How Too Avoid Paid Survey Scams

If you search for "paid surveys" with a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or even MSN will give you a few million results to search through. More than likely you have arrived at this article by searching in this way. These of these offers do look very suspicious.

Get paid to take surveys! Earn up to $250/hr for giving your opinion! Make thousands of dollars a month taking paid surveys in your spare time!

Ads like these are what has everyone asking, "Are paid surveys real?". Just look on any major website or even in your email and chances are you will see someone offering lots of money to take paid surveys online. Is it a scam?

The answer to this question is no. Paid surveys are not a scam. You really can get paid to take online paid surveys. But, finding a legitimate source for paid surveys can be discouraging. There are several sites that disguise themselves as paid surveys in order to get your personal information or get you to join other programs they affiliate with. It's sites like these that give paid surveys a bad name. So how do you tell the real paid surveys from the fakes?

Before I answer this question let me give you a brief summary of what a paid survey is and why they are conducted.

A paid survey is a study conducted by a market research firm in order to gather information about a specific product or advertisement. Major companies spend billions of dollars every year on advertising. They want you to recognize their products. In order to find out how the public feels about a product they will hire a market research firm to gather information from the public. One of the ways a market research firm gathers information is through surveys. These market research companies are paid alot of money for this research. So in return for your participation in an online survey each participant will be compensated. Paid surveys are not the only form of market research. There are also mystery shops, product tests, and focus groups.

Now that you know what a paid survey is you need to know what a paid survey isn't. A paid survey is NOT something that compensates you for purcashing something. A paid survey is NOT something that pays you to sign up for product trial offers. If you see a banner or text ad that says something like, "Pizza vs Cheesburgers. Take this survey and get a free ipod", that is NOT a paid survey. You will never have to pay a fee or complete any type of offers to take a real paid survey.

So how do you avoid paid survey scams? The easiest way is to find a directory of paid surveys. Read reviews and forum posts of what people have to say about each company. There are two types of directories, paid memberships and free directories. A good free directory will provide all of the information that a paid membership does, saving you $40. From these directories you can join hundreds of paid survey panels.

There are thousands of legitimate paid survey memberships you can join. But there are only about 25 or so that send paid surveys daily and weekly. The ones I find better known paid surveys are NFO My Survey, Opinion Outpost, Global Test Market, and American Consumer Opinion.

Learn The Secrets To Get Paid For Surveys Starting Now

Paid Surveys are massively popular now a days to earning some money on the side. But how do you actually get paid for surveys? Well the first step is to get invited into a survey or focus group. Focus groups are a group of people who are invited to take part in a short session to discuss whatever topic is being talked about and they generally pay better than paid surveys. So if you want to get paid for surveys, you have to first find out a way to be invited to take part ahead of all the other applicants. So this is what can you do to make it happen to get paid for surveys?

Free Paid Survey directories

The first option you could take to get paid for surveys, would be searching for all the best free paid surveys listings on the internet. Just do what everyone else does and search on Google or yahoo for "free paid surveys". This should bring up a fair few results and it should take you sometime to apply to each one of these sites. Generally the sites that you find, will already be flooded with applicants, however you want to give yourself a chance to take part in as many paid surveys as possible, so make sure you do this first.

Join a Paid Survey Directory

If you want to give yourself the best chance to get paid for surveys, than joining as a member at one of the many paid survey directories on the internet will do this for you. When you become a member at one of these sites, you will be revealed to a myriad of potential paid survey providers, depending on the amount of listings in their database. Make sure you first check to see the size of their listing before you join up.

These sites also provide tons of information on each of their tables or listings and also tell you which is the best to the worst paid survey site. They are generally quite cheap to join and you are more than likely going to make the cost of your membership up within the first week anyway. The question you have to ask yourself is "do I want to start to get paid for surveys right now?" because if you do then you really need to join one of these sites which will give you the best opportunity to do so, as well as save you a great deal of time in the process.