How to Get Paid for Answering Online Surveys

Every single year, American companies are spending billions of dollars on consumer intelligence. In fact, survey companies and focus group consulting firms typically rake in millions of dollars. The industry is worth billions every single year.

It is no surprise that a lot of these consumer intelligence firms have switched over to the Internet to gather the important information manufacturers and distributors need when making important product decisions.

Don’t think for a second that online surveys are a joke, a scam, or a waste of time. They are none of the above. It is no surprise that a lot of companies are popping up like mushrooms all over the Internet paying people to take online surveys.

Believe it or not there are not that many qualified people taking these surveys. Companies are paying more and more money to get the right demographics to take their surveys. A lot of them are using all sorts of tricks to get the attention so people could take surveys.

Why would Companies Pay for Online Surveys?

Companies designing new products or relaunching old services and product lines need to be sure about how their target markets will receive their new offerings. If they make a mistake, these companies can easily lose millions of dollars.

This is why they hire third-party online survey firms and focus group companies to gather consumer information that would help them with the proper design as well as marketing campaign strategies.

How Do Online Survey Firms Make Money?

Online survey firms and Internet-based focus group companies act as middlemen. They recruit online consumers that fit certain demographics. They then feed them the right surveys commissioned by their clients. These companies get paid for every completed survey they get.

What is the Catch with Online Surveys?

Survey companies are only looking for certain demographic groups. If they distribute a survey that was filled out by somebody who doesn’t fit this demographic profile, they don’t get paid.

For example, a company is designing new women’s lingerie for older women. These women live in North America. The surveys that they need involve women aged 35 and older who live in the United States.

Obviously, if the survey company promotes the online questionnaire to young women between age 18 and 24 living in the Philippines or Ukraine, they’re targeting the wrong demographic. The survey firm won’t get paid for those surveys because whatever consumer information those surveys gathered are worthless to the client company.

Demographics and Geographical Distribution are Crucial for Online Surveys

If you want to make money answering online surveys, you have to live in the right place, and you need the right demographic profile. This might sound pretty straightforward and simple, but they aren’t. You have to remember that different companies with different audiences approach online survey firms all the time.

These survey firms’ determination of who qualifies for their surveys change on a survey-by-survey basis. This is not just a simple case of you signing up for an online survey platform and automatically getting a lot of surveys that pay $10 to $100 for 15 minutes of work. Those surveys do exist, but depending on your demographic profile, they may be few and far between. A lot of this also depends on where you live.

Do You Live in a Tier 1 Country?

If you live in the United States, and you are between the ages of 24 and 45, and you live in a major city, you are in a tier 1 demographic group. Nine times out of ten companies would want you to participate in their surveys. They will pay you $10 up to $100 for every survey you take. In many cases, these surveys take only 10 minutes up to an hour to fill out. Not too bad, right?

Here’s the problem. People who fit that demographic profile are actually very few. Also, a lot of these survey companies are very suspicious of people who take survey after survey. It’s obvious that they’re not really taking these survey so they can give honest, sincere, and accurate feedback on products or product designs.

Instead, it’s very easy to see that a lot of people who take survey after survey are actually just in it for the money. It’s no surprise that a lot of these online survey firms have screening mechanisms that weed out professional survey takers.

How Much Money can You Make Answering Online Surveys?

Assuming that you are geographically qualified as well as demographically selected, you can make anywhere from $10 and up per survey. Also, the surveys that you take can be as short as 5 minutes, or they can run up to an hour. Regardless, a lot of high-quality online surveys pay more than the federal minimum wage in the United States.

What is the Hardest Part about Earning Money through Online Surveys?

The hardest part really is geography. If you don’t live in a tier 1 country, tough luck. Tier 1 countries are the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, maybe Australia and New Zealand. All other geographic regions have all sorts of language and demographic restrictions.

I’m not saying that you can’t get a high-paying survey if you live outside of a tier 1 geographic area. What I am saying is that those high-paying surveys are few and far between. If you want to turn this into a steady source of income, you have to be located in the right place.

How to Maximize Your Earnings by Answering Surveys Online

If you want to make thousands of dollars every single month taking surveys, follow the steps below:

Step #1: Make sure you are in a premium geographic region

This is self-explanatory. You should live in a tier 1 country. The good news is even if you don’t live in a tier 1 country, you can still make decent money with online surveys. Just get ready for the fact that high-paying surveys may be available to you on an occasional basis.

Step #2: Make sure you’re in the right demographic

As long as you’re over 18, chances are you will come across a survey that you’re qualified to take, but if you want to take surveys frequently, make sure you fit the right demographic “sweet spot.” These are people aged between 24 and 45.

Why do companies prefer this age demographic? This is usually the age range of people with the highest spending power. Think about it. If you’re under 18, you probably are just getting money from your parents, and you don’t have that much spending power.

Similarly, if you are between the ages of 18 and 23, you are in college or you’re simply just getting started with life, and you probably don’t have that much disposable income.

Step #3: Sign up for as many online survey platforms as possible

If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can do extensive Google research on online survey firms. They’re all over the place. In fact, they’re based not just in the United States or Western Europe, but many of them are also based in Southeast Asia like Singapore or even China.

What’s important is you sign up for as many of these survey platforms as possible. You would need to put in the time searching for them on Google. Also, you need to use Google Translate because a lot of online survey companies don’t have websites in English.

Step #4: Get your PayPal account ready

The majority of online survey companies and platforms pay via PayPal. You must have a PayPal account ready.

