One of the ways I make alternative income is by doing online surveys. The only company I do surveys for is Pinecone Research. They pay $5 per survey which take about 10-15 minutes to complete. I usually only get 1 or 2 surveys a month though. They only accept signups at certain times so you have to be on the lookout for when they are accepting new members. I’ve never had any problems getting paid by Pinecone. They send out checks quickly or you can have the money deposited in your PayPal account. This isn’t much money but it is easy to make and every little bit helps.
Other companies that I haven’t used but I’ve seen recommended by other PF bloggers are SurveySavvy and Greenfield Online. Leave a comment if you know of any other good survey comments or let people know of any survey company you have had a bad experience with.
I use SurveySavvy, but I almost never get surveys from them. I also use SurveySpot (https://www.surveyspot.com/), which pays $3 for most of its surveys. With SurveySpot, the key is to jump on the surveys as soon as you get the emails, because if you wait too long, you’ll get a “We’ve already had enough members complete this survey.”
Also, I use MySurvey, which really only pays 10 cents per survey (pays in points, 1000 of which you can redeem for $10, and most surveys are only 10points each), but has a nice little messenger application you can download, which will alert you whenever you have a new survey. They have a referral program, so if you do sign up, please use my link: http://fun.mysurvey.com/join.cfm?r=2838507
(Or don’t because I see you have a CashDuck account, and I know there’s a link in there for MySurvey – better in your case to use that, I think!)
I’m working on a post about this myself, actually!
Surveys turned out to be a gigantic waste of time for me. Plus they just plain bore me to tears!
I think there’s no doubt that Pinecone Research is the best online survey program ever. But if you’re looking for others, I agree with Stephanie’s recommendation of NFO MySurvey. True, the screener surveys are only worth 10 points (or 10 cents if you redeem points for cash), but if you qualify for the full survey, they’re typically worth 25-100 points, and one I did earlier this month was worth 350 points.
I also recommend Lightspeed Panel. Their surveys are usually worth 75-150 points, with 1150 points getting you $10 in your Paypal account.
I’ve had good results with ePoll in the past, but haven’t had many surveys from them lately. Their surveys are usually worth 100-500 points, with a $20 Amazon GC worth 13500 points.
And speaking of Amazon gift certs, another paid survey company that I a lot of success with recently was Kanbay Research Institute. I did 4 surveys for them last month and they sent me $15 in Amazon GCs. They’re not accepting new panel members at the moment, but I think they’re worth keeping an eye on.
And my final recommendation is Your2Cents Online Opinion Panel. They don’t do points, so you earn real dollars for each survey you do. Each survey is usually worth $1-5, and they’ve got a cool system where you earn “bonus bucks” for filling out their little profile questionnaires, with a max of $8.
If you want to get paid to do anything online, I recommend you start with free trials. Surveys aren’t usually the best place to start because there’s a real shady area around them. Like you complete a survey only to get told that you didn’t qualify. That’s happened to me before. Other than that there’s not much you can do, but just down get your hopes down.
Surveys are a great way to earn extra income. Free trials are cool, but if you do not cancel them in time you can end up paying much more than you made. You can’t expect to qualify for every survey. Surveys are designed to collect specific information. Each from a specific source. So nobody will qualify for every single survey, but many panels have daily surveys that target you as closely as possible to make sure that you have the best chance of qualifying.