Paid Online Surveys: Do They Really Pay?

In my last article, I focused a lot on affiliate marketing and my successes and failures concerning this money making program. Prior to affiliate marketing, I focused on making money through paid online surveys. Let's first get to the main question at hand: Do Paid Surveys Really Pay? The short answer to this is yes. Paid online surveys do actually pay and in most cases, this is not a scam or a waste of time. Prior to really answering this question thoroughly, let me explain what "Paid Surveys" really mean.

While looking for "Online Money Making Opportunities" online, I am sure we have all come across the paid survey ads. When I was initially looking to make a little bit of extra cash to supplement my current income, it seemed to be the most ideal solution. At first, I tried to be "frugal" about it and hunt out paid survey sites on my own. I found about 5 or six sites that promoted offering to pay for taking surveys. I signed up for them, got on their mailing list, and nothing! I waited about 2 weeks for "a survey" and did not get anything. Very annoying! I continued to research the topic (in forums) and started to realize that 5 sites are not enough to get started. That prompted me to join a paid survey site. This is when I learned what "Paid Surveys" is all about!

In order to make paid surveys work, you need to step out of the box a little bit. There is MORE to paid surveys than just "Paid Surveys". Remember, the whole point to getting paid for surveys is for companies to collect data, build profiles and become more successful marketers. Filling out paid surveys online is just one way to do this. Phone interviews are a way to collect data. Online focus groups exist where you join a real-time discussion online. Also, you can read other people’s email and get paid for it. While this seems strange, you can get paid a few cents per email, and this can add up in a short hour! There are about a half-dozen more ways as well to earn money through paid survey opportunities.

Getting back to the original question again: Yes, you can get paid for you opinion! Most surveys I have gotten range between $5 and $25 each (for about 15 minutes to an hour of your time). Getting paid to read emails is about one cent to ten cents per email read (and I have made up to about $15 in an hour doing this). The other thing to be aware of is the payment options. A lot of paid survey sites offer compensation in either money and/or prizes. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on why you are doing these programs. Some of the prize sites are pretty nice and you can get more value in prizes than cash.

The main point to be made here is that you will be paid for you time. If you fill out a survey or sit in on a focus group, your time will be compensated. You commitment goes no further than the survey or interview or the group you attend. For people like stay-at-home parents or even college students, this is a great way to bring in a little bit of extra cash at your own leisure. A lot of it is quite a brain-dead exercise that you can do while watching some bad reality TV in the background. My biggest issue with paid surveys is its lack of residual income as well as its income potential.

I see ads that advertise that you can make thousands of dollars per month doing surveys. Their math seems to be pretty convincing as well: If you do two paid surveys a day at $20 each, for 30 days, that is $1200 per month! Wow! How easy! Not quite reality, though. If you sign up with enough paid survey sites, you can expect to get (on average) about 5-10 surveys per week, and most of these pay in the $5-$10 range. If you also join some focus groups and phone interviews, you can add an additional $100 per week. So in reality, making $500 is very doable, but that is near the ceiling for cash potential. It is still not bad! That is an extra $6000 per year (and a fairly respectable car payment!). If you were looking for a higher paying online opportunity, I would then recommend affiliate marketing. Online marketing provides the potential for a lot of residual money (money that is earned while you are not actually driving it) and its earning potential can be in the thousands to tens of thousands per month. Affiliate marketing does require a lot more commitment, initial set-up and a bit of training (all of which is achievable to anyone, as long as they are focused on their goals!). Read my article First Impressions of Affiliate Marketing to learn more about this.

In summary, I would like to give a few suggestions to those who are planning on trying to make money through paid survey programs:

1) Sign up for as many paid surveys as you can! - Most paid survey sites provide you with only one or two survey opportunities per month. If you are signed up on 50 sites, you now can about 2 surveys per day.

2) Sign up for a Paid Survey Link Site - So where do you find these 50 or so sites? That is what these paid survey link sites are all about. Most of them cost about $35 to join, but it is a one time fee (for any reputable site). Trying to find 50 sites on your own would take 10s of hours (and remember, time is money that you can be making filling out surveys!).

3) Funnel all of your paid survey email into one, new, dedicated email account. - I found that some paid survey opportunities can appear as spam and become lost in a regular email account.

4) Stay Organized! - As you start receiving paid online surveys, start a spreadsheet of whom you are working for and what you expect to be paid. When trying to manage over 50 sites, you can very easily forget which companies owe you money or prizes.

5) Remember, you are still an employee of the paid survey sites! - Be sure to fill out the surveys accurately and consistently. Surveys that have box number three filled out throughout the entire questionnaire provide them with no feedback and you will more than likely stop receiving survey requests. Also, if you start ignoring a lot of requests, they will stop sending them.

