Things That Don't Work: Part 1: Online Surveys

“Things that don’t work” part 1: Online Surveys

Online surveys sound good at first. The ads that you see for surveys can actually sound enticing: “Make $500 a week or more from home!” Well I will not say that it is impossible – but I will admit that I am just not willing to do it.
I joined 6-7 survey sites last year and had little success. Granted, I did not invest a lot of time in them. But one site that I did pay particular attention to was a disaster. I took some 31 surveys from this site and was disqualified 26 times. The worst part is that I had to answer 5-10 questions before they DQ’d me. And it was usually the same 5-10 questions every time. You would think that since they took the time and effort to set up web pages that took all my personal info in registering for the site – that they could have also asked these same 5-10 qualifying questions and stored the data in a profile. No, you had to go through the same interrogation for each survey and invest 5-10 minutes in simply qualifying!

After a couple weeks I decided to donate the $2.70 that I had “earned” from the site – and move on to something else.
To take a further examination into online surveys, let us consider this scenario. Say a survey site is offering $5 per survey taken (very liberal figure) and that you can crank out 4 in one hour. That would mean that you would need to use 25 hours each week to earn the $500. That is $20/hour – not bad money at all.

If a person has 3-4 hours a day that they are willing to spend answering survey questions – then yes, a nice bit of supplemental income will be theirs every month. If this is you – and its what you like – and you see a nice supplemental check every month – then God bless you.

For me however, it is only an hourly wage – and I already have one of those based on my salary. The time that is needed to actually see an income from taking surveys is fixed. There is no residual. No spillover. It is finite. It is done. It flies in the face of the basic concept of network marketing, internet marketing, social networking and all else.

Picture 2 people w/ a real desire to begin making money from home and/or starting a home-based business. Both people have an extra 3 hours a day during the week and 5 hours on the weekend to spend for the specific purpose of earning extra income. They will each have 20 hours a week to spend on their efforts. Fred spends his 20 hours diligently answering surveys. Sally spends her time learning about internet marketing, social networking, internet advertising, etc. After a week – Fred will probably have more money in his/her PayPal account than Sally does, because he is actually getting paid for the work he does – while Sally is studying, practicing and experimenting. The same will be true after week 2 and week 3 and maybe even weeks 4 and 5. After a while though, if Sally has found a niche and is expending consistent and focused efforts on growing her list of contacts, permission lists and her web presence – then her Paypal account is going to fly right on past Fred’s. It may take weeks – it may take months – but at some point the foundation that she has laid for her future home business will result in ongoing residual income. Fred’s surveys will never see this.

If you are one who is happy with the extra income you gain from taking online surveys – I am happy for you and don’t want to discourage you, or rain on your parade, etc. But I do have to tell you that if you could take that 2, 3 or 4 hours a day and use it to promote yourself, your product, your business or opportunity, and do so in a consistent and targeted manner – then you will be light years ahead of where you will be by your hourly job of answering online surveys.

My internet marketing mentor, Larry Brauner, says it best:

"Survey sites, get paid to read e-mails, and get paid to do whatever else sites appeal to people with lots of time and no money. The best way to make money is to refer people to products and services that they really need and are fairly priced. That's a win win."

Coming up… “Things that don’t work” part II: “Lack of Focus”