Can surveys and other online gigs pay your bills?

No

8 of 49

by Erik Setser

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As the old saying goes, not all that glitters is gold. As an addendum to that though, the brighter the flash, the more likely there's something to hide.

Online surveys most certainly will not pay your bills, except perhaps your Ramen Noodle and Mac 'n' Cheese expenses. Worse still, the more money they claim you can make, the more money you stand to lose. These sites fall into two categories, and in some cases, a single website can fall into both.

On the one side, you have the sites that require an upfront payment and/or a monthly fee to become an advanced member, VIP, gold member or whatever they choose to call it. This will get you the higher paying surveys, after you complete a dozen pages of detailed information about yourself - even though most of your surveys won't pertain to any of it -, if there are any surveys to be had at all. So often, it turns out that there are either no additional surveys offered for upgrading, or they'll claim that your demographics don't qualify you for any VIP offers. Would've been nice to know that ahead of time, huh?

Besides, given how many online money-making offers are scams, it would be nice to see some proof of the product. By that, I mean aside from stock photos, flowery testimonials signed in initials, and obviously fabricated phony bank statements. Let the user test drive what they're going to be getting. Include a contract agreement, binding the website to present the exact same perks and pitfalls that a paying member would get, and the user to purchase a membership - even just for one month - if they choose to cash out their earnings from the trial period. Of course, that won't happen. These companies expect trust but refuse to offer any in return or contractually bind themselves to their claims.

The other category - which again isn't mutually exclusive to the first - are those who require trial offers to be completed. The two most common are trial memberships through stamps.com and freecreditreport.com . However, the fine print on many of these sites, will either obligate the trial member to become a paying member before being eligible for cancellation or they'll end up charging the user a regularly monthly fee quite unexpectedly. No communication will be offered in the meantime, though they'll certainly make themselves known after that first fee is withdrawn.

The cancellation contact information is usually tucked away, and the process ends up being a chore. What this means is that the user ends up losing money on the survey site and instead gets a discount on an online service they probably didn't want anyway.

As far as surveys go, you're actually safer sticking to the absolutely free sites, the ones that really do make their money off of ad space and companies paying for the survey to be done. Trouble is, the money is painfully slow on these and is often presented as points valued at anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 points per dollar to give the feeling that you're earning more than you really are. Still, they're honest about what you get and will pay you when you request it. It's nowhere near enough to pay the bills on, but it's nice to get that check for $20 when you're broke, the gas gauge is down, and you've got 5 more days until payday.

Pyramid schemes, MLM (multi-level marketing) and GPT (get paid today) are as a dog, a canine and a hound; three different names for the same thing. Anybody with a shred of common sense can look at these things and tell they're a load of bull. Think about it. If you're making money off of everybody 6 levels below you and your cut for each member they recruit or product they sell (as though there ever is one!) is 50% of the payment, this money is somehow tripling within the system.

Hey, there's the answer to the economic crisis! No. If you get paid off of everybody within 6 tiers below you, the same applies to each of them. That means that you and 5 other people are each getting a 50% cut of that 6th member's sales. But it also means that people up to 6 levels above you are getting paid off of your earnings. So, you're really just a middle man to pass those earnings up the ladder until it reaches the people who run the system.

The same no-way-no-how regard should also be given to those so-called internet marketing gurus. Though now they've taken to claiming they're just everyday folks who epiphanated all over the internet. They'll boast about how much the products, usually books and DVDs presented through stock photography, are worth on retail to make it appear that you're getting thousands of dollars worth of merchandise for the low price of $197. But, if you go to Barnes and Noble, you'll often find many of these books for between $20 and $40 apiece and that they're in no way affiliated with the jerks in the photographs on the website.

I've not accomplished it yet, but according to testimonials from friends - who I did not meet through any of these programs - you can make money through affiliate marketing sites such as Clickbank as well as pay per click such as Clickforabuck. The former takes a bit of extra work on the part of the user, independently advertising others' products and services (which often requires researching and screening as Clickbank allows just about anybody on there). Clickforabuck exaggerates the actual earnings, but they state this in the membership information page.

Real freelancing opportunities are rare. The valid ones will typically require a very particular skill set, ones that would give a person a great chance of getting a job outside of the home with more stability anyway.

Honestly, the best money I've seen has been right here on Helium. I recently searched for this site on ripoffreport.com. I wasn't suspicious, I just get a laugh out of people's complaints - often stemmed from preconceived suspicions or misunderstandings - about services with a long track record of proven validity. What came up was a journalist who insisted that, because he was a journalist, his articles should have been rated higher. After all, he writes for a living, so there's no way that others who don't are better at it than him! Oh, and also everyone else here is apparently 13 years old for not agreeing with his point of view or liking his style of writing. Anyway, laugh time is over; let me get back to the point.

One of the rebuttals came from a Helium member whose name I don't recall. He said that he has about 1900 active articles, and his ad revenue from those comes to anywhere from $400 to $700 a month. This still isn't enough to pay the bills, but it would pay the rent or mortgage for a lot of people. Of course, this doesn't mean that if you have 190 articles, you're going to earn between $40 and $70 a month. You could earn more or less depending on the continued popularity of the topics on which you write as compared to those of the aforementioned member. Still, we could all use an extra $50 a month (Woohoo, free broadband!), to be cashed out whenever we please. Not to mention, you could stop writing for a whole year and, as long as you continue rating on a regular basis, that money will keep coming in. It's honest residual income.

Learn more about this author, Erik Setser.
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