Paid surveys are an honest and solid way to make a little extra money on the side. Like any money making opportunity, there is a little bit of initial overhead time, but with paid surveys, once you are set up, you are set up for awhile. You CAN make money working from home and paid surveys are a fairly safe, easy and risk-free way of doing so.

Which Affiliate Program is Right For You?

There are a great variety of options available for placing advertising on your website. It can be a very confusing process to pick the one that is right for you. There is no one solution that will work best for everyone. Therefore, it is wise to consider what type of programs will work best for the visitors to your site. This is a difficult question to answer. So, below are brief descriptions of various types of programs available as well as examples of websites they would work well with.

The first type we will look at is the PPS or Pay Per Sale program. This type of program is the closest you will find to the traditional salesman earning a commission by selling your product. Bestbuy.com, Buy.com, Amazon.com and many others offer a pay per sale program which gives their affiliates anywhere from 2-15% commissions on any sales that they make. The pay per sale program works well with informational sites as long as the product you are selling is linked closely to the demographic of your particular site.

One example of this would be a site dedicated to scuba diving. This scuba diving site would feature information about the best places for scuba diving and perhaps offer review of the newest scuba diving equipment. After you review a new product, you could place a specific affiliate link to that product on an online retailer's store. You would get a good conversion and click-through rate by going this route.

Another example would be an affiliate based site which sells electronics. A lot of pay per sale affiliates offer data feeds for all of their products which are available through their online retail outlet. With these feeds, you can build an affiliate based online store of your own selling their products. There are a lot of software packages available to assist in automating the building of affiliate sites around data feeds.

Many times online retail establishments run their own affiliate programs. However, there are other places to find these types of programs. Two of the best affiliate networks for this are Commission Junction and LinkShare.

The next type of program we will consider is the PPL or Pay Per Lead program. These programs pay you for sending lead information to an online company. These leads can vary greatly in the amount of information given. They may include only one or two fields such as an email address or zip code. They can also be as in-depth as extensive financial data need for loan or credit card applications. The programs with the highest conversion rates are the ones that require the least amount of personal information. If your site's audience is not prepared to purchase something online, then these programs may work well for you. They tend to convert well on freebie sites such as getBANK.net as well as informational sites. Here are some examples of affiliate networks to get pay per lead programs: PrimaryAds, AzoogleAds, AffiliateFuel, BulletAds.

The third program to be discussed is the CPM or Pay Per Impression program. These programs are best for sites with high traffic levels. It is not recommended that you use these sites alone, because PPS and PPL programs tend to be more profitable. However, CPM programs do offer an incredible chance to increase your site's cash flow when used along with PPS and PPL programs. They are also a great way to diversify your site's income stream. One of the best CPM affiliate networks is FastClick.

The final program is contextual advertising. Almost any site can benefit from contextual advertising. Contextual advertising is a great way to complement your current advertising and to provide an additional source of income. They are also a wonderful way of diversifying your site's income stream. Google AdSense is an excellent contextual advertising network to check out. Usually a site will achieve best results by employing a combination of these various types of affiliate advertising. You must experiment not only with these various programs, but also with individual offers to figure out the best combination for your site.

Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs

Most people have heard of affiliate network marketing and for the most part people do understand what it is and how it works. What people don’t realize is that there are some amazing things happening in the affiliate marketing industry.

“Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs” When affiliate programs first entered the market, most people were a little slow to see their potential. While network marketing had been so huge and the commission structure seemed so much better, affiliate network marketing seemed like too little commission for the effort. It definitely took some time, but soon network marketers started to realize the amazing potential in affiliate marketing and it is now the fastest growing niche in network marketing.

“Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs” or Affiliate marketing programs were basically an abbreviated version of network marketing with faster results. All forms of network marketing involve some level of sales and involve introducing people to a product or service idea. In network marketing it is not enough for the individual to want the product but they have to be so excited about it that they want to get other people interested in it as well.

Looking back over my network marketing years I hate to tally up all the money I lost if the goal had been either get people interested in the product or get them interested in the business. Plenty of people loved my products but so few were interested I the business. Perhaps part of that was my fault because I am not the best network marketer out there and I’m sure I fell short in my delivery a few times.

So I did what many people end up doing in network marketing. I quit. For a long time affiliate marketing didn’t interest me because without evaluating it, it looked just like network marketing. It took me several years to understand the difference between the two.

