Can You Really Make Money for Taking Online Surveys or Are They Just Elaborate Scams?

Online Surveys have had a lot of bad press recently as there are so many “survey companies” making absurd promises about the amount of money that can be made from taking online surveys “from the comfort of your armchair at home”.

Is There Really a Market for Paid Surveys?

Well, the things is getting market research from consumers is a totally legitimate process which companies, both big and small, are driving all the time.

In other words this market research information which they often get in the form of online surveys is so vital to their existence or competitiveness in their market that they are more than willing to pay for it.

Some of them pay cash for each survey completed, others pay their survey respondents in the form of rewards but the point is this – you and I can really get paid for giving our opinion to do with products and services that we have experienced in the form of an online survey.

Where Can We Find Online Survey Work?

Well we can approach companies in our individual capacity and hope to get some survey work or you can sign up with a legitimate “online survey company” that will provide you with a constant flow of online surveys for which you will get paid.

Identifying Online Survey Scams

The “online survey scams” originate from the many so called survey companies, that have sprung up from this lucrative and legitimate opportunity, that promise a certain earning potential to their paying members but unfortunately only fill their email boxes with scam, spam and junk.

Quite simply the legitimate paid survey companies have stood the test of time and the scams have probably been named and shamed.

But just to make sure, do a Google search on the survey company’s name and disgruntled members’ comments will probably be reflected in the search results to do with that particular paid survey company.

Benefits of Joining a Legitimate Survey Company

Generally just taking Online Surveys isn’t all that is offered if you are a member of an Online Survey company.

You will more than likely also be offered the chance to make more money by participating in the following…

You can get paid to participate in focus groups
You can get paid to take phone surveys
You can get paid to try new products and keep them in most cases
You can get paid to preview new movies
You can get paid ot do data entry

Other Benefits of Taking Online Surveys

Apart from the main benefit of taking online surveys which is to get paid for your research, other benefits include the following;

Work from home or at the office
Work in your spare time or make it your full time job
Do only the surveys you want
Participate in the additional paid marketing research activities that you choose

Paid Online Surveys – Conclusion

Joining a legitimate paid survey company is certainly a real way to make money online fairly easily, however whilst it could provide a steady income, I doubt whether you or I could get rich by just taking online surveys.

So in a nutshell, all you need is a computer and an internet connection and you can start getting paid for taking online surveys from home or even at work in your spare time for some extra cash.

Click the following link for more on surveys and find out how easy and fun it is to get paid for taking online surveys

Google today announced a new feature that impacts bloggers – a new URL shortener that integrates with Feedburner and a new ’socialize’ feature on Feedburner.

This allows bloggers to use Feedburner to send Tweets out automatically via Feedburner.

Of course most bloggers already have tweets going out to promote new blog posts by using either a plugin or a service like TwitterFeed.

Feedburner give you a number of options – including the ability to tweet out just the title or include some of the body (or only the body), adding hashtags (based upon your category), adding something before or after the title, filtering (to stop some new posts going out) – and limiting how many tweets go out.

Get more help and details on setting up your Feedburner account here.

In many ways it is pretty similar to what a lot of the other alternatives give you for this type of thing – but it is good to be able to have it all managed from one account. I’ll also be interested to see how Google/Feedburner integrate this into their Analysis/metrics (ie to see if they can measure clicks on their URL shortened links accurate – I’m not seeing any mention of this but it would seem like a logical extension).

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Google Add Socialize Feature to Feedburner – Tweet Your New Blog Posts from Feedburner

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Website flipping is all the rage as a new “Make Money Online” business model. New membership sites have launched showing you exactly how to cash in on buying and selling virtual real estate. In fact, some internet marketing gurus are even calling it an art. The art is really in finding a site with potential that you can improve and then selling it for a profit. What gets complicated are the mechanics of transferring the domain and website pages to the new owner.

Squidoo lens flipping is a newcomer to this art. On Squidoo you don’t actually own your websites, or lenses as they are called, but you can transfer a lens to another Squidoo member. There are no fees to transfer, and it takes only a simple exchange between the seller, buyer and Squidoo to complete the transaction. For a skilled lensmaster, the Squidoo version of a webmaster, creating or buying lenses and flipping them for a profit could be a viable business model.

Already talented lensmasters have started services to build a custom lens for a fee. Ready-made lenses are gaining in popularity as well. These might be pages that are brand new on a hot niche topic, or a lens that has already proven its ability to pull traffic and make a steady income. There are even sites set up specifically for lensmasters to sell or auction their Squidoo pages.

The buyer’s market for ready-made lenses isn’t just for new Squidoo members. The same speculators who buy websites can see the potential in a quality Squidoo page. One with steady traffic and a reliable monthly income can be a profitable investment. A business owner trying to place on Google for specific keywords may buy one to target those words in the search engines. A blogger may want a spot on Squidoo to drive traffic back to his site. The value of a lens depends on the keywords, traffic, backlinks, monthly income and Google positioning,which is very similar to pricing any other website. Prices for quality sites on Squidoo vary from as little as $10 for new lenses to as much as a few hundred dollars for proven income-generating lenses.

Some innovative lensmasters are creating a series of lenses on a specific topic. Each lens in the series will target related keywords within that niche. They will design the Squidoo pages to feature and link to each other creating a ring of traffic to each lens. Then they will sell the group as a set to a prospective buyer or someone who is looking to add to their website portfolio on that niche. A set of lenses linked together within a specific niche can often demand a higher price than the same number of Squidoo pages sold separately.

While website flipping can be complicated, selling a Squidoo lens is a simple process. Even advertising your lenses for sale is as easy as building a page showcasing your available lenses. Squidoo experts have even created lens marketplaces and auction sites. Starting a Squidoo lens flipping business couldn’t be easier. There is no financial risk to this make-money-online opportunity. With no fees to build a lens or transfer one, the only investment you have is your time.

I saw an interview with Matt Cutts reported on in the last few days that hinted that page loading speed may in the next year become one of the factors for how a website ranks in the search results. Now, to be honest I already suspected that there might be something used in the weighting already that related to page load speed. Why? Well, one of the things google has emphasized in its terms and conditions is the idea of sites that give a good user experience. Pop ups and deceptive redirects for instance are “bad experience” kind of things and affect sites negatively, while you would assume that a fast loading page would be a “good experience” kind of thing and perhaps benefit a site in the search results.

Anyway, along with the interview I saw a link to a new (to me) resource at Google and that is their listing of let’s make the web faster utilities. Some of them are tools from google and others come from other sources, but you may want to make use of any tricks and tools you can to try to improve the speed of your pages.

I could imagine that this would be a fairly simple metric to add to their current ranking algorithm. The main question would be how much the web site page load would be weighted and as you may know, the way the various ranking components are weighted is one of the main reasons the new algorithm changes can dramatically affect search results for keywords. You never know, initially they may rank the speed a bit too important and we may see search results change dramatically initially and then through several search algo updates they may dial the weighting down a bit to where they like it. The only way I see to be in a spot where you should be impervious to this is to make your site as fast loading as possible now and then you’ll avoid the dance between the future algorithm and weighting changes.

I came across this post “The Top 50 Marketing Blogs To Watch In 2009″ on a site. These are all just blogs, but they made it to the top 50. When you have so many people to follow you why depend on Google adsense, of course they do not. They depend on their own books, [...]

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