Step #5: Try to take as many of a platform’s surveys as you can

Usually, when you look into a survey platform, the platform itself will automatically detect whether you live in the right area or not. They will also look at your demographic profile and will automatically filter you out if you don’t fit the demographics that they’re looking for.

Assuming that you qualify on both these counts, you will be able to see available surveys. Take as many of those surveys as you can.

Step #6: Cash out when you meet the minimum threshold

This is the toughest part. Believe me finding online surveys, qualifying for them, and then filling them out is actually the easy part. I know that sounds crazy because it seems like those are really difficult.

However, the hardest part really is to take enough surveys so you can cash out. Depending on the platform, you can cash out if your balance reaches $10, $25, $50, or $100. You really don’t have much of a say here because the survey firms call the shots. If they say that the minimum amount that you must have in your account before you can cash out through PayPal is $100, then you’re stuck with that figure.

My Online Survey Money Making Success Tips

If you want to really be successful with online surveys or you want to generate a good stream of income from these survey sites, here are some tips that I have discovered on a firsthand basis that would enable you to maximize the amount of dollars you make from this method of making money from the Internet.

Tip #1: Refer as many people as possible

This is the best advice I can give you to turbocharge your income. A lot of survey platforms actually pay a finder’s fee for people who refer their friends and family. In fact, a lot of people who make their money from survey sites don’t make their money from actually taking the surveys.

Instead, most of their cash comes from the people they refer. This is a little tricky because every person you refer will only give you a small amount of credit. However, if you refer a lot of people, this can add up quickly.

How Do You Refer Friends and Family?

The easiest way I found out to refer my friends and family to survey platforms is to simply include the referral link on my email signature. I just set it and I forget it. The great part to all of this is the more emails I receive and respond to as well as the more emails I send out, the more people sign up through my link.

The great thing about it is this happens automatically. I don’t have to think about actively promoting the program. Every email I send or every response I send will have my referral link underneath.

Tip #2: Prioritize survey platforms that have a multilevel system

Don’t get scared. Don’t freak out. Usually, when people hear “multilevel,” they get scared because they think that this is one of those MLM scams. No.

Legit survey firms don’t charge you money. They pay you. You don’t pay them.

By multilevel, I’m talking about you referring people, and when they refer others, the amount of money their referrals make is also credited to you. In other words, you get a percentage of not only what your direct referrals make from the system, but if they refer other people, you make a percentage from those people as well.

Please understand that this type of multilevel referral system is rare when it comes to online surveys. However, they do exist. This is why I suggest that you prioritize these systems first because you make a lot more money this way. You don’t have to sweat trying to find as many surveys you could take. Let them do the work because the more they work, the more money you make.

Tip #3: Be proactive in promoting online survey platforms

As effective as an email signature is, you need to be more proactive to spread the word for your link. The good news is if you’re active at Facebook, this is good enough.

One simple trick I use is to fill my personal wall with posts regarding the survey platforms I’ve joined. I talk about how much money I make. I post pictures of the actual screenshots of my checks in US dollars from the sponsors. I fill my wall with that information and when people are interested, they can click on a link and sign up under me. That’s how my wall looks.

The next thing I do is I go to popular news pages or viral video and picture pages, and I just click the laughing emoticon. When somebody leaves a comment, I just laugh at their comment.

Please understand that people are by nature insecure. They don’t like being laughed at. They don’t like to be made to feel that they’re stupid or anything like that.

What do you think happens? They click on my profile because they noticed that of all the people giving them a thumbs up, there’s this guy laughing at them. They click on my profiles and what do you think they see? That’s right. They see the ads.

Believe it or not I pull in a lot of referrals this way. The great thing about this technique is you can use it on Facebook itself, and you can also use it on Comments sections that are powered by Facebook.

What I love about this is you don’t have to publish content. You don’t have to go out on a limb and publish comments and possibly draw unwanted attention to yourself. You just laugh at what people have to say, and it has been quite effective.

Tip #4: Promote on YouTube using your channel profile

I had a YouTube channel built up but I’m not uploading any videos. My channel is intended only to get people to click on my referral link. What I would do is I would go to YouTube and find really viral videos that get a lot of views.

I would then post very provocative comments. I’m not going to insult people. I’m not hating on people. I just post stuff that get people to think or stuff that’s really funny or stuff that’s shocking.

Whatever the case may be, I have a nice-looking avatar, and this avatar is attractive enough. They want to click through and then that’s when they get exposed to my marketing materials.

You can use this same technique on Instagram and other platforms that enable you to show a good-looking avatar.

The Final Word on Online Surveys

Online surveys take a lot of work if you want to make a full-time income from them; however, it is possible. If you build a nice referral stream of people signing up under you, you can possibly make several thousand dollars from this system.

The key is to join as many different platforms as possible and know what you’re doing when promoting these platforms.

Quick Shortcut

It’s a hassle looking for survey platforms all over the Internet. You have to know what you’re doing. In fact, a lot of them are dead. Some websites are unresponsive. Many websites take a long time to get back to you.

I found this awesome service that has screened high-quality survey platforms so you don’t have to do it yourself. This resource saves you so much time and hassle. Believe me filling out survey platform application forms is no joke. It takes a lot of time. You have to pay close attention to the information that they ask.

It would be great if you were to filter out survey platforms that you shouldn’t be joining in the first place. By using this resource that I’m sharing with you, you can do that. Not only do you save time, but you maximize the amount of income you get.

Best of all, they also list referrer systems. They list some survey platforms that will pay you a bounty for referring other people.

If you’re in a hurry or you don’t have all the time in the world, do yourself a big favor and join this resource so you can take online surveys and get paid the amount of money that you’re looking for.