I Like Gigs

Paid opinion surveys are a huge business on the Internet. Over 700 survey makers in the U.S. make thousands of surveys each week. Just one of these, Greenfield Online, paid out over $4,200,000 to survey participants in 2007! The reason they pay is to get survey takers with a wide variety of demographics to participate.

The impetus (and the money!) for paid opinion surveys comes from large companies that very much need to know what consumers are thinking. They need to know which ads consumers have seen (to know which ad campaigns are being effective), they need to know consumer preferences for various features of products and services (to plan new products).

We live in a consumption-driven economy where the consumer is king. Producers of goods and services need to know what their consumer customers and clients think and want before developing new products or changing old ones. And most of the producers of goods and services have no direct contact with their ultimate customers.

Just go into any large supermarket, for instance, and look around you. There are probably 3-10,000 different items being sold there. These are the products of thousands of different producers, packers and distributors. A customer pushes his/her shopping cart down an aisle, picks out one product from amongst many competitors, tosses it into the cart and walks on.

Now WHY did they do that? Pick that particular brand? The marketing managers of all of the competing companies are dying to know! They want to influence buyers to buy more, to select THEM instead of others. They want very much to know what the prospective buyer was thinking at the point of sale and why they chose as they did.

So they hire market research experts to measure public opinion, find out, and tell them. One of the tools that market researchers use is a paid opinion survey. And so another survey gets commissioned.

Now, for you to take surveys, get paid for doing so, you need to get your name on the lists of potential survey takers that the survey makers maintain. You do this by getting a good list of good survey makers and applying to each of them online. It’s easy and fast. Just fill in the blanks with your contact info and demographic data (gender, age, zip code, etc.), and your contact information.

The idea will be to sign up with the 20% of the survey makers that offer legitimate paid online surveys that pay well, pay ontime and respect your privacy. Also the 40% of second tier that maybe don’t pay so well or so fast but are still worthwhile.

If your goal is to get paid to take online surveys, you will want to avoid the remaining 40%. These are no-pay/low-pay survey makers and sales companies trying to act like survey makers to get your data. They and their buddies want to stuff your inbox with sales offers until you buy something from them. Absolute waste of time and needless hassle.

Avoid “free lists” of survey makers. These are mostly paid for by way of recruiting fees paid to the list distributors by that lower 40%, to recruit “fresh meat” for them. The good survey makers don’t advertise. They don’t need to. So they are harder to find.

So pick a good paid survey membership site, join them and get a copy of their list. You’ll make enough money with your first 2-3 paid opinion surveys to easily get back your membership fee.

To pick a good one, insist on a strong money-back guarantee, and then look for one with a low (3-6%) refund rate. Avoid any with refund rates that are unknown (usually means “high”) or are as high as 9-10%. That way you position yourself to be amongst the happy clients of a low refund site, and you have a guarantee.

– jorchav