For People wishing to Make Money Online, which is better: Paid Surveys, or Affiliate Marketing?
What are Paid Surveys?
Paid surveys are surveys that you can take online, for which a Company will pay you on average between $2 to $10 for taking – although up to $75 has been claimed when joining a focus group. Sometimes the company does not pay out cash, but gives you the chance to win prizes instead. In general, they can take between 5 minutes and 30+minutes to do.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
An affiliate marketer is someone who affiliates himself with a seller and drives potential customers to that seller’s website by means of online marketing techniques. If the seller makes a sale from that potential customer, the affiliate marketer gets a percentage of that sale as commission. Potential earnings from affiliate marketing range from $20 – $2000+ per day.
Which is Better for Someone Looking to Make Money?
Paid Surveys are quite simple to do, even for someone who is not totally computer literate. This is why Paid Surveys are so attractive to most people.
Affiliate marketing can also be very easy for a beginner to do, as there are easy methods to advertise that don’t require a high computer literacy which can be utilized. Take article writing, or blogging for example. It takes 2 minutes to sign up for a blog or to join an online article submissions site, and then it’s just typing your recommendations (doing your marketing) from there.
The reality is that whilst Paid Surveys guarantee some money for your effort, the amount that you will “earn” is not overly much for the amount of time put in. The biggest factor against Paid Surveys in my mind though, is that the income generated by them has a limited life. Once you have contacted all the Companies in your list and once you have done the surveys for them, barring a few new ones they might have every now and then, you cannot expect to make that much money from them in the future. There is no way to increase your earnings.
Becoming an Affiliate Marketer on the other hand, will enable you to build your “business” constantly. And once you have things in place for a product, very often they can be left to run by themselves for a while, making money for you whilst you focus on a new product. In this way you can double, triple, or quadruple your money without doubling, tripling or quadrupling your time and effort.
Another thing to be aware of with regards to Paid Surveys is that they probably won’t work for you if you are not in the US, or possibly in Europe. The majority of companies who require surveys are in the US with a few in Europe and they therefore mostly want people from the US or Europe to do their surveys. So even if a Survey product says that you can make money wherever you are, I wouldn’t advise this to a non-US citizen. There may be a few companies who want international people, but they will be the minority.
