Paid Viewpoint, operated by Ask Your Target Market, has been used for many of the professionally designed infographics that appear on this and other sites. My experience with Paid Viewpoint is limited to testing it out with a single survey, but it has received great reviews from other reviewers of paid surveys online.

How It Works

Paid Viewpoint has streamlined the survey taking process, so that you don’t spend more than six minutes on average completing a survey. You earn points for each survey you complete.

The payout comes when you have earned $15 in points. You can earn even more points through what Paid Viewpoint calls its TrustScore system, which basically requires you to be consistent and honest in your responses. Paid Viewpoint doesn’t collect or share your personal information, but it does want to get a sense of the personality traits, demographics and interests. Paid Viewpoint uses this information in deciding which survey requests you respond to.

You can earn additional points through Paid Viewpoint’s referral system–when your friends sign up and complete a minimum of six surveys. Paid Viewpoint has set up a way to invite your friends to the site via your social networks.

Paid Viewpoint is an international site, but it only makes cashout payments through PayPal, which is done within 72 hours of you reaching your $15 USD earnings.

Taking Surveys

Even as you registered for a Paid Viewpoint membership, you began earning points and money. Most of the registration survey questions involve demographic information about you – including employment and marital status, level of education, and career background.

Many of the marketing surveys are based on products like the iPhone, kitchen products, logo design, and brand appeal. You can choose to be notified about a survey through your e-mail, phone or text message. There is a limited time and number of responders to respond to and complete a survey, so you will need to log into your account as soon as possible when a survey notice arrives.

Based on the first and only Paid Viewpoint survey I’ve taken, I found the process to be quick and easy, though some of the questions were a little vague. As you complete the survey, you are told how much time it would take to get it done. Paid Viewpoint said its surveys typically take no longer than 5 or 6 minutes “but the longer a survey is, the more you will earn.”

TrustScore System

As a Paid Viewpoint member, your goal is to achieve a TrustScore of 9,000 or better. Paid Viewpoint says this “will place you in the top 10% of PV members and means you earn more for each answer”.

The TrustScore is based on how consistent you are in responses you provide from survey to survey. So for example if you respond in one survey that you earned a college degree, but in another survey, you say you got a professional degree, Paid Viewpoint may view that as a inconsistent response.

Inconsistencies in demographic information, based on my experience, might be attributed to how you read and understand the question. You can update your demographics between surveys to make it more consistent with your responses.

While Paid Viewpoint may never become a full-time gig, $15 can buy you a music CD, an e-book, or a few drinks at the bar.

If you are a Paid Viewpoint member, let us know about your experiences with the site. For other paid surveys online, check out this article.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

I guess it’s human nature to voice our thoughts – and try to seek confirmation from others. Nothing does that more than polls.

With the online anonymity, you can even voice your uttermost radical opinions (without fear of being looked at askew), and better yet, get a look at what the rest of the world thinks.

Although you get your fair dose of polls by visiting forums, blogs, and even online newspapers – you might be enticed to make your own poll.

With the two sites below, you can create a poll yourself, posting it on your blog and twitter, or even releasing it on the world – these should cover all you need.

Ask500People – Poll The World

Ask500People is a different concept from most poll services. Sure, you can show the link to your address book, or even embed a widget on your site, but in the first place, Ask500People is meant to poll the world. No need to aim at a limited group of people when you can pose your question to an international community audience.

Even if you don’t feel like asking a question, it’s well worth to browse the sites and – even if you don’t feel inclined to vote – take a look at the answers. With tens of thousands of questions asked, there’s bound to be a couple of interesting ones. The questions range from a more serious setting (e.g. alternative engergy sources, politics, the screenshot above) to absolutely ridiculous (but infinitely entertaining) inquiries. Interesting questions are voted up by the community, and get a chance to reach the front page.

The results can be viewed in more detail. As a free user, you’re able to view the differentiation between male and female votes. When you sign up for your free account, you’ll also be able to see the votes categorized according to age, annual income, education, team and country. Obviously, a lot of this miscellaneous data can only be gathered from votes of other registered users.

Ask500People won’t hold ground against controlled surveys, and results are not always completely reliable and representative, but browsing the polls can be a fun (and interesting) experience.

PollDaddy

As said before, Ask500People isn’t ideal to interview a select group. Say you want to poll your friends or blog audience, you’ll have to resort to other techniques. What you want is a private or public poll on a more isolated location.

