Paid Surveys Online - An easy way to make money online?

Paid surveys are being promoted as an easy way to make money online. Some ads promise you up to $250 per hour for taking paid surveys. Are they realistic? Can one really expect to earn that much money from online paid surveys? Let us find out the answers to these questions.

Such advertisements are usually put up by paid survey database companies like Surveyscout. They charge you for giving access to a database of market research companies, often in the range of $30 to $60. They typically have 400 to 500 survey companies in their database.

Is it worth paying these companies to get access to such a database? Whatever information you get from these companies, you can get for free on the internet on many free online survey sites. Secondly, these survey database companies do not send any surveys by themselves, and you have to join each market research company in their database individually to get any surveys. In addition, most of the survey companies in their databases are good for nothing. Only about 40 to 50 survey companies are really worth joining.

What does this mean? If you are planning to try online surveys, you never have to pay anyone. You can get the list of the best survey companies for free on the internet. You can join them and get started.

Now let us take a closer look at on the rewards offered by paid online surveys. Survey companies can be divided into those which reward you with cash for each survey, those that give you points which can be redeemed for cash, and those which enter you into sweepstakes or prizedraws.

Survey companies that pay cash give $1 to $20 or more per online survey depending on many factors. This group includes many of the best survey sites like American Consumer Opinion Panel, Surveysavvy, Ciao Surveys, Greenfield online(Gozing) and Pinecone Research. You can expect to get 1 to 4 surveys per month from each site.

Surveys that reward you with points let you accumulate reward points which you can later redeem for cash or gifts. Some of the most reputed market research companies like Globaltestmarket, Opinion Outpost, NFO Mysurvey and Lightspeed Research reward you in this way.

Yet other companies enter you into draws for cash or gifts as reward for taking surveys. Although many people don't like this form of reward system, your chances of getting the prize is quite good as the pool to select the prize winners is usually small. Some good survey companies that follow this reward system are Synovate, NPD Research, NOP World (Surveys.com), ECN Research and Nielsen Netratings.

Another important factor which determines how much you can earn from online surveys is your profile, particularly your country. Generally residents of the USA and Canada can expect to make more money from paid surveys, as there are more market research companies operating in these countries. Also they get more frequent surveys. However, participants from other countries can also hope to make some good extra money from paid online surveys.

All said and done, the maximum earnings an average person can expect from doing paid surveys is not more than $200 to $300 per month. This can be a good source of extra income for some people. But the claims that paid surveys can make you rich or replace your real job are largely unfounded. Hence, it is always best to stay with free paid surveys.

About the author:
Shaj M is the owner and webmaster of the free survey resources site http://www.internetpaidsurveys.com. The site has separate sections for USA, Canada, UK, Australia and rest of the World, each of which reviews free paid surveys for that particular country. For example, the USA Surveys section features more than 50 free survey companies accepting members form the USA.

How To Make Money Online Without A Website

You don't need to have a website to make money on the Internet. Here is a proven strategy to make money online without a website:

Step 1: Find Affiliate Product

Find a product to promote where you make good commission on each sale. Generally, you will get the biggest commissions on digital products. Digital products are defined as something that is downloaded directly to a customer's computer after purchasing, like electronic books or software.

Since there is no extra cost per unit, no inventory and no shipping, the commissions are much greater than on regular "physical" goods. The most common commission on digital products is 50%. The best place to find such products is Clickbank.com.

Sign up as a reseller (also called affiliate) for a product that looks the most appealing to you. After you sign up, you will get a unique affiliate link where you need to send people to purchase the product.

Your affiliate link will have a special code that will tell the product owner that it's you who referred the customer. The affiliate link code will allow your commissions to be tracked correctly and assigned to you.

Step 2: Get Domain Name

Get a domain name to redirect to your affiliate link. A domain name is a .COM name (like yourproduct.com). You can get it for under $9 at GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy.com will allow you to redirect your domain name to your affiliate link at no extra cost.

So when someone types in your .COM domain in their browser, it will go to your affiliate link. The visitor will see the website with the product you promote, and the commissions will be tracked correctly.

The reason why you need a domain name is that it's memorable and it makes you look more trustworthy. Affiliate links tend to be too long and arouse suspicion. For example, most people would rather click on the link bestwidgets.com as opposed to abcwidgets.com?reseller=john

A domain name will make your affiliate link look like it's your own website. So basically, you will have a product to promote and a website to send people to and get commissions - without really having your own website.

Step 3: Drive Traffic

In order to make sales, you need to get visitors to your domain name (which will forward them to the website of the product that you resell). You can pay for advertising and hope that your profit will be greater than advertising cost, or you can use free ways to generate traffic.

The most effective way to get free targeted visitors to your domain name is by writing and submitting articles. You can write short articles on the topic related to the product that you promote. At the end of the article, you include your author bio and your domain name link.

You will then submit your articles to various websites, and allow them to publish your articles as long as your link is included. Your articles will get published in many places on the Internet, and will be advertising your affiliate link at no cost to you whatsoever. People will read your articles, like what you have to say and click on your domain name link ready to buy.

Once you start getting regular sales from your articles, you can go back to step 1 and find another product to promote using this strategy. After a while, you will build up a nice source of Internet income - without even having a website.