How to Make Money with Free Online Surveys Step 2 of 3

By Unknown - Friday, August 8, 2014 - 2 Comments

Method 2 of 3: Find Legitimate Survey Sites

1
Get searching, but be wary. There are many legitimate survey companies out there, and money to be made. Which, of course, means that there will be unscrupulous people out there as well, looking to nab some dollars without working for it. Here's how to steer clear of scammers:
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Never pay up front. Some companies will ask you to pay a small fee up-front for access to survey lists, which is absolutely unnecessary. Check Terms and Conditions, FAQs, or any other area on a survey company’s page containing information on how the company operates. (If such information is hard or impossible to locate, consider it a red flag and cross that site off your list.)

3
Make sure you will be paid in cash. There are tons of surveys on the internet that can be completed for cash (or points that you exchange for cash), but some only pay in gift cards or enter you into a sweepstakes.
- Some sites offer a combination of these, which may or may not be to your benefit. Be sure you know exactly how you will be rewarded by checking a sites FAQs,Terms and Conditions, etc.
- Some companies offer prizes or products, or let you accrue points that you can trade in for such. Many of these won’t be as useful or valuable to you as cash, but occasionally you will get lucky. Just be sure to price-hunt any items before accepting them (or investing valuable energy into trying to earn them).
- Get fine-print savvy. Some websites will say you won an Xbox360 or a new laptop, for example, but if you look carefully, you’ll usually find an asterisk near the "you won" part. Be especially wary of weasel words, like "you may have already won," or "new laptop is based on a purchase of gummy bears worth $5,000 or more." Don't fall into these sorts of traps; they're ridiculously difficult and not worth it.
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Read the Privacy Policy. It is usually found at the bottom of a site’s homepage. This is important: who will your information be shared with? Always look for a statement along the lines of: “Email addresses given to our company will never be sold, given away, or shared with any third parties without your consent.” When you read those, think to yourself if there's anything in the language that would let them sell their mailing list.

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Check for age restrictions. Online surveys can be a great way for teens to make pocket money, but not all sites allow it. (Many allow it if parental permission is given.)
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Look for a minimum payment amount. Most sites won’t allow you to cash in until you have accrued a certain amount of money, which reduces the number of transactions they have to process (and, of course, gets people to invest more in the site).
- Make sure the amount required is fair before diving in—twenty dollars is common—and, more importantly, if you don’t like a site and plan to cash out soon, make sure to time it so that you don’t have to do a lot more surveys to unlock your cash.

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Look for sites that have good ratings. Finding a reputable survey-site aggregator (such as GetPaidSurveys or or BigSpot) that allows members to rank the companies they’ve worked with is a good way to do this. Don’t take any stock in reviews or testimonials that are self-posted by survey sites.