Now, you won’t get spammed by paid survey sites, but it is really important to have a separate email for doing these paid surveys. That’s because many companies like to inform you about new survey offers via email and you will be getting a lot of surveys per week, so this could fill up your inbox pretty quickly. I would recommend you use Gmail as it is the best free email service on the net right now.

When you sign up for survey sites, you will have to fill out your information every single time. Your Name, Addresss, Age, etc. This can be a really tedious process and it can take up a lot of your time. I suggest that you use a software to fill out the forms automatically. You simply enter the details once, and you click on auto fill and it would auto fill the details for you. This can be used for signing up for the paid survey sites or completing the surveys in general. I would recommend you try out Roboform. It is simply the best software to date. Download it here. Make sure you get the add on for FireFox as well. This will allow you to autofill within the browser. Get it here.

The research companies will make you fill out a survey to get a general detail about who you are so that they can assign you to specific demographics and assign these surveys for you. Now if you are lazy or you give them very few details about yourself, its really hard for them to qualify you. Therefore, you must give them a complete detail about yourself so that you will get more high paying surveys sent to your email. If they give you options to fill out, never select “other”. Always choose one of the choices that are given to you.

Now I know that I told you not to do this. But this was before you knew how to tell the scam companies from the real ones. But since I provided this information for you, you can use my tips to determine which sites are scams or not. You will make more money, if you register for many different survey sites. If you are unsure of which companies to choose, then check back here, I will be building a database of legit paying survey sites that you can use as a reference.

If you have the wrong mindset for this, you will make some cash, but not a lot. If you do these surveys casually and do it randomly or when you feel like it, you probably won’t hit the hundred dollar mark each month. But if you are determined and focused to make extra money and set goals for yourself, you will see a lot of money. For example, you could set a goal to have completed x amount of surveys per week , or even per day. Basically, the more seriously you approach this, the more money you will make.

This is a very important tip! Survey sites are free to join. Occasionally, you will see a survey site that would offer you big bucks, but if they require a “membership fee” to sign up, they are scamming you. Survey sites do not require any financial information. You will never need to give out your credit card or bank information. If they do require this, they are most likely a scam and you should stay clear from that site.

Usually, when I stumble across a survey site, the first thing I would do is to check out how many people visit their site daily. I do this by going to websiteoutlook.com . I would input my website into the box and it would give me a daily pageview statistic. Usually if it’s under 1000 hits per day, I would be wary. This is because if the site is legit, then a lot of people would visit it daily. Most scam survey sites are a short term operation, where once you join and enter your details there is nothing there, so the daily page view count would suffer greatly. Another variation of this check is to use alexa.com. What this site does is that it shows you the traffic trends over a period of time. So once you input the survey site into Alexa, you will see a graphical representation of the traffic stats. If it is declining over a period of time, then you should be cautious of the site. It means that visitors are not coming to the site, which could mean that this site is a scam or that they are not paying anymore.

Before you join a survey site, email them a question that you have in mind and measure their response time. Most legit sites would respond to your question within 1 or 2 days. If the site has a customer support option then that’s a good sign. If not, you can be sure it is a scam. Most scam sites do not take the time to respond to customer queries at all since it will be mainly complaints and questions about payments. They want to make a quick buck out of you and literally have hundreds of these survey sites. So they won’t bother answering your questions.

The Better Business Bureau is a third party non profit organization that deals with shady businesses. They rate other businesses on their performance and they accept complaints from the consumers and contact the business to have them rectify the whole situation. So before you try out the survey site, do a BBB search on your business to see if there are any complaints. The BBB is popular among consumers, so if the company is a scam, you can be sure you will find complaints listed there.

Forums are a valuable resource and you can use it to your advantage. Simply type in the survey site without the .com plus the word scam in the search box. Verify the results and check if there are many complaints. If there are plenty of complaints, then you can be certain that it is a scam. Read the forums to see what other people are saying about the site. These people are one step ahead of you as they already tried out the site, so you can draw upon their experiences without having to learn it the hard way. For example, if your site was Survey Scout, google “Survey Scout Scam”. This would show up posts about them being a scam and you should go through them to see the general public opinion on this site.