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No, no, no, no, you can't make a living doing paid surveys. Sure, you'll see tons of adverts telling you it's possible, and you'll be offered reams of material to encourage you to buy guaranteed listings of companies that pay, but unless you have a unique and secret "in" you'll never be offered enough surveys that pay enough to earn more than a pittance. The industry is a lesson in bad business ethics as it's rare to find anyone who has made significant money consistently.

The sign up process often gets your account started with a $5 deposit, but thereafter you'll likely find that even this is almost impossible to cash because of the threshold payment policy that can be as high as $50. Even some of the best known companies like Ipsos Reid and Angus Read make it very difficult to collect. The most outrageous are the companies that pay you to read emails. Emails earn anything from .5 to 3 cents, but if the minimum payout is $30 the math itself suggests you'd have to be crazy to sign up. Consider how many emails you could read in an hour if there was a steady flow sent to you, at even 3 cents each, and you'll probably find you still can't cover the electricity costs to run your computer.

Most people come to their senses after only a few weeks chasing the dream. The vast majority of companies offer entry into their sweepstake as the only reward for up to 30 minutes answering mundane and boring questions, many of which can't possibly provide useful answers. Quarterly draws for a $5000 prize is quite common among the rewards offered for half an hour of your time. Essentially you are encouraged to give these companies half an hour of your time for absolutely nothing.

No doubt there's money in the system, but the odds are so extremely stacked against the panelist, that the only winner is the survey company itself, since it has been hired to conduct the market research. It's interesting to find different companies offering the same survey, one offering $2 while another offers only a ticket for the next draw. You must know that even the one offering cash is making much more than $2 for every survey completed.

It's possible to earn a few bucks though, but you're never going to get rich. Bail from surveys that only offer sweepstake tickets, especially if they take more than 5 minutes to complete; cancel subscriptions to any companies that eliminate you after you've virtually completed a paying survey; and do the same for any that tell you after a while that they've already received sufficient responses. Chances are that your survey data has in fact been accepted but the company has simply made off with your money.

By all means become a survey panelist, but complete only those from trusted companies, and only when cash is on the line. This will save you from hours of frustration, and in the worst case beg for money on the street corner. You'll make a lot more money doing that for an hour that you'll likely make completing surveys.

Learn more about this author, Ian Buchanan.
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