In today's uncertain economy almost everyone is looking for a way to add a supplemental income to their pocket book. No one is sure that the bailout plan, when passed is going to buy us enough time to deal with the current economic crisis which is way people are taking action now to fortify their incomes.

One of the ways to do this is by participating in online surveys. This opportunity has been around for many years now but often gets a bad reputation due to all the scam companies that have jumped on the band wagon and pretend to offer surveys opportunities.

If you learn what separate a legitimate survey company from a scam then you will be able to easily make money taking surveys. Essentially what you really want to look for is a survey company that is a division of a market research firm. Technically market research is really where all these survey opportunities stem from so it's best to go straight to the source and not waste time with impostors.

These market research companies get hired by anyone from large corporations to medium sized businesses to perform a variety of tasks. These include gathering demographic specific groups and presenting them with either an online questionnaire or sample product to try and report back on. The major point is that these companies get paid a ton of money to provide the most accurate research and keep their clients happy.

This is why when most people complain about a survey company the most common complaint is that they either don't get enough survey requests or that when they do finally get a survey emailed to them they don't make it past the preliminary questions. Now what these people don't release is the enormous amount of specificity that goes into a marketing study.

On most occasions the demographics are so specific that there may be only a couple hundred spots to fit your age, gender, employment status, marital status and so on. With each additional demographic that the client requests the more specific the market research company needs to be with their preliminary questions. They obviously cloak these needs with decoy questions to ensure that people don't give them false answers and this is why it's often difficult to get selected for an online or for that matter offline market research study.

This is why I don't recommend that people rely solely on the notion of taking surveys as their income. You can make money taking surveys but your opportunities will not be there every day. To increase your chance of selection you can sign up with a bunch of market research companies but again you will still have to go through all the same hurdles and there are no guarantees that you will be selected.

Again to recap if you stick with market research companies and not get rich quick schemes and have reasonable expectations you will be able to make money taking surveys without many headaches and hassles.