Best Practices for Taking Online Surveys

Completing online surveys is an easy way to earn extra cash or gift cards in your free time. Whether you want to use your extra income to pay your bills or to have some play money, it’s important to make the most of your time when taking online surveys. Learn how to maximize your earning potential and navigate online surveys better with our paid surveys tips and tricks listed below.

Do Your Research

One of our best paid survey tips is to do your homework. Before you even sign up for an online survey website, do your research to legitimate survey site and provides fair compensation. As you investigate, make sure you can answer the following questions.

• How do you get paid?
• How much do you get paid per survey?
• Do online reviews show positive user experiences?
• How often do you get paid?
• How many surveys are regularly available to take?
• Does the company have a privacy policy?
• Is there a signup fee? (Avoid websites with signup fees – they’re likely scams)

If a company doesn’t provide answers to all of the questions listed above, cross it off your list. If they meet the requirements, go ahead and make a profile!

Fill Out Your Profile Completely

Filling out your profile is the best way to ensure you’re matched with the right surveys. Online survey websites like ours use software like our Survey Matching Engine to match users with surveys they qualify for. This saves users from spending time searching for surveys.

Keep Your Profile Updated

Remember to update your profile when a life event occurs – think getting married, having a baby or moving. Following this online survey tip allows us to continue to send you the right surveys. Over time, most survey websites will send you additional questions to fill out for specific topics so we can match you with even more surveys.

Take Online Surveys Seriously

Consider taking online surveys as seriously as you take your day job. When you put in time and effort, the hard work pays off. If you seriously want to earn extra money, you will need to actually put effort into your survey responses and pay attention to what you’re answering. Otherwise, your survey might get rejected – which means you won’t earn anything. Set aside time in your schedule to answer surveys to ensure you can actually walk away with a gift card or cash as often as you need it.

Use Your Time Wisely

One of the best tips for taking online surveys is to use your time wisely. If you speed through your answers, your survey response might get rejected, resulting in no points earned. When your survey indicates a short completion time, the reviewer will find your answers suspicious and likely reject your survey to avoid an outlier in their survey analysis.

Keep Track of Your Earnings

You’re required to pay taxes on the money and gift cards you earn from taking online surveys. When filing your taxes at the end of the year, you must report it as income. If you happen to earn $600 or more with one company, you will need to submit a W-9 form to receive a 1099-MISC form to fill out your taxes. This paid survey tip can save you from a future audit as long as you don’t forget to pay your taxes.

Use Additional Opportunities to Earn Points

One of the most important online survey tips is to take advantage of additional opportunities to earn points. At Branded Surveys, we offer lots of different opportunities for users to earn additional points through daily polls, challenges, referring friends, moving up in our loyalty program and much more.

Choose High Point Surveys

The more points a survey is worth, the sooner you can cash them out for a reward. If you want to make the most of your time, go through all of the surveys offering high points first. This will help you reach your point minimum to cash out much sooner.

Regularly Refresh Your Dashboard or Inbox

If you receive email notifications for new survey matches, refresh your inbox regularly so you can claim a spot in as many available surveys as possible. Refreshing your dashboard will also show your most recent survey matches.

With these tips for taking online surveys, your earning potential just got much higher. Start taking online surveys today with Branded Surveys. Sign up today to get matched with your first survey!