What are Paid Surveys?

Answer:

Paid surveys are performed by various market research firms. Large companies spend billions of dollars a year on advertising. Market research firms are hired to test their ads and products or do research so that they know the best way to advertise to certain markets and which products are favored by customers. These market research companies have large groups of people they use to conduct these studies. They do their research by compensating people to test their products, to mystery shop and to take paid surveys.

Most of these paid surveys pay a small amount of money, usually between $3 and $15, and take about ten to twenty minutes to complete. Some people can make a significant amount of money by simply taking paid surveys.

Paid surveys are most often taken online, or less frequently through the mail or in person. Many websites exist where one can input certain characteristics about themselves and be emailed revalent surveys which are filled out for money.

Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Mystery Shopping is a (market) research method that is used in order to analyse the quality of consumers' experiences when carrying out a particular transaction. Usually a researcher will disguise himself as a consumer and will access a certain service that is offered. Subsequently the researcher will rate the quality of the shopping experience, for example whether staff was friendly, the information provided was sufficient for a purchasing decision and so on.

The method has it origins in the 1940's and was originally intended as a mechanism to control employer's integrity. Tools used for Mystery Shopping assessments can range from simple questionnaires to complete audio and video recordings. With the Internet opportunities for application of this method have greatly increased.

The Mystery Shopping industry had an estimated value of nearly $600 million in the United States in 2004, according to a 2005 market size report commissioned by the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA). Companies that participated in the Report experienced an average growth of 11.1 percent from 2003 to 2004 and the average growth in the number of shops during that period was 12.2 percent. The Report estimates more than 8.1 million mystery shops were conducted in 2004. The Report represents the first attempt to quantify the size of the mystery shopping industry.

Marketing schemes have emerged in the past several years attempting to lure unsuspecting consumers into paying money in order to learn how to become a mystery shopper. What most people don't know, is that all the information necessary to become a mystery shopper is widely avialable on the internet.

Paid surveys the truth and what you need to know

Hello,


Several years ago I was injured in an on the job accident and had to collect disability, I noticed all of the hype about paid surveys while searching for a way to supplement my meager income online.
While searching for companies that would compensate me for my effort I decided to start with the search engines.
I used every conceivable phrase imaginable using the search engines (paid-to, paid-survey, paid opinions, paid survey database, free paid surveys, online surveys, free surveys etc.) to try to find a list of companies that would actually pay me well enough to help me pay the bills working online.

I didn’t want to pay for a membership to a survey database, although, that certainly looked like a more expedient way of finding a large catalog of companies to register with, but I can be pretty stubborn when it comes to things like that so I decided that I would do all of the research on my own and compile a database.

Within a couple of months I was making money but not nearly the amount that some of the database websites had promised.
I first signed up with NPD, Greenfield Online, Pinecone, Synovate, Lightspeed and SurveySpot et cetera. These companies paid exactly what they promised but you have to look at the process as just that, a process. I have found it to be a three tiered process.

First is the registration, when you fill in the signup form with as much personal data as is required, this helps the company to identify the surveys you may qualify for in the future.
Second, you must wait for an invitation which will usually arrive within a month after signup, the best exception is NFO Mysurvey, they send you a survey the next day.

This process is an important one; this is where you will be informed of the approximant length of the survey and most importantly the reward you will receive if you are able to complete it. If you choose to reply to the invitation it will most likely take you to a brief questionnaire that will confirm you meet the criteria set by the company to start the survey.

Third is simply filling in the survey, this might seem arduous to some but I myself enjoy it, maybe it’s that I buy into the thought process that I’m not only making a little bit of extra cash but that I’m effecting the future marketplace. Either way, this is my favorite part of the process.

The real key to turning this into something more than a passing whim is to take it for what it is. Your average survey will pay you about $3 and take you about twelve minutes to complete, not bad if you think about it!

Here’s the secret, you have to find hundreds of quality companies and register with every one of them, and this gets your profile into enough databases to allow you to be selective when invitations arrive.
Just last week I finished a bulletin board discussion and received $100.00 in compensation for about an hour and a half of my time. While I can’t divulge what company it was that paid me I can tell you it’s an easily recognizable name in the industry. Another company paid me $40.00 for a twenty minute survey involving a subject that I am particularly qualified for and I have completed countless surveys for $10 to $15.This is not something the average person who gets involved in this should expect.


I take this very seriously and spend a great deal of time keeping me profiles updated to make sure these companies have all of my prudent information. So you see it’s really all about information and sheer number of these companies who have you and your profile on file in their database, so when their clients needs require folks that meet your specific qualifications you get the opportunity to be rewarded.

Since I started this endeavor more than three years ago I have made close to $50,000, this is not something you should expect to achieve but if I did it participating in and completing online and telephone surveys, online and at site focus and discussion groups, product testing, taste testing, you name it, then you might be able to as well if you put the time in and believe me it takes a great deal of it if your as serious as I am.

I have taken everything that I learned during this time and started my own website. Not a paid survey database but a free one.
I update it everyday and have laid it out in an easy to understand way that’s also easy to navigate.

Please take a look: http://www.keysheet.com