For people who want to make money online, which is better: paid surveys or affiliate marketing?
What are paid surveys?
Paid surveys are surveys you can take online, for which a company will pay you on average between $2 and $10 to respond, although up to $75 has been claimed when joining a focus group. Sometimes the company does not pay cash, but instead gives you the opportunity to win prizes. In general, they can take anywhere from 5 minutes to more than 30 minutes.
What’s affiliates marketing?
An affiliate marketer is someone who affiliates with a vendor and drives potential customers to that vendor’s website through online marketing techniques. If the seller makes a sale from that lead, the affiliate marketer gets a percentage of that sale as a commission. Potential earnings from affiliate marketing range from $20 to $2000 or more per day.
What is better for someone looking to make money?
Paid surveys are pretty simple to do, even for someone who is not computer literate. This is the reason 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 of advertising that do not require great computer literacy that can be used. Take for example writing articles or blogging. It takes 2 minutes to sign up for a blog or join an online article submission site, and then you just have to write your recommendations (doing your marketing) from there.
The reality is that while Paid Surveys do guarantee some money for your effort, the amount you’ll “earn” isn’t much for the amount of time invested. However, in my opinion, the most important factor against paid surveys is that the income generated by them has a limited life. Once you’ve contacted all the companies on your list, and once you’ve done the surveys for them, barring a few new ones they may have from time to time, you can’t 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 allow you to constantly build your “business.” And once you have things in place for a product, very often they can be left to run on their own for a while, making money for you while you focus on a new product. This way you can double, triple, or quadruple your money without doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your time and effort.
Another thing to keep in mind regarding Paid Surveys is that they probably won’t work for you if you’re not in the US or possibly Europe. Most of the companies that request surveys are located in the US and some in Europe and therefore mostly want people from the US or Europe to take their surveys. So even if a survey product says you can make money wherever you are, I wouldn’t recommend it to a non-US citizen. There may be some companies that want international people, but they will be in the minority.
