How to Get Informed and Unbiased Information on Paid Online Surveys

Good information is hard to get, but it's out there if you look for it!

Paid online surveys are a great way to make extra money for many people. For others can they turnout to be a complete waste of time. It all depends on which type of surveys you take. Whether you make money or waste time depends almost completely on having good information on the survey makers that offer paid online surveys.  And you need this up front, before you get started.

Large companies commission market researchers to make surveys because they need good informantion about consumer preferences and opinions.  These sponsoring companies negotiate a budget with a survey maker for each survey they commission, and they pay the survey maker to make the survey and report back.

About 20% of these survey makers allocate the cash to pay the participants for doing their part. The other 80% try to pay out as little as they can get by with, and keep the rest. The difference determines whether participants will get $10 to 25 for filling out a survey questionnaire or only $1 to $2.

In order to make money  you need information about the survey makers that make these surveys.  You want to sign up with the 20% that pay and avoid the 80% that do not pay. The information about which is which is not easy to get.

It is further complicated by the fact that the 80% no-pay/low-pay survey makers have high turnover (as you might expect!) and have to constantly recruit new survey takers. To do this they pay recruiting fees to free and paid survey sites, to find and send them new survey-taker recruits.

For this reason 95 to 98% of the ads and promotions you see offering "free lists" of survey makers are recruiting for the 80% that don't pay. (You will not get good information about paid online surveys from ads!) The promoters make money but the recruits don't! They will just waste their time with low-pay/no-pay surveys, and no real hope of making any money.

The best way to find the 20% that pay and pay well, is through honest paid survey sites. I say honest because some of these try to "double dip". They charge membership fees to their clients AND they collect recruitment fees from marginal survey makers!

But the good, honest, paid survey sites live on their membership fees. They pick survey makers by the quality of their payment reputation and not by the size of the recruitment fee offered.  They really try to find good survey makers for their clients and members.

They know that the survey makers on their lists must perform well for the paid survey site's clients or the clients will demand their money back under the guarantee.

You can find these sites by listening to the opinions of their past clients. You can know the opinions of their past clients by the refund rates of each specific paid survey site.

The secret, then, is to look for sites with a STRONG money-back guarantee, backed by a bank or financial company like PayPal or ClickBank. Then, within that group look for a low (3-6%) refund rate. Avoid any with refund rates that are unknown (which almost invariably means high!) or are as high as 9-10% or more.

A low refund rate means happy clients who used the list from that site, found good, paying survey makers, signed up with them, got good surveys that paid them in cash, and they made money.  They received value for their membership fee, got it back many times in survey payments, and were happy!

A high refund rate means many unhappy clients who used the list, found low-pay/no-pay surveys, did not make any money, were consequently dissatisfied and demanded their money back.

The refund rate reflects the informed and unbiased opinions of the clients of that paid survey site. Those opinions are the best source of information on paid online surveys.

So the way to get good information on paid online surveys is to join a paid survey site with a strong guarantee and a low refund rate. Then you use their information, their list of good, paying survey makers. You will then make money and join the list of happy clients of that site.

There is more to it of course. For more information on paid online surveys, go here: Home Page or here: Paid Online Surveys.