Progam:

Survey Money Machines may look like another paid survey scam site at first glance, but it’s actually an entirely free program to join. However, it’s really nothing special or different than any other survey site.

I’m quite familiar with online survey companies such as this one, so I’m going to do a quick Survey Money Machines review. I’ll go through the process of how it works, discuss the pros and cons, and help you decide if it’d be a good fit for you.

If not, I can provide an alternative solution for those looking to make extra cash online. (See my #1 recommendation here).

How does Survey Money Macines work?

You won’t be taking surveys directly via the Survey Money Machines site; rather it’s simply a database that provides listings to a bunch of companies where you’ll be able to take surveys from. You’ll need to register seperately for each company you want to take surveys with, though, and you’ll end up giving out a lot of your personal information left and right if you aren’t careful.

Basically all these survey job board sites are all the same with only slight variations of listed companies.

SMM actually did provide a rather large database; when I signed up they gave me 45 different companies to choose from!

These are companies such as Swagbucks, Ipsos I-Say, YouGov, National Consumer Panel, Clearvoice Surveys, MintVine, Opinion Outpost, and Inbox Dollars, just to name a few. But a closer examination on my part revealed not everything listed within the database to be completely legit. Some of them weren’t even related to online surveys but were actually scams!

WARNING!!! Some of the websites listed are not survey sites at all. I ran into two completely irrelevant sites, Project Payday and Real Writing Jobs.

Project Payday is a CPA freebies site where you make money by completing CPA offers and referring others. It isn’t really a scam, but it is NOT an online survey site.

Real Writing Jobs is supposedly a membership site where inspiring writers can find legit freelance jobs, but I’ve previously joined and reviewed the program and it’s a total scam.

What survey companies should you sign up for?

All of the suggested survey websites are not created equal. Some are very professional and strictly business, while others are overly promotional and spammy (or downright scams!!!).

The ones I liked best:

• I-Say
• YouGov
• Swagbucks
• Inbox Dollars

These all offer very clean, professional and easy to take surveys that don’t send you to the moon with additional offers. All of them work by earning you points to cash out for some type of gift card (such as Amazon or Walmart)  or PayPal deposit.

I’d stay away from:

• Big Bucks Survey – VERY spammy and slaps you with an overwhelming amount of promotions while you try and take the surveys.
• Media Insiders Panel – not really a survey site at all. They pay you to install an app on your tablets and/or smartphones which allows them to spy on you!
• Project Payday – CPA freebie offer site, not related to online surveys at all
• Real Writing Jobs – total scam

I noticed the trend with some of the survey companies is to sneakily incorporate CPA offers into their questionares…

For example, you’re answering a survey regarding your tastes for restaurants. You come across a question like “Which is better – McDonald’s or Burger King?“; upon answering a new screen will pop up and take you to a form to fill that claims you’ll get a $50 gift card to your choice of McDonald’s or Burger King. After you select your choice and fill out your basic information (name, address, birth date, phone number) you’ll be redirected to a 3 step process you need to complete to get your gift card.

This is where it gets sneaky. Each of the offers you need to complete will require you to register for paid access to different services. For example, creating an account with freester.com; become a member of the disney book club; or sign up for a 30 day trial to Gamefly.

Within the terms and conditions you’re told that you must not cancel any more than 1 of the accounts before the first 30 days if you want to remain eligible to recieve the gift card. So you’ll have to stay a paying member of these sites to even qualify.

You need to be very careful when a survey redirects you to additional offers, because it happens all the time. Before you know it, you’re in over your head with accounts to 40 different companies you didn’t even want in the first place! And as for actually recieving the gift card rewards you’re promised for signing up for the offers, that’s another story…

How much money can you make with Survey Money Machines?

They claim $50 an hour or $15 – $30 per survey, but that is a load of crap. Realistically you can expect probably around $2 – $3 for every hour you put in.

While they do make it quite clear it isn’t a get rich quick program, they go on to claim you can expect to make quite a bit per every survey. They tell you that all of the companies will pay you $15 – $30 per survey, but you’ll only be able to fill out a couple surveys per week from each company.  Therefore, you must sign up to at least 10 companies to make sure you’re getting the most opportunities possible.