This is where PollDaddy comes in. A free account allows you to make unlimited numbers of your own polls. The only restriction imposed is the unavailability of vote analysis – i.e. you won’t be able to view the location and choice of a single participant. With the free account, you can still make your own poll templates and manage the global poll result.

After creation, you can either share the link, or embed the poll on your own website. PollDaddy offers a selection of JavaScript and Flash embed codes, as well as alternative solutions for Facebook, Ning, WordPress and Myspace.

Do you know any other great polling services? You can tell us about them in the comments section below!

But not everyone’s got the feel for it. There are of course other ways. You can, in fact, earn money taking online surveys or company offers. That’s right, you can get paid for giving your opinion. Before I began to work at MakeUseOf, I worked this possibility for a time. A 16 year old boy, in Belgium, gathering some extra cash. This only begins to show how ‘open’ this all is. Your age and nationality matter little to none, the only thing you need is an internet connection and some time to spare.

Today I’d like to show you how to tackle this line of ‘work’. The various tips and tricks involving successfully engaging it, and the trustworthy places to go for your survey fix.

Step One ““ Get Real

Before you start trying to earn money taking online surveys, there are a few things you’ll need to realize.

Do not expect to make money in truckloads. You (most probably) won’t get hundreds of dollars a week, thousands a month, whatever the ads try to tell you. True, when you participate in a multitude of high-roll surveys daily you can make a fair amount, but things don’t work out like that in real life.

Those high-roll surveys will be a sporadic surprise, rather than routine, and depending on how many company aims you hit or miss (do you handle the budget at home, or do you live off your parents? Are you a jock or a nerd?), the amount of surveys you receive can differ greatly. Also, when considering the hourly earnings ““ some surveys can take up a lot of time ““ you’re not exactly well-paid.

However, if you enlist for a reasonable number of survey services, you can certainly score some extra bucks. Best of all, you don’t need to be able to actually do things, just have an opinion ““ and everyone has one of those. Just keep in mind that this is a little extra money, instead of your new job.

Step Two ““ Get Ready

You want to be properly set up before you go. Besides cluttering your address with surveys, you’ll encounter some false ““ spamming ““ services if you go venturing on your own.

I highly suggest registering a new email address for the job, to keep pleasure and business apart, so to speak. Go with Gmail (a lightweight and easy interface is advised in days to come, it’ll also be needed to set up our filters) and pick an easy to remember name.

Filters

If you keep the different suppliers separated, it’ll be easier to see where the occasional crap is coming from. Don’t worry, you won’t need to register twenty-odd different addresses, Gmail helps us with that.

1. If actual@gmail.com is your email address, use actual+service@gmail.com for the different services. (e.g. if I were to enlist myselft on GTM, I’d use the mail address simonspam+gtm@gmail.com). As Gmail completely ignores the addition mark and suffix, all emails will arrive in the same inbox, but we’ll be able to separate them by using filters.
2. Creating the actual filter is a lot easier than you’d think. However, you’ll have to repeat the process below for every service. First, press the Create a Filter button at the top of the page.

   

   Next, enter the actual+service@gmail.com as the receiving address, and head to the next step.

   

   You can then choose how to manage this part of your mail. Choose for it to skip your inbox and be added to the service’s label. You’ll be able to access it in a separate folder at any given time, located on the left portion of your screen.

   

If you ever receive spam on one of your pseudo-addresses, you can easily put a halt to all incoming traffic. Just edit the right filter, and select Delete it.

Step Three ““ Get Paid

The final and most simple step. Register on a multitude of (trustworthy) survey suppliers, and wait for the ‘work’ to come. You’ll quickly notice that different sites work different ways, with different systems and paygrades. Usually you’ll need to wait until you’ve reached a certain amount (ten to twenty dollars) until you can cash out ““ sometimes a wiring to your bank account, most often Paypal.

Below you’ll find three of the highest recommended sites, by us and other satisfied users over the internet. All are international.

1.  SurveySavvy

If you’re going for the bucks, you definitely need to enlist for SurveySavvy. Each survey gets assigned a dollar value, between 2 and 20 dollars. Even when you don’t fit any of that month’s surveys, you get automatically entered in the monthly sweepstakes, where they give away fifty 10 dollar prizes.

2.  American Consumer Opinion

Don’t be misguided by the name, they work worldwide. They pay between 4 and 25 dollars per survey, and also automatically enlist you for their monthly sweepstakes. Don’t pass on any surveys you receive.

