Wife's Journey Into Online Survey Cash

As a PHP freelancer, the thought of paying off all your debts seems more interesting than when you used to have a cubicle day job. The reason is because you're more focused on how hard it is to get and maintain the cash flow, and wouldn't it be nice to not have all the cash that's coming in go right back out on bills???! Heck yeah.

So....my wife took a trip tonight into the world of online survey cash. We decided to not use our own home phone, so we used K7 to get a phone number. Otherwise, about the cheapest plan we could get would be $8.95 per month, and heck, that would eat up the profits of the service on some months when we don't work that hard at this. We also used Gmail for the email because it has the best spam blocking, and we used an account we will hardly check.

Everything else, however, and we used legitimate information except for the fact that my wife's name would be KayR instead of just Kay. (Of course, I'm not telling you my wife's REAL name because, after all, I'm Mr. Grey.)

And we installed an auto form filler for Firefox and it took a bit to get this configured. However, we managed it and I continue to tweak it for her. It does about a 50% good job on forms, and then we look it over and change everything else.

Some tips we heard were to use the form filler, to close all popups after the initial one, and when the domain name changes or you can't see the domain name, or when it says you've completed the survey, then you're done. Now, some surveys are ridiculously long and just flat out bogus, so you skip those and move on.

You can only go back to the online survey cash service and click a submit button or a completed button unless you have actually completed the survey.

Well, what's the result? You guessed it: spam! I can't wait to see what happens to our direct mail that will start shipping to us every month. I'm sure it will be like crates and crates of stuff. I'll have to work out a deal with the local postal lady that if she trashes anything saying KayR on it, we'll slip her a $50 at Christmas in a Christmas card for her. (That's what my Grandpa used to do.)

Another result was that it was *NOT* as easy as it says it is. First, the form fillers addons for your browser are imperfect and require tweaking. You have to know a little HTML to know how to make the form fillers work better. Second, some surveys are tremendously long. Third, it's hard to click those tiny little radio buttons to say no all the time, and then not accidentally click the ads that are right next to the no buttons.

Anyway, I spent 30 minutes doing surveys and getting things set up in the form filler tool, and all I managed to do was get $2.00. My wife was even slower.

So, I don't know if it's worth it to do this except perhaps to just say to yourself, "I'll commit 1-2 hours a day doing this." Realistically speaking, that comes to about $400 to $700 a month from this. So, don't expect to get rich, but you might be able to pay off a credit card.

So we think about it like this. We use wealthy people (these advertisers) to pay off other wealthy people (credit card companies), and we hate both of them. So we basically are using one to combat the other. Not a bad deal.