Online surveys can make you money, but what are online surveys? They are basically questionnaires that businesses, governments and educational facilities put out to get feedback on a range of issues. How can they make you money? Businesses, governments etc will pay you for your time to find out your opinions and feedback. Some pay ok, but some pay very little. 

How do you start? Get yourself a new email address just for surveys, like Gmail. They will email you when there is a new survey and you don’t want that clogging your normal email. Then, you need to sign up to one or more of the many survey companies. It helps if you fill in your profile, so that will help them match surveys, but that depends on how much info your willing to share. The people running the surveys are looking for a certain cross section of people. So even if you fit the bill, if they have say 100 spots for middle aged males from your area and when you do the survey they have already have 100 responses from them, then the quota will be full and you won’t be able to do that survey.

Some of the links below are affiliate links, so if you sign up and start doing surveys I will receive a small incentive. This will help me keep this site going. 

One important thing with all surveys, if you do them honestly, then you will be ok. If you go through as fast as you can and just tick boxes at random, they will close your account. 

I have roughly worked out how much you money you get per hour of you doing surveys. (ie 1 survey estimated 20 mins pays $3, so that if you do 3, that’s 1 hour of effort, so  that’s $9 an hour). Some survey sites are pretty fixed in how much they pay per hour, others fluctuate quite a bit. What I have done is I focus on the surveys that pay the most, then work my way down the list. I’d much rather do a survey that pays $5 for a 30 min survey, than spend 30 mins and earn $2. So that’s what you should aim for. There are reports of some being not paying out or taking a very long time. I’ll only put on reputable sites.

Depending on the survey website, they pay either into your bank account, into your PayPal account or you can choose gift vouchers for places like movie cinemas, grocery stores, department stores etc. Now all businesses have their ups and downs with service and support. You read reviews of some survey sites and some same they awesome and others , so even for the sites below that I have used and found ok, I would not leave large amounts of rewards in your account just in case. 

While doing these won’t make you rich, it’s an easy, quick and fun way to bring in some extra cash. For me over the last few months, I averaged around $3 a day. Some days I did surveys, others I didn’t. So $3 a day doesn’t sound like much, but I only did it when I had some free time and over 3 months I had around $300 extra for Christmas.