3.  Harris Polls

One of the most respected survey sites out there ““ both by users and professionally. They award you relatively generous with Hlpoints, which you can redeem for gift cards, prizes, and sweepstakes. They work internationally and “are continuously investigating international laws regarding sweepstakes rules and eligibility”. More information on their questions page.

4+ Other Sites

You’ll want to enlist for as many survey suppliers as possible. Check out Online Paid Surveys for other websites. You can filter them on geographic availability and get more information out of the reviews.

This is where we round up this article. I hope you’ve learned something and will be able to put it to use. If you’ve got any other questions or comments, head straight to the comments section below.

Google Docs, in addition to being a stellar way to write, store and manage your documents and slideshows, is also a fantastically useful way to collect survey data. Basically, you send out a form, people fill it in, and Google reports the documents back to you in an incredibly simple and easy-to-understand fashion.

To get started, sign in at Google Docs. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google Docs account. If you don’t, come out from that rock you live under, boot up the computer, and get yourself a Gmail account. Once you’re logged in, click “New,” and then “Form.”

Give your form a title and an explanation. The explanation field is perfect for explaining what the survey is, or or what people need to know in order to take it properly. Then you start asking questions.

Type the first question into the “Question title” field. Then select whether you want the question to be “text” and have a written response, “paragraph text” which allows for long-form responses, ” multiple choice, scaled (1-10, for example) or a checklist of options.

Fill in all the available answers, choose whether or not to make it a required question (i.e. do they have to answer this one before sending in the survey?), and click “done.”

To get a new question, click the “Add Question” button at the top left of the page. I found it easier though to just duplicate the question by clicking on the two boxes on the right side of the question field, and then change the answers with the formatting already set for me. To each his own, though.

Once you’ve finished creating your form, it’s time to get responses. You can email the form to people, which allows them to fill it out and submit it right from their email ““ this is probably the way to start. You can also, however, embed the form on a website, and let people fill it in that way; this is better if you’re trying to get mass responses, instead of from a select few people.

When you’re emailing the form, Google Docs hooks up to your Gmail contacts, making the process of sending your form a whole lot faster.

Once people start filling out your form, you can see the responses you get. You can view the summary (with graphs charting who chose or wrote what), or as a spreadsheet to view the individual responses. Particularly for surveys or polls, the summary response is great ““ especially since you can always click “see complete responses” and have them available to you immediately.

You can edit your form as often as you want, send it to as many recipients as you want, and use the tracking ability for all its worth. Google Docs makes getting information a whole lot more efficient, and a whole lot simpler for both sides of the equation.

Next time you want to ask a question, poll a group, or figure out who’s coming to the party, give Google Docs a shot. It’s okay, you don’t have to thank me.

How do you get information from people?

While doing my undergraduate studies, sometimes I had to spend hours on creating simple survey forms, hence I know how time consuming and irritating the process can be. Wufoo can help you build good quality online forms, surveys, invitations and etc. It does not end here, service also does a great job at processing and managing forms. You can check out different form examples and have tour though account user interface here and here, respectively. Wufoo provides good all-in-one feature set, letting person not only to create forms but also easily manage and analyze data obtained from it. It is even possible to create complete customer management system.

There are many people who can benefit from this tool considerably. I think it may be especially useful for teachers, students or people involved in a job that requires to carry out regular customer surveys and monitore custumer behaviour. From the wide variety of subscription models available, I assume that the demand for this service exists in many corporate sectors as well. Below I have included excerpt from the Wufoo’s website

Basically, the possibilities are endless, but here’s a short list of things to give you an idea of Wufoo’s versatility:

• Contact Form
• Mailing List
• Survey
• Job Application
• Workshop Registration
• Event Calendar
• Account Management
• Customer Management
• Bug Tracker
• Invitations / RSVP
• Online Orders
• Wedding Planner
• Address Book
• Home Finances
• Classifieds
• Personal Journal
• Quizzes / Tests
• Media Collection

For sign-up you need only email. Service has 5 different pricing options(check here) including free option. Free service option is limited to 3 forms/month, 3 reports/month and 100 entries. This amount should be enough for non-business use. If you need more then that you will need to subscribe to one of the premium accounts priced between $9 to $199/month,depending on the number of forums required.

Another couple of web based companies that offer similar onlne tools are Form Assembly and WyaCracker. If you know any other similar services let me know.