by Max Lehmann

Created on: September 24, 2010   Last Updated: September 25, 2010

There are a huge number of opportunities online, many focused on making money for participants. Sites such as Helium or Hubpages pay for quality original content, but for the less creative individuals a popular alternative is to try to make money form answering surveys.

Survey companies exist because real life data about individuals is valuable. Companies want to track their customers through loyalty schemes but they also want to know more about the habits of those they haven't attracted or who aren't yet loyal to their brand. By getting useful data the companies can reduce their advertising spend and target the people they want to attract more easily. This data can only be collected by engaging the every day person and finding out what they think about all manner of topics. Data may also be used to fuel news stories, or government analysis, but the top buyers are businesses. Sometimes a survey will want you to fulfill specific criteria, but the whole point is that if you are the right type of person, they want to extract your honest thoughts and understand your day to day habits. Often the best way to get this information is to pay for it, and the companies that run the surveys earn big bucks, while passing on some of their profit to those who fill in the surveys in order to entice them in.

The most common kind of surveys around these days involve you signing up for an account with the survey provider and giving them a lot of data about yourself so they know which surveys to target you with. Some offer more advanced feedback opportunities and may get their users involved in focus groups or diary-keeping from time to time. After that it's a case of sitting back and waiting for alerts that let you know there is a new opportunity to give feedback.

Many sites advertise to grow their user base, and their call to action often promises vast sums. What are the risks? Some risks are outlined below:

- You need to be aware of how your information is being used. Usually the survey is after quantitative data, that is, they want to know what percentage of people agree with each option in their questions, but sometimes they want more qualitative data. This is more difficult for them to analyse but more valuable because it gives very individualistic responses. The latter takes them longer to analyse, but also takes longer for you to provide because instead of checking boxes you're writing whole paragraphs. Giving away this information is not only time consuming, it's really quite

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