Paid Survey Sites

I am sorry for the long posts so far, I will try to keep them short and to the point. My first endeavor into making money online started with paid surveys. Some of the ads I saw for this would lead you to believe you can make a living doing paid surveys. I really don't think this is possible even with the legitimate companies. I do think you can make some money doing this though. I researched the heck out of this idea, and here is what I personally found out.

There are many survey companies that sell groups of survey sites for you to join. They usually claim to give you access to over 300 or more survey sites. They also charge for this. They may or may not work, I don't know for sure because am not going to hand out 40 or 50 bucks to find out. I will tell you though that out of hundreds of survey sites I looked into, I could only find about 50 I could find any background to at all. 300 legitimate companies, I don't think so.

I base this information on three items I researched, survey organizations, forum posts from people that have been paid and I believe them, and the sites themselves. First of all there are 4 different organizations you can go to to investigate survey companies....

1. CASRO- Council of American Survey Research Organizations...this site is somewhat hard to find things, but if you look long enough, you can find out a lot of info.
2. CMOR- Council for Marketing and Opinion Research...another good site to find information on a survey company.
3. MRA- Marketing and Opinion Research...you have to look hard, but the information is there.
4. TTRA- Travel and Tourism Research Association...less information here, but still valuable.

I also joined several "work from home" type forums, to get a real person perspective. I am not sure if I can post them here or not, I will have to look into the Blogger terms and policy's. I will update later.

I also went directly to the survey sites themselves. All I had to do is go to the Terms and Agreements page, and read, read, and read some more. Many of my proposed sites dropped off here. Its very wordy and boring, but I would recommend always read these. I never ever used to do so, now I do and it has saved me more than once.

That brings me to the list of sites that I joined. Every site had to meet one of three criteria minimum.
1. Be a member of one of the 4 survey organizations.
2. Be mentioned by 5 or more people on forums stating they were actually paid by them.
3. I investigated the site personally and found it to be legitimate. ( I will declare this in my list )...I don't want to mislead anyone, so for these I advise you do some research also.

I came up with 42 sites that I joined for FREE!!!! Don't ever take your credit card out of your wallet. If a site asks for your credit card number, even if they say it will not be charged...run away fast. I have alphabetized this list instead of how it pays out. You will find that every person because of who they are, age, location, interests, can make more money on some sites than others. It will all depend on your profile, therefore a "Top 10" or "Top 100" is of no use to the individual.

****NOTICE****
This is my list and results so far. I have earned points and cash in many of the sites but I have not cashed out in any of them. Some have credited my PayPal account though. I am not going to cash out for a while so I can force myself to save the money. I started signing up Jan 2, 2009.