Sunday, October 14, 2007

Home-Biz-Help BizOpp Review: Make Money Taking Surveys

The ads would have you believe that you can actually make a good living. or at least make your car or house payment or send your kids to college or . . . . by taking surveys on line.

Don't believe it.

Ironically, those who need the money the most stand the least chance of making it taking surveys. Why? Because those conducting the surveys are interested in the spending habits of people who spend money on their type of product. The people who most need to make money don't have any money to spend, so if they are honest in their responses, they don't qualify for many if any of the surveys.

In other words, the people who conduct the surveys ask questions like "Do you plan on buying a new car in the next 2 years or did you buy a new car in the past 2 years?" Or they ask about electronics purchases, furniture purchases, home remodeling, your investment accounts (!), how many credit cards do you have, all the prepackaged groceries and snacks you buy, how often do you eat out, etc.

People who are struggling to get to the end of the month before they get to the end of the money do not spend what little money they have on those things, so they don't qualify for the survey. Instead, they get a sweepstakes entry or some such. Nobody can pay any bills on that.

People who qualify for most surveys already have money to spend, and the survey takers are most eager to find out how they spend it so they can manipulate the market and get more of it! But unless they get into a focus group (this is rare) the pay-off is still $1-$5.

So just what happens when you buy a list of survey companies and start to sign up for them? I can't speak for everyone, I can only tell you what happened to me and it wasn't pretty.

First of all I used an email address designated only for surveys. That was good, but not good enough. I should have had a different unique address for each one. I immediately began getting spam e-mails from "affiliates" and "associates" and "partners" (oh, my!) of the people I signed up with. My inbasket overfloweth.

Some of the companies were only interested in trial offers and samples of products I had no interest in or use for. I opted out of them right away, but somehow even though I got into the company immediately it took weeks to opt out! There is no legitimate excuse for that. I was especially annoyed at having to opt out of lists I had not opted into but who had gotten my address from someone else who "shared."

It gets worse. After I began opting out and was actually off a few lists, I began to receive the most vile of pornographic spam. I suspect at least one if not more of the people I opted out of sold my e-mail address to a pornographic spammer so they could at least make some money off of me, but I can't prove it.

Remember I said to use a different unique address for each company? This is why. If each survey company uses a different address to send communications to you and passes that address on to a spammer, pornographer, or both, you can nail them dead to rights because NOBODY else had that address!

I contacted the people I bought the list from, but they were useless. They claimed they had anonymously signed up for each offer before they put it on their list. Maybe they did, I don't know. It sounds good, anyway. I suggested they opt out of some as I had done to see what would happen. I never heard from them again.

My recommendation? Go ahead and sign up to take online surveys if you want. Once you have your list, be sure to use a different address for each company. It can be fun to influence market choices such as newly designed labels for familiar products, but don't expect to get rich.

For more and better ways to make money working from home visit
123 I Work From Home 4 Me or
123 Home Based Business Works 4 Me