Survey company information

Things I have learned in the past 5 months doing surveys.

PROS!
1. You earn a little extra spending cash legitimately! (This is the main reason I do it!)
2. Many of the surveys are fun to do- and I feel like I'm making a difference in products coming out and what's already on the shelves.
3. It helps break up my day by taking 10-20 minutes per survey between Jack's naps and cleaning the house.
4. I sometimes get sent new products to try and give feedback on- and then I get to keep the product, and get compensated for my time!

CONS!
1. You will NOT get rich doing it, and you probably can't even count on it for extra income every month because the company's needs change so much on who and what they need for their surveys.
2. Some survey companies are NOT legitimate- and will just sign you up for spam or more survey companies- you never get into the actual money making surveys.

***Make sure to check with the survey police if a survey company you're going to sign up for is legitimite and people actually receive rewards for doing the surveys. Click on panel directory for a complete list of verified and unverified survey companies***

3. Some companies offer you very little compensation for your time, but you don't realize it because they offer "points". Now some companies do offer good compensation through points which you can redeem at other companies, but always check to see what the dollar value change over would be. For example- if you are offered 500 points to do a survey that takes 10-15 minutes, but you need 5000 points for a $5 gift card- it breaks down to about 50 cents for the survey- this is NOT worth your time!
4. Some companies give tons of surveys to one person- and not to another- so what works for me- might not work for me- and vice versa. For example I am a 24-30 year old woman- and they may want a 30-36 year old male

The companies I found work best for me include

Pinecone Research- $3 for every survey completed. My favorite!
Opinion Outpost- $1.50-$5 for every survey completed, I have earned $40 from here! (They give points, but 15 points translates directly into $1.50 cash)
Valued Opinions- $2-5 for every survey completed
Opinion Place- $1-4 for every survey completed, and an automatic link into their sweepstakes every month for every survey tried to complete. I won a sweepstakes from here from a survey I didn't qualify for, and they automatically entered me in. (I recommend not signing up for companies that only offer sweepstakes entries as their reward though. Often it's not going to be worth your time, but if they automatically enter you- and they were planning on paying you for the completed survey- go for it!)

Pinecone Research is only open for new registration some of the time. To find a link open go here and the site will tell you if it's open for registration right now. As of right now it is open, but that can change very drastically and suddenly.

If you have questions on specific companies you can ask if I tried them out, and I'll let you know my experience. I started out by registering for 20 survey companies, and have narrowed it down to these 4 as consistently giving me worthwhile surveys. There are a few more that give me surveys every once in a while, but these are the main ones that are worthwhile for me.