The first time ‘paid surveys’ was typed into a search engine was after market research companies had started expanding onto the internet. At some stage someone had previously seen that it was possible to make money from taking surveys online and decided to stick the two words together in a search engine.

The motivation behind this phrase comes from the idea that anyone can sit at home answering questions and giving opinions to market research companies in return for payment. For helping companies improve their products and services they are willing to pay people.

‘Paid Surveys’ are described as: A series of questions from market research companies that offer cash rewards in return for personal views and opinions.

Quite simply, people want money and businesses want consumer opinion. It’s a good match and it’s why so many websites exist when doing a ‘survey’ related web search.

There are 5 types of site that will come up in a ‘paid surveys’ search. Knowing which to choose from can save a lot of time and effort so here are the kinds of site you can expect:

Survey list or Directory: (Great)

This kind of site has a useful list of the most popular survey sites on the web. Each survey site listed has descriptions and details of payment, rewards, minimum age and country of availability. The best ones make it easy to choose your country of residence and reward type. This type of site is free to access requiring no initial email sign-up.

Market research company websites or Survey sites: (Good)

These are the sites where the survey questionnaires are taken and from where the cash rewards are given. These won’t appear very often in search results and deciding on which ones to choose that reward cash could take a long time to research. Survey lists or directories exist for this reason to take the effort out of manual searches.

Email sign-up survey list or Login entry directory: (Not so good)

These sites require that an email address and personal details be entered on the front page to view what is otherwise freely available survey information. To avoid potential spam it may be better to use a free survey list or directory for truly free information.

Sales pages asking for money for survey ‘secrets’: (Bad)

Many sites like this exist on the web. They are often easy to spot as they offer the chance to earn unrealistic huge amounts of money from surveys. The pages are usually quite long with different sizes of convincing bold text tempting with large rewards. All they ask for is payment for these ‘secrets’, some of which I am writing right now! After reading this article you are armed with the knowledge to find this stuff out for free.

Make your own surveys: (Not relevant)

This type of site allows anyone to create their own survey for free on any subject to give to friends and contacts.

Some of the ’paid’ part of the searches will be referring not just to cash but to other rewards. ‘Paid’ may also mean high street vouchers, online vouchers, entry into cash prize draws, win holidays, win games consoles and many more like this. All the rewards have value for someone and are all considered as payment.

Some paid survey searchers only want cash as a reward which can be restricting as cash-only rewarding sites make up less than a third of all online survey sites. Of course vouchers or gift certificates and even some prizes can be sold on to family and friends for cash which opens up all the reward options to everyone.