First of all, if you've come this far, we can agree on the fact that you're interested in earning money. Next, you'll need to decide wether you want a way to make a lot of money fast or if you're just looking to get some extra couple of bucks to spend. If you're looking for a lot of money, you can easily turn your attention to another place, because making money on surveys is not a highway to the sweet life. However, it can add a small extra income, especially if located in the US.
How to earn money on surveys
First you need to find companies that want to pay for your honest opinion. If you are from the US, you should have a lot more options than people from outside the US. Being from Norway I found very few who would pay for my opinion, but here are some possible options: http://www.globaltestmarket.com, http://www.triabe.com and http://www.verdifullmening.no for Norwegians exclusively.
Step 2 is simply registering on their websites and going through some questions about yourself to get relevant surveys.
Now you'll just have to wait until they contact you with a survey they want you to look at. In my experience you'll get about 5-6 surveys from each company every month, so the more places you're registered, the more surveys you'll get, and the more money you'll get.
Wait to be credited money to your account.
Why? How does answering surveys get you money?
Surveys mean a lot to a company, as they provide information on how products are recieved and by who they are recieved in this way. However, many of the free online surveys are taken on by less serious people and tend to provide inaccurate or dishonest information for the company, making them useless as the company can't know what to believe. So many companies want to pay good money for people to take surveys, trusting that by paying, their members are serious, honest and spend valuable minutes answering them.
How much can you get?
In the US there's a quite good market for surveys, and I've read that you can in general earn about 0,5-1$ for every minute spent. Outside the US, the rates drop proportionally to the drop in amount of companies willing to pay. In Norway, I generally get about 3$ for half an hour spent. And I am only registered at the 3 companies mentioned above, hence my income from taking surveys is rather low. But if you are from the US, member of about 10-20 companies you could probably get (quick math: 15 companies, 5 surveys from each per month, 15 min per survey, 0,75$ per minute) about 850$ every month. But doing as many surveys as this requires quite a bit of time, and it is in general not possible to just skate through a 15 minute survey in 15 minutes. From the calculation above we can see that to earn 850$ per month, you'll need to spend about 19 hours in a month doing surveys. It's not an insane amount of hours but it's still a lot of work... Frustratingly boring work if you're just in it for the money.
Conclusion
Earning money on surveys depends a lot on where you live. I read dozens of reports on how great and easy it is to make money on surveys, but I soon learned that being a non-US resident greatly reduced my chances. Everywhere I turned, US residency was required. The international survey-companies did not meet the same standards as opinions are apparently a superfluous commodity in Europe and the rest of the non-US world. However, doing online surveys can get you an extra income, depending on how much time you're willing to invest.
Written by DarkM
