Survey and microwork sites are infamous for low pay and generally being a bad return on time investment, usually forcing you to struggle just to make the equivalent of minimum wage.
Scared off yet? Good, because it's not all dark clouds and ill winds. These sites are probably never going to be as good as building a freelance career or business of some sort, or even just getting even a lower-end full-time job. But those things aren't always immediately accessible to everyone, while survey and microwork sites allow you to jump right in and have very little in the way of barriers.
There might be some days where you put in five or six solid hours of work just to make like $40, but there are some ways to tweak and arrange things to stack the odds more in your favor. I've never been too immersed in this but I'd put the upper daily earning potential at $200 to $300 if things go REALLY well for you.
This isn't worth everyone's time, but it could be worthwhile in some situations. If you're in a developing country with a low cost of living, or if you're in a NEETy situation and not paying rent or big bills, even $50 a day could be quite helpful.
So how do you maximize microwork and survey sites?
STEP 1: IDENTIFY SITES THAT ARE WORTH YOUR TIME
The first thing to do is find sites that regularly have tolerable work, and that won't waste a bunch of your time in getting to it.
You can boil this down to three qualities:
1. Sites that regularly have enough work to be worth checking throughout the day
2. Sites that don't put you through time-wasting hoops (i.e. writing a paragraph of text before each task as a screener, letting you do surveys for a long time before screening you out, putting you into "invisible chains" of surveys where you unknowingly get screened out of one and handed off to another)
3. Sites that have reasonable payment terms and a history of paying as agreed
STEP 2: UNDERSTAND HOW DEMOGRAPHICS WORK
Before you go leaping into all the survey sites, though, you should know something about demographics.
There is no fairness, equality, PC or SJW in the survey world. Some demographics are much more valuable to marketers than others, and opportunities are made available accordingly.
Now before we go any further, I'm not suggesting that you lie or misrepresent yourself on these sites. And not just because it would probably be frowned upon by all these sites I have affiliate links with, but also because it's an unethical thing to do. And it could get you blacklisted from a whole bunch of sites if you get caught, so be real careful with all that.
You will also want to be consistent with how you present yourself on different sites, as they draw on massive creepy user data profiles that are available from data harvesting companies.
However, I will tell you what the most valuable demographics are to survey sites so that you can evaluate how much of your time they are worth.
Here are the groups survey sites seem to like the most:
- Middle-aged full-time-employed white people with higher-than-average incomes
- IT professionals (lots of regular industry surveys)
- Executives and managers that make purchasing decisions at all types of businesses
- US resident Latinos of all income levels who can take surveys in both English and Spanish
- Pet owners
- People looking to buy a new car or a new phone
- People who go out to restaurants a lot
- Luxury travelers who travel often
- Moms with kids and who do all the household shopping are a tricky demographic - there's a lot of demand, but it's also easily the most saturated respondent demographic due to absolute tons of women with children working from home, the more income you have and stuff you buy the more you'll stand out
STEP 3: GET YOUR LIST OF SITES TOGETHER
So with all that out of the way, how do you find the sites that don't suck?
Honestly, nothing beats just trying them out for yourself. That gives you the best sense of which ones work best for you and don't waste time jerking you around.
That's a lot of time commitment, of course. You can get some pointers in the right direction from good reviews (like the ones we've been collecting for years over this way >>>), but quality review sites are few and far between. A bunch just indiscriminately drive you to every site to try to make referral money, but even the ones that make an honest effort are often kinda useless due to poor organization and just not really knowing how to review properly. The one I do recommend offhand is SurveyPolice just due to having decent write-ups of sites plus the ability to read lots of user comments and reviews.
So you can comb through our reviews here to get started ... but to make things even simpler I'm going to give you a shortlist of sites that I feel are worth adding to just about anyone's roster right here.
Some of these are sites I never did get around to reviewing (but maybe will at some point):
- Prolific Academic
- YouGov
- Pinecone Research
- SurveySavvy
- PaidViewpoint
- eRewards
- Inbox Dollars
- American Consumer Opinion
- 2020 Panel
- Testbirds
- UserTesting
- Mechanical Turk (with the caveat that there is a LOT of junk to wade through and browsing it is kind of an inefficient nightmare ... so you need to get some outside help in filtering through the jobs, pore through the MTurk Reddit to get started with all that)
I'm sure there are more out there, but I don't have the time to explore that I used to ... you'll have to do some spelunking and come up with your own list that works best for you.
STEP 4: THE JOYS OF MULTI-TABBING
OK, we've got a list of sites that are worth visiting on the daily. The next trick is efficiently keeping up with them and being right on the spot when those piping hot jerbs become available.
The basic approach is having multiple sites open in browser tabs so that you can constantly cycle through and check everything. However, there's an upper limit to how much you can have open. It will depend on how much memory each site uses and how much you have in your computer, but in general expect a modern computer to start having slowdown problems or potential crashing somewhere around 10 tabs in.
Since a lot of these sites can be navigated with mobile devices, consider also getting your phone and some tablets in the mix. Depending on how active you are and how much money you make, you might even consider investing in some extra tablets to run more sites at once. A few different decent brands of tablets can be had for $50, if you want to go up to $75 some come with a keyboard dock. ( See a list at Amazon)
But what if you're using one wired internet connection at home? No problem - grab a basic WiFi travel router. These little portable routers take your incoming wired internet connection and convert it to a WiFi signal that you can connect multiple devices to, they go as low as $15.
These sites also usually do email notifications, but these aren't entirely reliable. It might be worth setting up a dedicated Gmail or Protonmail account just for this purpose to keep open during the day, but it shouldn't be relied on to catch everything. You'll do best if you're actively multi-tabbing and refreshing throughout the day.
STEP 5: THE GRIND
And that's pretty much it for setup. It's up to you to fire up your computer and devices in the morning, refresh those tabs and get on the opportunities.
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