promised you.  Not every survey site is reputable so you’ll want to be careful filling out the survey.  You might want to go to a reputable mega-survey site that pre-screens surveys to make sure they actually pay out what they say they’ll give you and you can fill out hundreds of surveys at such a site.  Good sites for this that give you the best return on the money you pay in to belong to the site include Survey Scout.com ,  Surveys4Checks.com , which has contacts with many major companies that allow you to do surveys for cash and Maximum Paid Surveys .

While there are sites that offer you sweepstakes entries, you can’t prove that they’re really legitimate so go for the sites that pay you cash. Surveys can pay as little as $1 or $2 or as much as $50-$70, depending on the length of the survey and how specialized it is.  That money can be available to you right away in Paypal or can be added to other monies you’ve earned from the site and will come in a check at the end of the month.  It probably won’t be much money unless you qualify for a lot of surveys and give up a lot of your time doing surveys every day but it does add up over time and you can get something out of doing surveys online.

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One of the sites on Teen Surveys is My Survey.com, which involves the entire family doing different surveys that includes teen surveys.  Participants gain points and when they get to a thousand points, they get a check for ten dollars.  Surveys are sometimes long to fill out but the points given are those that can provide a few dollars for the teen, just by doing important market surveys.

Teens are the biggest market for music, iPods, cell phones and other gadgets like video games and video game consoles.  Teens can test market these products and provide information back to the video or music companies so as to find out which are the hottest products to sell.

Teens have a special knack for knowing what the latest next trend will be and they make great market survey participants as many have time on their hands to take what can be lengthy surveys.  They also have the time to test out products sent to them by companies interested in knowing whether or not their product has market value, including how much a teen or a teen’s parent would pay for such a product.  This gives teens something to do and provides valuable information to companies trying to get a handle on where the market is going.

Survey Bounty.com at http://www.surveybounty.com/free_surveys/kidssurveys.html allows kids of all ages to fill out surveys for cash but you have to be able to be fourteen years of age or older in order to do it without parental permission.  Kids don’t make much but they can have fun testing products or filling out surveys for cash and prizes.

Surveys 4 Teens.com at http://www.surveys4teens.com/ provides opportunities for teens to view movie trailers and see movies to give their opinion on what they think of them.  They get to try new products specifically designed for teens as well as filling out surveys for cash.  They can probably get more money babysitting or mowing lawns but this opportunity provides them with a fun internet outlet and the chance to change the items and advertisements out there in the world. What can be more empowering than that?

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