Paid Surveys: Take Free Paid Online Surveys, Paid Focus Groups

Can you really make $3,000 a month filling out surveys? The answer is no, yes, and …it depends.

How no? Well, look at the math. The average paid survey pays $10 to $25. If you only filled out $25 surveys, you would need to fill out 120 surveys a month or 4 per day. Or 10 $10 surveys per day. Or some combination in-between. Generally the availability and the qualifying works against your achieving that by restricting the number of surveys and the target population.

There are not always that many paid surveys available, looking for takers. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. At any given time the sheer volume of surveys that pay in cash is not unlimited. So you may be ready willing and able, but there may not be enough surveys in your inbox to generate the volumes you would need.

And when there are more than enough paid surveys, there may not be enough aimed at the ‘valued opinion niche’ that you occupy. Some surveys are aimed at stay-at-home housewives with kids. Some are aimed at men over 60. Others are aimed at unmarried young people between the ages of 18 and 35. Still others will specify residents of Northern California. Obviously you cannot qualify for all. So while the sheer volume of available surveys may be adequate, your personal situation and demographics may prevent you from qualifying for enough of them to make $3,000 a month.

In fact, most survey takers report that while it is relatively easy to make $500 to $1,000 a month taking paid surveys, making any more than that is problematic. And so, on that basis, the answer to the $3,000 question is no.

How yes? The answer is to expand your concept and vision of what is involved. Go beyond the narrow definition of paid online surveys into the larger world of varied activities with similar results. Activities that put cash in your pocket without the necessity of you having to show up for a regular job.

The first thing to add is participating in focus groups. These are informal discussion groups, put together by the same agencies that send out paid surveys, with the purpose of discussing how you feel about some area of interest to marketers. You meet physically or via an Internet chat room type of connection and kick a subject around. One person’s answer sparks another’s comment while the moderator takes notes and records the session.

A subject might be, “How do you decide which laundry detergent to buy?” There is no single answer. Different people buy different products at different times for varying reasons. These reasons and their thinking at the moment is extremely interesting to whomever is running the ad campaign for a brand of washday detergent. Focus group participants get paid more, generally $50 to $250, depending on the subject and length of time required.

Then there are activities like mystery shopping, mystery restaurant guests, even mystery golfers. In these you can get paid to try something out, as though you were any other customer. Then you give a detailed evaluation of the experience to the marketing people who want to improve the experience for their paying customers.

Add to that similar paid activities for going to the movies, attending amusement parks, getting paid for driving your car with an advertisement on it… the list goes on. When you include and add up the income potential of all of these and similar activities, the answer becomes Yes, you can make $3,000 per month in cumulative income streams. This is especially true if you include the value of products and services received for free, just to try them out and report on your experiences.

And lastly, How, “it depends?” The amount of income you can really make depends on how you think about it and how diligently you work at it. If you define the idea of taking paid surveys to include similar activities to make money, the amount you can make at it goes up considerably. And, if you really work at it, perhaps $3,000 a month is not out of reach.

Jorge Chavez is an experienced business analyst, accountant and internet entrepreneur. Learn more about ranking and comparing paid survey companies to pick the best one. See four months of comparative rankings of the top 20 paid survey programs plus paid to shop programs compared at this link: Paid Survey Review

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