First of all, most of the surveys you encounter won’t pay anywhere near that amount. I’ve signed up with many different survey companies and taken lots of surveys, and the ones that do offer more are only with certain companies and usually it requires signing up for a service first to qualify (meaning you must invest some money).

It may be something like signing up for services to a particular insurance company or book club so you can provide a fair assessment. With this initial investment required, that bigger reward is much less worth it.

Let me give you a more realistic view of the type of income you’ll earn from online surveys…

I spent about 2 hours the other day taking various surveys from I-Say and ended up with 500 points. Now, the way that I-Say operates (as well as several other survey companies) is each survey earns you a certain amount of points. When you accumulate a mimimum amount, say 1,000 points, you can cash out for prizes such as gift cards or Paypal deposits.

Cashing out 2,000 points from I-Say gets you $20 PayPal funds. Seeing as it took me 2 hours to earn 500 points, I can figure it’ll take about 8 hours to earn the 2,000. Earning 20 dollars for 8 hours of work is only $2.50 per hour!

And that wasn’t the first time I’ve ever taken online surveys, either. These companies are all very simliar and you do have to put in several hours of survey work just to get a few extra bucks.

Here’s a glance at some surveys for Inbox Dollars:

As you can see, that’s only $4.75 for 1.5 hours of work!

Pros:

• Some of the survey sites recommended are completely legit and provide you with clean, professional surveys.
• You can definitely earn some extra cash by taking surveys.
• It’s relatively easy and requires no particular skills.

Cons:

• While you can earn extra money, it takes a lot of time and you end up working for just a few bucks an hour (way less than minimum wage)!
• It’s a waste of time if you don’t actually enjoy it.
• Every company has a minimum payment threshold. If you sign up for many different companies, it’ll take a lot more effort to reach the minimum payouts for each one.
• Some companies within the SMM databaseare overly promotional and really spammy. You’ll be up to your eyeballs in pop ups and offers before you can finish a simple questionnaire.
• Certain companies will make you sign up for services or buy products before you can complete a survey, which requires an initial investment.
• You’re giving out a lot of personal information, sometimes even your social security number is required
• They claim they don’t spam you, but your inbox will be filled with spam emails before you know it and your phone will be blowing up with telemarketer calls. Create a seperate email account speficially for online surveys if you want to get seriously into it. Try to avoid any offers that require a phone number as well.

My final opinion – Is it worth it?

Survey Money Machines is only a database that provides you with links to survey companies and nothing more. While some of the suggested survey sites are pretty cool and a fun way to earn some extra cash, other recommended companies are actually scams, which really makes this program lose a lot of credibility in my eyes.

Remember to be careful when it comes to giving out your personal information – create a new email address for online survey companies and try to avoid offers that require a phone number. Also, don’t go too crazy when it comes to signing up for these companies; be selective and only join the best ones. I-Say, YouGov, Inbox Dollars and Swagbucks are my personal recommendations.

If you genuinely enjoy taking online surveys, it’s a hobby that can pay a few bucks. But only you can be the judge of whether the little money is worth it or not.

If you are looking for a way to make consistent, reliable income online there’s really only one program I can truly recommend to beginners. It’ll teach you how to build a website around your passions, interests or hobbies and actually earn real money doing it.

Check Out My Top Recommendation Here

Program:

Verdit: LEGIT!

Slicethepie – What’s the Deal!?

What exactly is Slicethepie? Well, it’s basically like a community project – it matches up unsigned artists with music fans, and pays people to review new songs. It’s great for new artists, because it allows them additional exposure and helpful music critique, and it’s cool for reviewers, because it gives them a chance to get paid while listening to new tunes.  It’s really a win-win situation.

Oh, and if you’re still wondering “is Slicethepie legit?” – yes. They really will pay people for reviewing music!

How does the process of reviewing music work?

When signing up, you’re asked to rate different genres of music on a “Love to Hate” scale, so in theory they play more of that music for you. However I find they will push all sorts of music your way, so be prepared to rate a variety of tunes. If you really don’t feel comfortable rating a song, you can always skip it.

Here’s how it works – you’re given the task of listening to a song, writing a review, and then ranking it on a 1 to 10 scale. You have to wait 90 seconds after the song starts playing to submit the review, but you can take as long as you want to actually write it out.