The issue that frustrated me in network marketing was the core difference in affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing the profit is made whether someone wants to be involved in the business or if they just want the product. It’s about as simple as finding a really cool website that you’re excited about and telling your friends how cool it is and so they go and check it out. Of course you’ll need more people than most of us have friends in order to make a good profit, but the concept is still the same.

A Good Business Made Even Better

Once I began to really understand affiliate marketing and how people were rapidly building fortunes, I was knocked off my socks once again when I discovered a very specific type of affiliate marketing that was blowing the competition away.

“Pay per lead affiliate programs” are by far one of the most phenomenal home based businesses on the net to make money. This is the best of all “I failed network marketing because” concepts.

With “pay per lead affiliate marketing” plans you don’t even have to sell the product anymore. All my excuses have dwindled from “Nobody wants to do the business” to “Nobody likes my product” straight down to nothing.

With the pay per lead affiliate plan if somebody checks it out and they want to join the business then that’s great. If there’s not interested in the business but they want to buy the product then that’s great. If they are just looking and have no real idea about what they want well then that’s great as well because with pay per lead affiliate programs you get paid if all they do is fill out their information.

“Pay per lead affiliate programs” are serious money makers if you join the right one. In fact, pay per lead affiliate programs may eventually make other affiliate programs completely obsolete. The basic foundation of these programs is based on creating multiple streams of income. We have all heard that expression before, but most often we associate it with having more than one business pulling in profit. “Pay per lead affiliate programs” allow you to develop multiple streams of income from one business, one marketing effort, and one website.

What makes this so phenomenal is that you can actually retain these multiple streams of income from just one visitor. Because if Nancy is wandering around out there in cyberspace and she is just looking for a way to bring home a little cash she may pop in on your website and fill out her information. You get paid for that. Two weeks later when Nancy is still wandering around out there she has remembered that she wanted to take a second look at your website and this time she decides she wants to try the product, so you get paid for that sale. Two weeks later she is completely in love with the product, realizes that you got paid twice for her two actions, and now she wants in on this business. Yes, you get paid for that, too.

From one marketing effort you receive three streams of income. Most of the time it probably won’t happen the way that Nancy went about it. The real point is that a person has options when they come to your affiliate website and that equals three streams of income from the same marketing effort. That’s really exciting if you start to realize that some “pay per lead affiliate programs” offer tier payments as well.

Tier Payments

Tier payments are pretty simple as long as you understand network marketing. Tier payments are the financial heart of the affiliate program compensation plan. Once Nancy came back and realized she wanted to be part of the business plan she became your first tier down line. Most affiliate programs include a first tier payment. When Nancy gets her first tier down line, they will become your second tier. The process continues all the way down through. Some affiliate plans pay only through the first or second tier payment while others go to a generous eight or ten tier payment plan.

While the actual percentages of tier payment plans may seem quite nominal, these payments actually add up into significant sums as long as there is activity in the tiers. These tiny percentages add up into even healthier incomes when you consider that pay per lead programs give you three streams of income. You are now earning small percentages on three separate streams of income for up to eighteen people, depending on the tier payment plan.

Why Not Network Marketing?

If affiliate pay per lead programs are so good you may be wondering why not just get involved again in network marketing. After all the commissions in network marketing are much higher than affiliate marketing plans. While this may be true, affiliate marketing plans have several distinct advantages over network marketing.

Affiliate marketing plans are typically inexpensive to join, and in some cases even free. Multi level marketing businesses tend to run much higher just for the right to join their program let alone get into advertising and marketing costs. The costs of some of the better multi level marketing programs can run in the thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars simply to join the program. Prospects who are truly interested in joining find these start up costs rather prohibitive.

Network marketing pays higher commissions, but they only pay commissions. Granted you receive commissions on several tiers, but unlike pay per lead affiliate programs you can not readily develop two or three streams of income from one marketing plan.

Network marketing requires at the very least a retail sale to generate commission. “Pay per lead affiliate programs” only require enough interest in the program or product to fill out some contact information in order to receive payment.

Some people find network marketing plans suit them perfectly and they are capable of running a solid business from these plans. However the majority of new to home business opportunity seekers are finding the pay per lead affiliate network marketing plan something they feel more confident in finding their success. Confidence is a key factor in success. Belief in the ability to build a reasonable income is half of what it takes to be successful in any web based business.

However don’t feel obligated to take my word for it. There is a fabulous website perfect for finding exactly this type of information. Whether you are looking for a specific affiliate program, “pay per lead affiliate program”, or simply want to compare affiliate programs with multi level marketing programs, affiliatepit is a really excellent resource to help you determine what is right for you. I personally found the information on “pay per lead affiliate programs” life changing.