Favorite Surveys

Okay, I wish I’d followed some of these tips before I’d started before doing some of the paid offers that I’ve done, but now that I’ve received a couple of telemarketing calls, I’m passing them on to you! I really didn’t think I’d actually get any phone calls since email is cheaper and easier, but I guess some marketers are pretty aggressive.

So the first tip is before you do anything else, set up a new email address. You don’t want all the surveys and offers and new junk mail you’ll be getting competing with your regular email. If you set up your new email account with Google’s Gmail, you can then set up various labels to keep track of all the different sites you are signed up with. I set up a new label for each survey site that I join and then I also have labels noting what type of site it is, i.e. whether it is “online surveys” or “get paid to complete offers”

Once you have your new email address, sign up for a free private phone number voicemail service with PrivatePhone.com. The great thing about privatephone.com is that you get a phone number with your actual area code, and you’ll need the right area code to complete offers that require a phone number.

I’ve actually considered opening up a PO Box too for the junk mail, but then I decided I didn’t actually want to drive to the post office just to throw mail away

Right now, SendEarnings is one of my favorite sites. While the site does have some surveys, it is mostly for doing offers. I’ve already earned over $10 this week by completing free offers.  SendEarnings pays out on all kinds of offers — some of them are totally free and require you to just fill out some information and provide your email address and some fo them require you to sign up for free trials using your credit card.

Surveys usually pay a few dollars. Free Paid Offers that don’t require a credit card pay anywhere between .50 and $3.00 per offer. So far all the free offers I’ve done have been credited within minutes (amazing!) or within a day or two.

Paid offers for which you need to enter a credit card number pay between $4.00 and $15, with most of them offering $10. Most of the offers that require a credit card are free trials so as long as you CANCEL the trial before the deadline, you won’t be charged anything, and of course some of the offers are quite good so you might actually just want to keep them. I haven’t done any offers yet that require a credit card and I probably won’t as it looks like you can easily hit the pay-out minimum without doing any of them. But again, if you want more money and don’t mind sharing credit card info (you can always use the Paypal virtual card or get a preloaded MasterCard or Visa giftcard from the Mall), you’ll definitely make more dough.

They also do paid emails (.05 each) and have lots of shopping offers. Payout Minimum is $40 and they pay by cheque.

You can sign up for SendEarnings here. 

Nielsen/NetRatings is owned by the same company that does the tv ratings, so if you’ve ever wanted to be a member of the “Nielsen Family” this may be the closest you get to that experience, since the people who rate tv shows are all recruited by personal invitation.  I was invited to join them with my TiVo data a couple of years ago and that was a nice low impact experience. I never got any junk mail or telemarketing calls from them, so I’m pretty comfortable supporting their online market research as well.

Once you register to join the Nielsen/NetRatings panel, you need to download their software and then it just runs in the background on your computer, collecting data about how you surf the internet. They use that information for their statistics gathering as well as for determining what kind of online surveys they should send you.

For every completed survey that you turn in, you get entries in different sweepstakes and promotions.  The chances of actually winning prizes are supposed to be quite good because the group of entrants for any individual prize is reasonably small.

Nielsen/NetRatings takes the data that they collect from their software and uses to to provide meaningful information about how regular people use the web on a day to day basis, what kinds of things interest us, the content that actually attracts users and how we interact with the internet. All kinds of large companies rely on Nielsen/NetRatings data to make decisions on how to shape their internet presence and you’ll often see them quoted in newspapers or at places like CNN and MSN.  And now you can register for the Nielsen//NetRatings panel and help influence the future of the Web too (and hopefully win some very cool prizes along the way!)

You can join the Nielsen/NetRatings Panel Right Now. 

I’ve recently started doing the “Get Paid To” do surveys and read emails thing and I thought I’d set up this site to share my experiences with the different online survey companies. I’ll be posting up reviews and linking to new sites as I find them and of course warning about any sites that look like scams as I stumble across them. Hope you’ll stick around and participate.

I’ve also done some mystery shopping and merchandising work so I’ll be posting some hints and tips about how to get those types of jobs and what the work is like too.

And of course, if I come across any great deals or freebies, I’ll definitely be sharing them!