A look at the basic screen:

You have to be thoughtful and varied with your reviews – they won’t let you say the same thing over and over again in a copy/paste fashion. Even if you write out similiar reviews, you’ll find that after a few you’ll get stuck with a warning saying “that review looks familiar! try writing something original!”

You’re given an “energy” bar that starts out with 10 energy points. Each review you submit costs you 1 energy, but you regain a new energy every 3 minutes. I suppose this is to prevent people from submitting reviews too fast, but I find it replenishes to 10 rather quickly and never got anywhere near 0! (but maybe I am just slow..)

How much do you get paid per review?

Everyone starts off with a base salary of 2 cents per review, but if you submit lots of helpful reviews you can work your way up to a base salary of 4 cents. That sounds ridiculously low, but that is just the base rate – the more detailed, helpful and high quality review you can provide them, the more you will be paid. I never was only paid just 2 cents – here I reviewed probably about 10 songs and got paid around 15 cents per review. I did take my time and tried to write something helpful and constructive for each song.

But even after reviewing songs for an entire hour, (and at 15 cents per song) I was only paid $1.46. I wasn’t reviewing the entire time, I stopped in between here and there – but for the most part I was pretty focused on the reviews.

Update – I find after doing it for awhile, it does flow more naturally and it’s easier to write varied reviews. I spent probably about 45 minutes rating some more songs and my balance shot up a little –

It actually takes time to think about the music and write something of quality  – you can’t write a review that just says, “Cool tune, bro“, or “Man that sucks monkeys…“

See, that is what happens! You have to write something of substanance for them to accept it. You really need to have a good grasp of music termonology here.

Something I found really annoying about their system is many times when you submit the review, it’ll tell you that your score (the rating you gave it on a 1-10 scale) will vary significantly from the review you gave. It’s obviously a computer system picking up on it, but it isn’t very sophisticated. It’ll scan your review for particular words and if you have any negative words within the review but end up giving it a better score as a whole, like above a 7 – it’ll freak out and think you’re review doesn’t make sense.

For example, if I talk about how the song is amazing, the singing is great and has a fun melody and beat, but mention the lyrics are a bit too repetitive, and end up giving the song a 7 as a whole, it’ll pop up with the “the rating you gave varies significantly from your review” message. Obviously my review is in more detail, but you probably get the point. Their system thinks it can scan a review and connect it to a rating, but it is horrible at doing its job.

Then, I end up getting this email:

We hope you’re enjoying reviewing. We’ve noticed your reviews can be quite disjointed which makes them difficult to read. Please note that your reviews go straight to artists and so we’d encourage you to write lengthy, detailed and constructive reviews that comment on a number of aspects of the track. For example: beat, melody, instruments, vocals, production, commercial potential etc. The following article was written by one of our scouts and will help you to improve your reviews:http://chasmac.hubpages.com/hub/slicethepie-reviews.

I try to write the best reviews I can, but they’re obviously very picky about the reviews they recieve. This makes it really difficult to do it if you don’t actually have a passion and appreciation for all types of music. It also makes the few cents you get for the review almost not even worth it. You really do need to put in a bit of effort to your reviews and it can be very time consuming.

SlicethePie Payment Proof

Here’s a screenshot of Slicethepie delivering my payment into Paypal. It probably took me about 2 hours total to earn the $10. Like I said, this is not a way to get rich; but it is a fun thing to do to earn some extra cash.

Note: Once you cash out, your reviews are sent to be reviewed by an actual human and can take up to 5 days to transfer to your Paypal account. I would make sure you’re not writing anything inappropriate or cruel because you may risk them rejecting your reviews and not paying you for all the hard work you did.

My final opinion….

Overall this site is awesome and it can be a really enjoyable activity. What’s important to remember here is that this site is for people who appreciate music and are interesting in helping out new bands – not just those looking for a paycheck!

Sure, the extra money is cool, and it can be a really fun hobby for music lovers willing to help out bands with some constructive critisicm. However it’s very time consuming and it’s a lot more in depth than just listening to music. You can’t expect to turn on the music, let it play in the background while you play around on Facebook/Youtube … You really need to dedicate yourself to the song and write the review as you listen to make it helpful and worthwile. You also need a fairly good grasp of music and the vocabulary involved – so if you don’t really know any technical aspects of music, you can do some research to write better reviews.

Go rate some sweet new tunes at Slicethepie!

