How To Select The Best Paid Survey Company


by Jorge Chavez - Date: 2007-02-27 - Word Count: 524 Share This!

The key to making money filling out paid online surveys is in finding the best guide company. The guide company is the one you sign up with to guide you to the best market surveyors out there, the reliable ones that pay in cash or equivalent, such as points that can be redeemed for cash.

There are hundreds of such guide companies out there. The quality ranges from great to not-so-good to outright scams. If you read their ads, each one is trying to convince you that they are the greatest. So how do you sort them out?

Size is an indicator. It's hard to get big and stay that way unless you are doing something right. But there is always the possibility that the big company is big because it is better at selling new customers and really only does an average job of serving them.

Recent growth is an indicator. To be growing also means that they are doing something right.

A good guarantee is a factor. A good guarantee is one that is firm, unequivocal and enforceable. The best are backed up by some large, responsible entity other than the paid survey company itself. Such as the 60-day guarantee offered by ClickBank on anything sold through its vendors. The ClickBank guarantee is made stronger by their actually handling the money and by their holding back a reserve from cash flow-through to vendors for 60 days to cover possible refund requests.

The problem with guarantees is that they only get back your original $35 to $50 signup fee. It's better than nothing, but think of the opportunity loss! You put up the money in hopes of making $500 - $1,000 a month. Instead you find that you have wasted your time and energy and missed that opportunity to make money.

The best indicator of all is the refund rate on signups for the Paid Survey Company's services. The refund rate is a measure of the company's failure rate. That percentage of its signups were a total washout. It's an indicator that, like the unemployment rate, will never be at zero. There will always be the few who changed their minds, or were expecting riches without personal effort. But anything over 2.5% to 4.5% (1 in 40 to 1 in 22) should be a red flag. The actual level of dissatisfaction is probably closer to two to three times the refund rate. This is because many will just walk away without going to the trouble and hassle of demanding a refund. After all, it is very small in relation to the income expectations.

Normally the refund rate statistics would be difficult to obtain, but ClickBank provides good numbers on this. And there were 70 paid survey companies listed with ClickBank, the last time I checked. Refund rates vary, of course, but lower is better than higher. And fluctuations in the refund rates should accurately reflect the overall level of customer satisfaction with the company in the last two months.

So how do you choose? Sort through all the available options, look at their offerings. Then pick a good-sized, growing company with a great guarantee and the lowest refund rate you can find!


Related Tags: paid survey, surveys, paid surveys, cash for surveys, cash surveys, get paid to take surveys online

Jorge Chavez is an experienced business analyst, accountant and internet entrepreneur. Learn more about ranking and comparing paid survey companies to pick the best one and see three months of comparitive rankings of the top 20 paid survey companies at http://surveysentinel.ya23.com

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