http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/ Aussie Survey Blog en-us Nucleus CMS v3.24 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/ http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=18
The great thing about doing surveys, besides the extra cash, is that we are doing something to actively affect the decisions of major businesses around the globe. I personally like that I get to express my views on corporate use of environmental factors in a way that’s quick, easy and meaningful.

Unfortunately, a thousand passionate people with placards outside the offices of a company acting irresponsibly toward the environment will probably do little to change that company’s ways… but a thousand people telling a company they’re acting irresponsibly, through the subtlety of well considered survey responses, can actually change the strategies and actions of companies almost overnight.

As part of my day job, I’ve been around a board table when the results of major surveys are presented to a business, and seen the surprised expressions on exec’s faces as the survey results are presented and various pennies start dropping for them. Survey results are meaningful, and they can strike the fear of God into a table-full of suits.

In the case of environmental responsibility, people’s perceptions of brand are incredibly important to a company, and if a company fears their brand is being seen as irresponsible, they’ll usually do something to fix it.

The moral is that next time you’re doing a survey, don’t just rush through it without considering whether there might be some issues in relation to the product, or company, that you have a chance to highlight with your responses. This is particularly relevant if you’re invited to input text comments. For example, simply commenting to a car company that you’d be ‘more interested in a particular model if it was available as a hybrid’ is the sort of information that can end up being quoted by researchers in qualitative segments of market research reports.

Remember that your voice is louder than most, so while you’re earning a couple of extra bucks, why not try to do some good for the world as well.


]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=18 Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:30:24 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=17 I noticed a few days ago that Pureprofile had changed it’s position on payment timing, so that it will now take at least 21 working days to process transactions.

Isn’t it a little bizarre that the survey participant community is made to wait over 4 weeks for an electronic transfer of $25 and yet we’re still happily complete surveys? I doubt I’d get my lazy self to wash a stack of dishes for $25 if I had to wait a month to see the cash!

I remember sitting in psychology lectures and learning about the power of an instant reward on sustaining a behaviour. The best survey companies seem to have a pretty good grasp of this concept. I figure the reason most of us are ok with waiting eons for a few bucks isn’t because we’re hanging out for $25 to feed the kids. It’s that the reward of money is substituted very effectively for ‘credits, ‘points’ or even digital representations of a few cents that we’ll have to accumulate for weeks, and then wait months to see actualised.

The important bit is that we see those points change after doing a survey, we feel we’ve earned something (even when it’s just a few cents worth of reward) and we’ll happily do the next survey that comes along.

Don’t get me wrong, surveys can earn participants great money, but you’ll type your fingers to nubs before you’ll earn as much as you would from a day job.

So what’s the point? I guess I’m just writing so we, as participants, keep the survey companies honest in terms of giving us our cash within a fair amount of time. Remember those credits you get after taking a survey are a little hollow if you have to wait insane amounts of time before you get the cash they represent!

… and if you’re the type who’d happily wash that stack of dishes, even if you weren’t going to get paid for it for a year, that means you’re a specific type of person. Marketers generally rely on surveys getting to a cross-section of personality types. If a survey company only attracts participants who are of a certain personality type, its likely to skew the participant populations, and therefore results, of the surveys these companies are being hired to administer. A big no-no in the survey game!

… end rant… just keep them honest, eh.
]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=17 Mon, 27 Aug 2007 18:46:50 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=16
I have to say that AW Surveys smelled fishy from the get-go. From what I could make out, it seemed much of my payment was going to come from signing up to other sites. Hmmmm… so much for thinking I was going to get paid for doing surveys, more research could be a good idea!

A bit of googling soon showed that people around the world felt that AW Surveys had the survey equivalent of a few skeletons in the closet, a couple of fresh bodies in the trunk and a dodgy uncle that you don’t leave alone with the kids at Christmas.

The big dirt is that AW once closed its doors on members and then re-opened with members losing their previous earnings. Naughty-naughty!!!!

The other dirt is that a lot of members feel it’s possible to get reasonably close to the $75 required to get paid before the ‘survey’ action dries up and you can only reach the target through referrals. If this is the case, it’s not much good to anyone who doesn’t either run an unscrupulous web site or want to test their friendships by referring people they know to AW Surveys.

The final dirt is that you have to earn $75 to be paid $50 through Paypal!!! A $25 admin fee is charged! If other companies listed at Aussie Surveys That Pay can make Paypal transfers free of charge, I’m sure AW could pay through Paypal without pocketing 1/3 of what you’re telling someone they’ve earned.


I purposely haven’t linked to AW as I consciously don’t link to sites I wouldn’t join myself (or in this case, have cancelled my membership). It’s my little way of keeping myself honest :-) . If you’re a masochist you’ll have no problems googling them, unless they close shop again.]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=16 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:12:12 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=15
I was trialling IE7 a while back and started noticing that a few survey companies didn’t seem to be crediting my account. It took me a few unpaid surveys to put two & two together (I’m not all that bright). On investigation it seemed that the install of IE7 had disabled cookies.

With a bit of research, I found if you’re not getting credited for surveys, you need to ensure that 1st party cookies are allowed, and that 3rd party cookies are at least prompted for (or allowed if the prompts become too much of a pain).

