Are Paid Surveys a Scam?
Get paid to take surveys! Earn up to $250/hr for giving your opinion! Make thousands of dollars a month taking paid surveys in your spare time!
Ads like these are what has everyone asking, “Are paid surveys real?”. Just look on any major website or even in your email and chances are you will see someone offering lots of money to take paid surveys online. Is it a scam?
The answer to this question is no. Paid surveys are not a scam. You really can get paid to take online paid surveys. But, finding a legitimate source for paid surveys can be discouraging. There are several sites that disguise themselves as paid surveys in order to get your personal information or get you to join other programs they affiliate with. It’s sites like these that give paid surveys a bad name. So how do you tell the real paid surveys from the fakes?
What is a Paid Survey?
Paid surveys are not new. Opinion research has been used for decades by marketers as a way to explore customer needs and every year companies and institutions spend billions of dollars on consumer research. The reason is simple: The better they understand us as consumers, the more money they can make. Because they need to know what consumers like and want, companies are willing to pay for our opinions.
A paid survey is a study conducted by a market research firm in order to gather information about a specific product or advertisement. Major companies spend billions of dollars every year on advertising. They want you to recognize their products. In order to find out how the public feels about a product they will hire a market research firm to gather information from the public. One of the ways a market research firm gathers information is through surveys. These market research companies are paid alot of money for this research. So in return for your participation in an online survey each participant will be compensated. Paid surveys are not the only form of market research. There are also mystery shops, product tests, and focus groups.
Now that you know what a paid survey is you need to know what a paid survey is not. A paid survey is NOT something that compensates you for purcashing something. A paid survey is NOT something that pays you to sign up for product trial offers. If you see a banner or text ad that says something like, “Pizza vs Cheesburgers. Take this survey and get a free ipod”, that is NOT a paid survey. You will never have to pay a fee or complete any type of offers to take a real paid survey.
So how do you avoid paid survey scams? The easiest way is to find a directory of paid surveys. Read reviews and forum posts of what people have to say about each company. There are two types of directories, paid memberships and free directories. A good free directory will provide all of the information that a paid membership does, saving you $40. From these directories you can join hundreds of paid survey panels.
How To Avoid Paid Survey Scam Sites
Everybody wants to avoid a paid survey scam on their way to joining a legit free paid survey site. While it might seem simple, many money seeking people have a hard time finding the top notch paid survey sites out there. Well, I am about to show you how to avoid a paid survey scam and also where to start your paid survey site adventure.
A well run paid survey site will be properly maintained and all of its links will go somewhere. If there are non-working links on the site, avoid it like the plague! Also make sure that there are support or contact details on the site, which you can test to see if you get a response.
You should not have to pay to join an individual paid survey site; some sites will do this in order to get some kind of commission from the market research site offering the surveys, but you should avoid sites like this. All the paid survey sites you need to sign up for, you can register to them for free.
One type of internet paid survey companies you should look out for, are ones that offer batch surveys. This type of company will send you hundreds of surveys, promising a payment when a certain quota of surveys have been completed. In the majority of cases, you will have an eternal wait for payment, as the company will have disappeared by the time you reach the required quota.
Try to avoid survey sites, which offer non-cash awards, like points, product samples or vouchers. Why take a survey for a non monetary gift, when you can be taking surveys for cash? After all, I suspect that your reason for taking surveys is to get paid. Find yourself a list of Cash Surveys Only, and that will solve this problem.
In fact, to avoid scam paid survey sites altogether; you can sign up to a good paid survey directory, like Cash Surveys Only, who screen all the survey sites that they include, so only legitimate sites are listed, saving you from the hassle and research.
Don’t just settle for one or two free paid survey sites. The more you join, the faster your money will grow. Finding every legit free paid survey site has never been easier and you should finally be able to avoid the dreaded paid survey scam.
