Over the years I’ve often wondered if it’s possible to make some spare cash working online, I’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of promises to make me a millionaire. I’ve been around the block a bit when it comes to the “Internet”, so I’m sure that there are a number of people out there that make a good living from it. If you look at the site you’ll see the adverts that I’ve placed here, mostly from Amazon but there are a couple of others as well. Have I made any money from them, not really – on average probably £25 a year or so.
I recently found a site that seems to actually be likely to make some money, not the thousands a day that every one promises through “Binary Options Trading” – whatever that is. Or the nice gentleman from the Bank of Nigeria who has found $20M and wants to give me half, it’s just outstanding how selfless and altruistic some people can be. Nor was it any of the other half baked schemes that seem to be everywhere you look, this is a UK site that pays people to take surveys. I will be honest, I am still a little sceptical and doubtful if I’ll actually see any cash return – but as I’m at home between contracts I’ve decided to give it a try.
As I said earlier in this post I’ve been around the block a bit when it comes to “online stuff”, so I decided before getting involved in this in any shape or form I’d set some stuff up – to protect the innocent as they say. In anticipation of the deluge of “poo” that was likely to follow, I took the following precautions which do seem to have worked. These “precautions” would seem to have been quite wise and from what has followed, I’m quite pleased with myself – note “not smug but pleased”. So here is a heads up on the precautions that I took, with a little why I took them – usually based on experience.
- I created a throw away email address, easy to do and from previous experience whenever I’ve used an email address to register. I’ve invariably had to throw the damn thing away as it just get’s spammed to death, so having a disposable address is a must!
- A disposable mobile number, I used a PAYG from one of the big four Mobile companies. I had the mobile phone, so all that was required was a sim card (99p) and £10 to activate it. This is also a MUST, I have had the phone on silent and have been monitoring – there have been over 120 calls to the phone in the week since I started on this.
- A PayPal account hopefully to receive funds into, here I’ve had to use the only one that I have – as setting up a new one takes a bit of time. I haven’t been paid anything yet but time will tell on that front.
- A Skype number, these numbers are available for about four or five pounds a month and will mean that you don’t have to give out your home number.
So how does it work, well as far as I can make out – it’s almost completely free. I say almost completely free, because some of the conditions with some of the surveys are that you have to join online casino sites or similar – and deposit amounts like £10. These surveys or promotions I have left out and they have shown up in the payments summary as pending, so I guess that the confirmation will fail and I won’t be paid for these. I may still take these as it looks like a £10 join amount will get you a £40 or £50 payment, but as with most people I’m a bit sceptical and not sure if there is the potential return. Still where am I now, well here is a summary of my progress.
This is actually the current screen shot of the earnings report for my account, as I’m just kind of trying this out I’ve only taken the first 8 of the surveys. That is actually working out at one per day, these take around 20 minutes to complete – so the potential returns seem to be not to bad. You can take as many as they have setup, currently I have 26 on offer – but I have decided that this is just something to keep me occupied at the moment. I will work my way through the surveys, but I’m not going with the ones where I have to deposit money to get some money back – for two reasons. These are simple and I’ll detail the logic behind the decisions a little further on in the post, the good old sceptic sneaking back into my life again.
Anyway, should anyone want to investigate this, the image above is also a link and will take you to the site where you can create an account and start getting paid for taking surveys. But before you do you should ensure that you have at least the measures above in place, why would you want to do this well there is the chance that you can make some pin money. The earnings summary is based on around three hours on line, so the potential returns are quite good – potentially around £100 per hour. this is actually an hourly rate that’s not to be sniffed at. The additional things to consider are, you do have to give out your address – so you are likely to start to appear on mailing lists. But I have a log burner so can deal with paper waste quite efficiently, as to the additional steps – well here they are.
- Get a prepaid credit card, these are available on line and can be loaded with cash as requited – but check out the deals as some charge a monthly fee. This will save you giving out any more personal information than is required. It also means that where there is a repeat subscription, there is no need to cancel it if there is no money available on the credit card.
- Set up an automated calendar that will remind me when to cancel subscriptions, as some of the offers are dependent on taking out a subscription – it is essential that they are cancelled within the window.
Below are two further screen shots, these show just how the surveys operate, you can see the type of stuff that you can do – and what the payments for doing them is.
This is one of the typical Bingo type surveys, I would say that around one in three is this type of survey. I order to qualify you have to deposit money and from what I can see lose it, then you’ll be paid (possibly?) and it will all be worth while. Some of the other types of survey involve taking out a subscription, the example below is for Experian – this is where you’ll need to be diligent in monitoring the dates. As you’ll only have a short window where you will be able to cancel without incurring additional costs, lets face it most of these surveys are to drum up additional business for these people and to increase someones potential list of customers.
These people don’t do these things out of the goodness of their heart, it’s all about making money – it seems like we’ve come full circle with that statement. All you have to do to make this worth while is to spend a lot less than you get paid.
To anyone who wants to try this, well have a go. What I would say is please bear in mind the things that I’ve said above and that you should ensure you have taken sufficient measures to prevent yourself from being pestered by the people who are paying you to take these surveys. You have to look at it as letting a sales person accost you in the street, once they have your details they are going to try to persuade you that there are lots of things that you need. The object is to take money off you for services, you objective is to get some money out of them and not end up with a new conservatory or double glazing.
Me I’m just going to plod along with this for a bit of fun, to anyone else I’d say it’s worth a try if you have nothing better to do.