You can check your browser’s help file if you have trouble working out where you need to be to change your cookie settings (search ‘enable cookies’ or something similar).

It’s also a good idea to delete your existing cookies in case there’s anything sitting in them that’s skipping over payment scripts.

Depending on which survey site you’re having troubles with, other browser settings that could be causing glitches include:
- Not having Java Permissions enabled
- Having cache settings that don’t refresh every time you revisit a website

Remember to always close your browser and then restart it to make sure the new settings have been activated. Also ensure your pc’s security by running Ad-Aware, Spybot or a similar free malware checker regularly.

Good Luck!
]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=15 Tue, 17 Jul 2007 06:06:02 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=14
It’s an annoying and familiar story. Obviously there’s just a glitch in the coding, or something may have timed you out along the way, but that’s cold comfort when you you're promised a reward that you don't receive.

I’ve always gotten in touch with the listed contact from the survey site (either manually or through a feedback form). I politely explain the issue, giving a survey number or pasted link, the amount I believe I was entitled to and my account login. The response I get back has ranged from excellent to infuriating.

In the blue corner you’ve got Lightspeed, who have always credited me with my missing points within a couple of days… cool!

In the red corner, Valued Opinions, who I generally have a high regard for, responded by apologising for the inconvenience (1/2 an hour of inconvenience in this case), and saying they’d credit my account with $1. Not so cool. This was a $5 survey which they now had no intention of paying me for… to add insult to injury I’m yet to see the token $1 after a few weeks, AND my usual torrent of surveys from Valued Opinions seems to have completely dried up. In reality, the last point is probably just coincidence… I kinda doubt they’d blacklist me as a troublemaker just for reporting that I got diddled a few bucks.

So what do you do?
I think you have to raise the issue. If too many people let it go, survey companies will be less likely to work out why it happened and to stop it from happening again.

How can you keep track of how many points you have with each survey company to begin with?
I keep a simple spreadsheet with the name of the survey company and my last points or cash total. I open it when I do my 1st survey of the day and update the totals with my new points tallies. That might seem like some kind of uber-dorky massive pain in the rear, but it’s saved me a good $50 or so in non-payments that I questioned and received. Seeing the totals also helps me realise how much I’m making, and that this whole survey gig is actually worth the time we put into it.]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=14 Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:11:20 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=13
I've been getting a lot of spam along these lines and I just want to say that I HATE when companies try to get people to pay upfront to receive online surveys!!!

Marketing companies paying survey sites big dollars to rake in participants, there's plenty of money to go around without people having to hand over their cash to get a piece of the action. I've seen companies pay $20,000+ for a fairly quick and dirty report of survey findings for around 100 participants.

Knowing survey companies pay approx $1 to $5 to online subjects, someone's getting far too much dough in the middle to be asking for those participants to pay upfront for the privilege of participating!

It’s pure theft I tells ya! Theft and downright rudeness you'll never see on Aussie Surveys That Pay :-)
]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=13 Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:10:23 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=12
I’m not sure who else this guy was signed up with, but he reckoned that apart from his $2.5K win, he’d only seen $6 worth of rewards after doing surveys for 8 months! My partner made $6 in 15 minutes from one Valued Opinions survey just yesterday!

All I can say is… student dude, get thee to aussiesurveysthatpay.com for some tips on putting together some decent dollars!!!
]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=12 Fri, 29 Jun 2007 06:57:05 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=11 Emailcash have kicked off their coupon program. I can't say I'm too impressed with their 'Beta Release'. Looks to me like you pay e-cash for the kind of vouchers you'd get for free on the back of shop-a-dockets or in your junk snail mail.
They're asking for feedback at the moment, so I'll be leaving those thoughts with them.

Add to that I seem to have an uncanny habit of being served by a disgruntled francisee every time I have a coupon for somewhere like Subway, where at my last visit I was informed with a snarl "I wish head office would ask us before they started giving out freebies to everyone!" :-D Nice!

I don't want to be too down on them, because I do think Emailcash is all-up, an excellent site. However, the premise of effectively paying for promotional coupons is a little flawed.

]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=11 Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:45:06 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=9 Aussie Surveys That Pay has quietly launched the Aussie Survey Forum, so the online survey community has a dedicated space to get together and share info, tips, survey site addys etc.

Content will be building over time from these humble beginnings. We'd love to have your help making it a success by posting opinions on your favourite (or least favourite) survey sites.

See you in there!]]> General http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=9 Tue, 26 Jun 2007 05:41:54 +1000 http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=7
I'm naturally holding my breath with anticipation... a win wouldn't pay off my mortgage, but it would change my opinions of ACOP. With 44 chances out of however many people they've sent this survey to internationally, I don't like either my chances of winning or their chances of convincing me it was worth my time to sign up in the first place.

Yeah, I've grown to be a little cynical of ACOP. I figure that any survey site without a member login option (and that doesn't address that fact in their faq) has to be a little dodgy.

...so foregive the lack of a link to ACOP in this post, I don't think I'd be doing either of us any favours by refering you there. :-/]]> Survey News http://aussiesurveysthatpay.com/blog/index.php?itemid=7 Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:41:15 +1000