Do you want to make money online?  Would an extra $200 per month be a welcome addition to your bank account?  How about $1,500 per month?  Do you have a few minutes of free time in your day which you could dedicate to taking paid online surveys?  If you answered yes to even just a few of these questions, read on.

Taking paid surveys online is a proven method of making money online.  Millions of people are using this method to supplement their income every single day, and you can too.

Do I Need Any Specialized Skills or Certifications?

Technically, the answer to this question is no.  You do not need to have a college degree or a survey taker’s certification.  You do not need any training or memberships to any secret societies.  You just need a computer with internet access, some free time and the right mindset.

However, there are a few skills you might want to learn if you want to be successful at making money by taking online surveys.  These are not requirements by any means, but just tips and tricks that you can employ to make your journey to side income a little bit easier.

8 Tips and Tricks to Maximize Your Payouts

1. Understand what paid surveys are all about

The whole purpose of paid surveys is for companies who are releasing or improving on products or services to find out how customers will react to these products or services.  It helps them develop better offerings for their customer base.  It is important to understand this as you are navigating the waters of taking paid online surveys.

2. Treat it as a side income or a hobby

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you can get rich or even make a living by taking surveys online.  Unless you live in a cardboard box and you don’t have any utility bills, it is very unlikely that you will be able to make a career out of taking surveys and actually be able to survive financially.  However, if you want a little extra cash every month for one of your bad spending habits or just to pay for eggs and ice cream, then taking paid online surveys may be perfect for you!  You should not rely on it as a source of income, but just enjoy the extra cash coming in every month.

3. Only use legitimate survey companies

If you hadn’t noticed, there are a lot of scams on the Internet.  If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Don’t fall for the scams that promise that if you pay $40 a month to take their surveys, you will make $100 or more every month.  While there may be legitimate companies using this type of membership plan, there are enough free alternatives out there.  Stick with free memberships if only to maximize your income.  To find a list of professional survey companies that we know and trust, keep reading our blog.  We will post a list soon!

4. Be an avid researcher

If you want to find the best surveys that pay out the most money and are most relevant to your knowledge, you will want to become proficient at researching survey companies and finding good surveys.  If you are not willing to invest a little time in this upfront, you probably will not be a very happy survey taker.

5. Be honest (most of the time)

The reason that companies will pay you for your input is because they truly want feedback from potential customers so that they can make better products and offer better services to their paying customers.  If you are just giving them nonsense answers, or rushing through and answering “yes” to every question they will catch on that you are being dishonest.  They will likely shut your account down, and you will be unable to take surveys for that company in the future.  So be honest!  Answer the surveys truthfully.  However, when a survey asks if you take lots of surveys every month, you should probably not admit to this.  They don’t like professional survey takers because many of them are not honest.  As long as you are answering surveys honestly, there is no need to admit that you take a lot of surveys monthly.

6. Set up a separate email account just for your survey sites. 

If you don’t do this, you will end up with thousands of spam emails to your inbox seemingly overnight.  You will thank us for telling you to set up this secondary email account when you wake up one morning with three thousand emails in your inbox overnight.  It only takes five minutes and there are many free email services available, such as Yahoo Mail and Gmail so do not hesitate to set one up today!

7. Simple math skills go a long way in survey taking. 

Many survey sites will be very upfront and explicit in telling you what the payout is and how much time you should expect on a particular survey.  For example, one particular survey may payout $2 and the expected time to completion is 20 minutes.  Based on these numbers, you can quickly assess if this is a survey that is worth your time.  At this rate you would actually make $6 per hour, which is not bad for taking a survey while binge watching House of Cards.

8. Learn to use technology to your advantage. 

Many surveys are going to ask the same initial questions: What is your gender, age, zip code, household income, etc.  There are some great tools available to log you in automatically and auto-fill these fields and save you time so you can take more surveys and make more money.  Two such tools are RoboForm and LastPass.

These tools will automatically log you into most websites, and can be set up to auto-fill certain information on your surveys.  Both tools offer a free version!

What Are You Waiting For?

While technically, you don’t need any specific skills or certifications or tools to make money by taking surveys online, there are some skills and tools that you may want to develop and employ.  We hope that these 8 tips and tricks for taking paid online surveys were helpful.  These will make the process much more enjoyable, and more importantly will help you to maximize your monthly payouts.  Won’t that extra $200 next month feel great in your wallet?  Get out there and get started today!