Survey Tips

1. When you receive a survey invitation, respond to it as soon as possible. The surveys usually have quotas, and the fill up fast, particularly for higher paying surveys.


2. Toluna, Surveyhead, and Palm Research only send you invitations to some of the surveys they have available. You need to check their web sites to see all surveys. I do this at least once a day to make sure I'm not missing any surveys that have incentives.


3. Toluna has a number of low-paying surveys. However you can get higher compensation for some of these by going through Palm Research first. So make sure you do your daily Palm Research surveys before going to Toluna to check on available surveys.


4. When going through available Toluna surveys, I use the following algorithm: if the survey is 10 minutes or less, I do it. If it's longer than 10 minutes, I only do the surveys that have an incentive attached. To skip the surveys without an incentive, simply disqualify yourself. The most common way to do that is simply say you work for a marketing/research company.


5. All of the companies I recommend may refer you to Opinionshere (aka OTX) surveys (now part of Ipsos-Isay). These surveys often make you waste a large amount of time before disqualifying you from a survey. I make a policy of only trying 3 qualifications before I give up so I don't waste too much time trying. Also Opinionshere tracks when you complete surveys and will only let you do one per day, so if you complete one, don't bother trying to complete any more the same day.


6. When you go through the demographics questions on a survey, never state that you work for any of the companies they screen for, or you will almost always get disqualified. Just pick "none of the above".


7. Sometimes surveys with low or no incentive are screeners for longer surveys or focus groups that pay. This is particularly true with MySurvey. Generally it's a good practice to do the shorter screener surveys like this to see if you can qualify for the followup with the larger reward.


8. Don't expect to make a fortune doing on-line surveys. Any hype you have heard about making tons of money is just that, hype. If you follow my suggestions here, you can probably average between $5-10 an hour. Not bad for just sitting in front of your computer and clicking.


9. Don't get disappointed if you don't qualify for every survey. Companies are looking for panelists that meet a variety of demographic criteria. Noone fits in every category. In my experience I qualify for about 20-30% of the surveys I attempt. I think that's average for most demographic profiles.