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I write this article by speaking from experience, over the past several years I have participated in many online survey web sites that start by giving you a certain amount of money for signing up and then pay you for each completed survey. The problem with many of these sites is that you have to take a small survey to see if you even qualify to take the real survey, and this can waste about 5 minutes of your time just to see if you can take the actual survey.
By the time you actually are allowed to take the real survey you can find the real survey’s take between 30 and 45 minutes for some of them and at best pay you between one and three dollars for each survey you take. Many pay 50 cents on average for a fifteen minute survey.
If you consider this then you can actually make money taking online surveys, but you will average about one to two dollars per hour at best and you will qualify for less and less surveys the more you take as many of them require that you haven’t taken previous surveys in the same category for three months or more.
This makes it highly unlikely you will make enough money to pay anything but the lowest bill that costs around thirty dollars per month or less from taking surveys online. There are much better ways to make money online that can earn you around three dollars an hour that are much more rewarding than taking surveys.
That said, there are a few rare sites that offer really good surveys and give better rewards, some give you credits and you can exchange these for free gifts. I have received some free used BlockBuster DVD’s for taking surveys, so instead of cash I might have gotten fifteen dollars worth of free movies in one month.
But these online survey sites are rare and hard to find and sign up for at best, most of the survey sites are scams that require survey only to lead you to try and purchase a product in the end. My advice is to save your time and invest in another online pursuit, there are other ways to make money with the Internet at home that have a better payout ratio for your time spent.
Some sites that pay you for reading and clicking on email links also pay so little that it takes months to merely earn a few dollars, from my own experience trying to find a way to make money online, blogging is still the best way to earn a small side income online and you can do it with less hours and a better payout than surveys or clicking on emails online.
-Justin Germino