If you enjoy the tasks, the money is really just a bonus. Otherwise it isn’t worth your time if you want to do it just for the paycheck.  Unless $1.46 per hour is worth it to you…

Wendy,
Owner, SurvivingAfterCollege.com

Want to be more productive with your time?

Swagbucks is an online rewards program in which you can join for free and earn points (they call these “swagbucks”) by doing various online activities. Once you’ve accumulated so many of these points you can cash them in for prizes – mostly gift cards to different places such as Amazon, Walmart, or PayPal (among other choices).

How does Swagbucks work?

Anyone can easily join by entering an email address, and it’s 100% free. (There isn’t even a catch!)

Once you’re a member, there are many different ways you can earn swagbucks. The good thing about it is in many cases, you can earn these swagbucks for stuff you are already doing – such as online shopping, playing games, and searching the web.

Ways to Earn Swagbucks:

Games

There are MANY online games you can play to earn Swagbucks – literally hundreds. A lot of them are free to play, but most of them will only earn you a couple of swag points each time you play – and many times you won’t earn any at all. You’ll have to spend A LOT of time playing games to accumulate any significant amount of these Swagbucks. I found the games annoying to play because you have to sit through a very long advertisement each and every time you start a new game.

Some games you can pay money and will be guaranteed to earn a lot more chunk of swag – however if you spend money JUST to get the Swagbucks it’s kind of pointless.

They also have game tournaments which you can gamble some of your existing swagbucks for a chance to earn a bigger payout.

Surveys/Daily Polls

You can fill out online surveys to accumulate points, too.  However as with any online survey,  you may not qualify for the majority of them and they can be rather time consuming.

Swagbucks also puts out daily polls which are super simple and only take a quick second – you only will earn 1 swagbuck for each poll, though.

Online Shopping

This is great if you do shopping online. Simply go to any store you want to shop at through the Swagbucks site and you’ll earn a certain number of Swagbucks for every dollar you spend! They have a lot of popular stores and chances are, if you already shop online, you’re probably already doing your shopping from one of these retailers! Amazon.com, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Groupon, and LOTS more.

You can earn anywhere from 1 – 12 Swagbucks on the dollar, depending where you shop.

Searching the Web

This is probably the easiest way to earn Swagbucks – all you have to do is use their search engine instead of going to Google/Yahoo/Bing.  You can easily set the Swagbucks search engine as your default so you don’t forget to use it each time. The bad part about the search feature is you don’t earn every time you search – it’s hit or miss. The first time I used it they immediately hit me with 50 swagbucks, however after that I have no since earned any from searches.

Another reason I don’t like this or use it is because I much prefer Google search and this is definitely NOT Google search!

Watching Videos

They have what they call  “Swagbucks TV” where you can watch all sorts of videos encompassing anything from news stories to cooking tutorials. It’s sort of like Swagbucks version of Youtube (only not nearly as good). The more you watch, the more your Swagbucks meter fills up – and each time it fills up you earn 3 points.

 CPA Offers

These are things like signing up for credit cards, free trials, joining mailing lists, etc. Most of these require a credit card and it’s only a good idea if you’re already wanting the service or product you’re signing up for – I wouldn’t complete these for the sole purpose of earning some Swagbucks because you’re going to have to spend money to get them.

…plus MORE ways

Cashing in Swagbucks – what are the rewards?

You need to earn a lot of Swagbucks before you can cash in – you need at least 450 SB for a $5 gift card, 2,500 SB for a $25 gift card, and 5,000 SB for $50 gift card. You can get these gift cards for places like Amazon, Walmart, or PayPal.

If you’re already doing these things online and willing to do it through the Swagbucks site, you can earn some extra cash with this system

If you’re already doing things like shopping online, web searching, or playing games – you can do it all through Swagbucks and accumulate points for these rewards. However it can be quite time consuming and the rewards aren’t all that great. Assuming you do it consistently, it might take you a few months to accumulate enough to get a $25 or maybe a $50 gift card!

For extra cash, it’s alright. Don’t ever expect to get rich or make any substantial amount of money this way, though!

So yes, Swagbucks DOES work. Is it a waste of time? Probably.

Join for free at www.swagbucks.com.

If you’re looking for ways to make actual money – I’d recommend checking out my #1 ranked product.

Any questions or comments? Please drop them down below!