Paid survey sites have a bad rap. Most people believe that these programs will never pay out, or they will trick you into buying something you don’t want. With all of the people on the internet trying to steal your identity, it can be hard to trust a survey site. To begin to trust a survey site, you need to understand how they make money.

How Do Survey Sites Earn Money?

These sites earn their money in several different ways. The first way is the flat sum they earn for every survey you complete. After they take their cut, they pass down the remainder of the earnings to the survey taker. Companies are willing to pay a large amount of money for market research. In their eyes, it is a small price to pay, to discover what potential customers might want.

Another way that survey sites earn money is through their affiliate programs. They disguise these programs by referring to them as offers, or shopping programs. You will be given a reward for completing offers, or a refund for shopping. When you complete an offer and receive your stipend, you can rest assured that the survey site is pocketing some cash as well. Some of these offers will be presented in the form of free trials. It is important to cancel these free trials before they force you to pay. These companies are banking on the possibility that you will forget to cancel.

How Can You Benefit From This?

Now that you are aware of how survey sites make money, you can use this knowledge to use them to pocket some cash for yourself. Obviously one of the ways to make money online with survey sites is to take the surveys. It can take a while to find a survey that you qualify for, so this may not be the best option for some. If you are able to qualify for a survey, you will be paid approximately one dollar. It can take about fifteen minutes to complete a survey, and you can only take a couple per day. So you won’t get rich taking surveys, but you can earn some extra spending money.

The next option is to complete the offers. It is suggested that you only complete free offers that do not ask for too much information. These generally don’t pay that much, but they are very quick to complete. Make sure that you have a dummy email address set up so it doesn’t matter if you get a lot of spam. These companies will send you a lot of emails, so beware.

The final, and best, option to make money with survey sites is to participate in their referral programs. Since they make so much money on offers and surveys, it is important for these sites to increase their user base. You can earn up to 25% of what your referrals earn. If you refer 2000 people, the amount of money you will receive every month from referrals is staggering.

When you join a survey site, it is important to remember that you won’t get rich this way. You can only hope to add a little bit to your monthly income. Some people make hundreds of dollars every month just through survey sites, and there is no reason that you can’t. Just be careful, and don’t sign up for something that asks for too much information. In the long run, you can make a lot of money through the online survey sites.

Online gambling is a huge industry with companies like Bodog and Betfred
raking in so much money that the president of Bodog, Calvin Ayre, avoids setting foot in the USA for fear of being brought up on racketeering charges.

Who has the money or resources to start up an online casino? Or even the energy and time to get the backing for one that could compete with the big boys? Why bother when you can do what many did back in the gold rush. The real money back then was selling the shovels not in finding the gold.

History has a way of repeating itself. Casinos, much lick the Klondike of old, have the odds stacked against the gambler that there is virtually no chance that they’ll strike gold. Many gamblers buy “winning” sports picks from various “experts” in a vain attempt to strike it big.

So with that in mind does it really matter if the picks the gamblers get are real, or is the rush and excitement of knowing they’re about to get a leg up on the casino enough to make buying your sports picks.

The traditional way the “experts” run their scam is to send out a bunch of fliers with a free “winning pick” and a number for gamblers (AKA the mark) to call in if they want to pay for a winning pick. The handicappers (or shysters as one legit handicapper I know refers to them) make promises of you making incredible amounts of money on their picks and of course they have a free pick on the flier that will have, if you’re in the correct are code, won.

What you can’t see is that the fliers are different in each area code. For the first run of fliers 1/2 of area codes get one team as the winner and the other area code gets the other team as the winner. Replicate this out to 10 or 20 cities and you’ll end up with one that has a large number of people that saw your steak of “winning” predictions.

The internet and IP to city databases allow you can determine the location of a visitor to your website. You can use this to replicate giving from the same city the same picks just like with the traditional flier method. Assuming you’ve figured out how to get traffic to your website then you can make lots of cash.

Requirements

The most important requirement is that you have no morals at all. You’ll be ripping people off. Running a sports handicapping scam like this is probably illegal but there are so many of them it makes you wonder why no one stops these criminals.

Ironically there are a few legit ones, but their problem is that they can only promise a return of 10% of month over a long term of playing their picks. It just isn’t exciting like knowing you’ll be doubling or tripling your money in a day.

Then you’ll need an IP to city database, some programming skills and a website. Fortunately all of these can be purchased online. There’s a lot of qualified designers and web programmers contracting through eLance that building website should not be a problem even if you lack the requisite skills.

Other than that some links to online Sports Books, AKA Casinos, will come in handy. You can recommend “reputable” sports books where your customers can place their bets. The great part is that you can get an affiliate code and make a commission from people that sign-up and bet on top of the fees for your sports picks. The affiliate links look like the following:

The Payout

Assuming you can get traffic to your website then you could be making hundreds of dollars a day.

