Surveys and Blogging - have they had their day??

Lindacelt

Hello everyone and a happy new year.

I used surveys sites, well known ones and I find them a waste of time. You can spend 40 mins to 1 hour on a survey and not get any monetary payment, just a few points.  You would have to spend hours to make only a little money. It's sneaky. You are working for free basically. Why cant they just pay you £5 an hour?

Blogging used to be a good way to make money...takes a while but it is possible. But not now, there are so many 'bots' and false blog posts its a minefield. 

A lot of the suggestions are out of date and 10 years old! ebay and Amazon is still ok but not as easy or lucrative as it was 5 years ago, people want things for free practically!!

I don't want to sell things to people that they don't need just to make a buck, I don't want to drop ship a lot of tat and try to sell it on. 

I used to advertise my admin, freelance writing and organisational skills on Fiver but even that is no longer easy. People want a tremendous amount of work for a very small amount of money. 

If anyone out there has new ways to make some extra money - I'll help create a new, current list. 

Many thanks

Lindacelt. 

JoeCrystal

Lindacelt said:

Hello everyone and a happy new year.

I used surveys sites, well known ones and I find them a waste of time. You can spend 40 mins to 1 hour on a survey and not get any monetary payment, just a few points.  You would have to spend hours to make only a little money. It's sneaky. You are working for free basically. 

Many thanks

Lindacelt. 

Generally speaking, it takes me on average 20 mins or so to do the surveys. I am not sure which survey sites you use for that specific survey. I do generally get £150 or more per month from a mixture of Crowdology, Nielsen, Opinium, Panelbase, Populuslive, Prolific, Qmee and Yougov off the top of my head. Having said that, it takes a lot of time and effort to do it but for someone like me who do it in the early hours and the evenings, I do not mind.

adamp87

I think they have their place just don’t expect to facilitate a working income with them. Trick is find the right site and having the time.

sometimes you get filtered around because you don’t match the criteria and earn much less 

mikep22

I mean I'm not really sure what you are expecting with a lot of this stuff....

Surveys I dont see a major difference with regarding what I earn from when I started 4-5 years ago - but what I would happily bet on is that there are many more people that are doing them, so therefore you may get less individually. You are clearly not working for free but the expectation that you are going to get £5 an hour is and has always been unrealistic - part of the reason sites like Prolific are so good is they insist on this, but then you get far fewer surveys. 

I suspect ebay is not as popular as it once was, there are many other places to sell items these days and ebay can be quite expensive, eg I recently sold a TV on there for £120, of which £12 went to ebay....had I done it on facebook it wouldve been £0 (but not the security). 

Have to be honest its coming across that youre throwing the toys out the pram, which is ironic as you are also moaning about people wanting stuff for free. Things evolve, there will always be new and more progressive ways to make a few quid.

Scorpioangel

I have to say that I found survey sites to be a waste of time; 99% screen out either at the beginning or after wasting 10 or more minutes. 

I signed up for several in April 2018 after I left my job and in the next couple of years that i was actively participating regularly I amassed about £30 spread over all of them and £12 of that was on panel opinion. I used 20 cogs, that took 3 years to complete to get £44.

The biggest con that these sites have come up with though is advertising them on job sites like Linkedin, indeed and several of the agency sites and pretending that they are actually real jobs, totally dishonest advertisements but the people who hold the ads don't care because they get paid.

yksi

I don't know if there is a "correct" reply to this thread, but there are definitely sites that pay a pittance and sites that pay... well... just ok. As far as surveys go, these ones never/very rarely screen you out:
YouGov, Prolific, PopulusLive, Testable Minds, and the essentially-passive Qmee browser widget. If you only do these, £5 an hour is easy, but you won't actually get many surveys. Podengo is a "bricks and mortar" researcher that does Zoom interviews and pays very well if you are lucky enough to get in - £25 an hour is fairly standard.

These ones are the easiest to reach payout:
Prolific, Qmee surveys, Crowdology, Streetbees, Swagbucks, e-Rewards (Nectar only) and "cash for receipts" programmes like ShopPrize, Storewards, Shoppix, Huyu, Snapmyeats (the best paid of them all but you have to answer a survey each time). 

If you put real effort in to surveys you'll earn somewhere around £3.00 an hour. But there's a ceiling, and the more you do, the less you'll get paid per hour, because most providers are aggregators, that is, they're serving you someone else's survey and taking a cut for recruiting you to do it. As you will start to see a huge majority of surveys come from a select few sites, and the same surveys are appearing on multiple sites - you begin to get screened out more often.

I'm a member of about 20 more survey sites but many of them have nothing but others' surveys for rubbish pay, or even aggregators for other aggregators. This can lead to fabulous offers like 9p for a 30min survey that just redirects six times then crashes after 29 minutes or never comes back to the site you started from, so you never get paid. Those ones I only do if I have time to kill or am seriously bored