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Here at MakeUseOf, we're big fans of using PollDaddy for our weekly polls. It's a great free tool for polling simple questions. But what if you're looking for something a little more hefty? What if you need something free to use for market research or HR surveys - what then?

For building your larger marketing research questionnaires, there are a number of great free web-based tools. However, I recommend using Survey Monkey. It's simple to use and filled with great features - plus the free version allows you to create usable surveys and properly try the product.

Survey Monkey's Free Trial

The free version on Survey Monkey is almost a fully functioning product. They don't limit how many surveys you can have or how long they are available for. They simply limit the types of questions you can ask (multiple check-boxes, single response, etc) and limit the number of questions per survey to 10. Obviously, the paid version has many other useful perks, but Survey Monkey have gone to some effort to ensure that the free trial is usable and permanent. This should give you a little peace of mind.

Creating A Survey

If you know what you want to ask and are a professional survey writer, you can easily write your own survey from scratch. For people who aren't quite so certain, Survey Monkey has plenty of templates ready to use.

It's easy to select a template and modify it slightly to suit your purposes. This can be very handy if you're in a hurry.

Don't forget to try out the different themes. Make your survey stand out from the crowd!

Promoting Your Survey

Survey Monkey make it easy to promote your survey when it's complete. You can send an email with a link, get Survey Monkey to send email on your behalf, embed the survey in a website or promote on Facebook "” all in a few short steps.

The different methods of accessing the surveys are known in Survey Monkey as "collectors". You can control these collectors and determine how users will be limited in their responses (eg. how many times they can respond and whether they can change their answers). By adding multiple collectors you can also track which types of survey promotion are most effective for you "” why go to the effort of embedding a survey if your customers all respond to your Facebook links?

Analysing Survey Results

The default free survey results display is certainly an adequate tool for the job of analysis. No results are hidden from you "” the information is simply collected and displayed in a basic table.

Strengths/Weaknesses

A failing of Survey Monkey's free account is that free account users are shown all the same menus as a paid user, without being allowed to use them. This is a common tactic for free accounts which could be a little confusing, but certainly doesn't detract from the overall experience.

Survey Monkey is a far more professional tool than competing poll and survey making tools. And since it's free to use, you can easily give it a go for yourself and see what you think.

How To Make Use Of Survey Monkey?

ProBlogger has made a video on how he uses a marketing survey to work out exactly what his readers want to know more about. Specifically, he asks questions to work out what articles he should write and what sort of eBooks his readers would be willing to pay for. He actually recommends Survey Monkey for the job, too. I think this is a great idea for all bloggers to take on board. Take a look!

Need to read more?

What do you think of Survey Monkey? How do you rate it compared to other free online survey tools? Let us know in the comments!

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