At the very least you’ve probably learned not to throw your money away with the shysters.

Google is hiring an army of Quality Raters to help them test the relevancy of their mighty search algorithm as well as help them identify SPAM websites, or anything that is of a malicious nature.

Google’s algorithm is a leading edge, and by far the best, way to search for relevant web sites from “removing hang nails” to “installing a tub surround”. In an ideal world with no one trying to manipulate their pages for higher search engine ranking (and more clicks on advertisements) Google would be providing virtually flawless search results for almost any conceivable search. The only problem is that there are hundreds of webmasters out there employing “Black Hat” SEO techniques to get their built for AdSense websites into the top positions on many popular searches.

The algorithms have a tough time tossing the “fake” sites, so that’s where the people come in. Basically the raters will evaluate an actual website clicked on by an actual surfer and rate that website against the actual search the user performed.

The rating is anywhere from “is the website vital to the search the user performed” “to not relevant”. It can also be flagged SPAM or pornographic among many other possible flags.

I did this job for about a year, working around 8 to 10 hours a week. The nice thing was that the job paid me for surfing on the internet, I could do it from home, or anywhere with a high speed internet connection, and they paid me $18.00 an hour on a weekly basis. It was pretty easy to make an extra $150.00 to $200.00 a week.

The job is pretty tedious, though there were some interesting experiments that I was involved in. They only let you do this position for a year but you can reapply after a 3 month leave.

Requirements

You need to have a high speed internet connection. Be legally allowed to work in either the US or Canada. They want people that have traveled and are tech savvy. In a nut shell they’re looking for people who love the internet and are curious by nature.

Payout

They want you working 10 to 20 hours per week and pay around $18/hour so that brings the weekly haul in around $180 to $360 a week. Plus 4% vacation pay in Canada. They pay via direct deposit weekly making this a very lucrative way to earn extra cash.

The interesting thing about applying for this position is that by nature it’s hard to interview people. If you make the short list you’re given a manual to read and are presented with an exam. Applicants get paid $150 for taking the exam and another $150 for passing it.

You’re not actually working for Google, you’ll be a temp working through a staffing agency, but they do let you put on your resume that you worked on a project for Google which means that you’ll be able to reference one of the most respected and talked about companies in the world on your resume.

With the cost of digital cameras and scanners having come down so much it’s never been easier to scan your old pictures, or take new pictures. If you’re like me then you’ll take about 100 bad shots to that one really good shot where you say to yourself “Wow, I could make money selling this”.

The only problem is who do you sell them to?

There are many options, but two that I like are iStockphoto and Shutterstock.

iStockphoto

What I like about iStockphoto is that it’s geared toward the photographer. They don’t let just anyone join and submit photographs. They present you with a quick tutorial and a quiz before you can upload 3 samples. If they reject a sample they give you constructive feedback as to why the picture was rejected. Once your samples are approved you can begin uploading pictures and making money.

Requirements

Good Quality Pictures that are at least 2.5 megapixel, well composed, and well lit. The type of shots that someone would want to use in a brochure or on a website.

The Payout

40% of the price of the download, prices very from $1.00 for an extra small image to $15.00 for an extra large.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock is geared towards the customer, making it a very popular source for images. Users buy a monthly subscripton and can download 25 images a day. There is no quiz given but you have to submit 10 pictures for approval before your images can be purchased for download.

Requirements

Same as for iStockphoto, basically good quality pictures.

The Payout

You make $0.25 per download regardless of the image size.

Program Description

This study’s purpose, carried out by IBM Business Consulting Services, is to measure the delivery performance of Canada Post’s Advertising and Promotional mail in Canada.

You’ll receive an email notifying you of which test piece of Admail to watch out for. Then once you’ve received the Admail you sign onto the study page and fill out a 10 second survey.

Requirements

1. Access to a phone or internet to complete the surveys but you’ll need access to the internet to sign up in the first place.
2. A Canadian address that Canada Post delivers Admail to.
3. A heartbeat.

Payout

There’s no set payment for this study. IBM and Canada Post have decided to hold a quarterly draw, one of $500 and ten of $50, of which the participants name is entered into each time they’ve completed a survey.

How do you sign up?

Just visit www.admail.surveysource.com and register.

Currently Made: $0.00

Well so far I’ve been doing the Admail survey for about 2 months. The current quarter should be ending on June 30th and hopefully I’ll be seeing a cheque come my way.

I’ve spent about 10 minutes so far completing surveys and I have a feeling that if I continue doing so for a long period my earnings would probably average out to $10/hour.