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Paid Surveys – Are Free or Membership Programmes Better?

Written By photo 7 background picture on Monday, August 22, 2011 | 6:08 AM

When it comes to making money online, undertaking paid surveys are some of the most popular activities around. Many people like to fill out surveys online in their spare time, in exchange for payment or entry into prize draws. There are two main types of paid survey sites around: those that allow you to sign up and complete surveys for free, and those that require you to pay a membership fee in order to acquire paid surveys. This article looks at which type is better.

If you do a search online, you should easily be able to find many websites that will allow you to sign up and take part in paid surveys for free. These sites are plentiful and the vast majority of legitimate survey sites will not require you to pay to join. This is because they are genuinely keen to find out about your thoughts and opinions and so don’t want to put people off joining due to membership fees.

This means that as a general rule, you should be wary of paid survey sites that require you to pay in order to join. Many of the sites that ask you to sign up to a paid membership programme will have lists of paid surveys that are available for you to enter, which can often seem like a tempting prospect when you are looking for decent surveys to complete.

However, the fact is that most of them will have found the surveys on their lists exactly the same way as you will have found them yourself: by searching the internet. This means that you aren’t paying for new, useful information and are instead paying for information that you could find yourself with a simple search on Google or other popular search engine.

Some of these paid membership sites will also include links to other paid membership sites in the hope of encouraging you to sign up with them, too – but when you get there, you are highly likely to find that their lists of surveys are exactly the same so you won’t be gaining anything by doing that, either.

Also, if you are completing paid surveys, do you really want to be giving away your earnings in exchange for paid membership lists of surveys you could have found on your own anyway? The amount you get paid per survey will obviously depend on how long it is and how complicated the questions are, but even the most complicated survey isn’t going to pay you a huge amount of money – you might well end up losing more than you are gaining by signing up with a site that requires you to pay in order to be a member.

In conclusion, you should definitely be wary of sites that ask you to pay for your membership, especially when the information they give you is something you could easily find yourself. It makes much more sense to put a bit more time into researching good, free paid survey sites to ensure you get as much out of completing surveys as you possibly can