If you Google for Online Surveys – you’ll get over ten million results and most of them will promise great payments ($25 to $150 per hour), free product to try and a lot of other interesting things. In reality most of those sites will just provide a referral links to other referral sites etc…

There are actual legitimate research sites that will pay for taking online surveys, but most of them pay from $1 to $20 (nowhere close to $150…) in cash per completed survey and other part will offer cash equivalent you can redeem in selected products or keep trial samples.

From my own experience with survey panels most of surveys pay $3 to $10 and take about 15 minutes to complete. Much more opportunities are available to US residents than rest of the world and also may defer from state to state, age, marriage status, kids, ethnic group…

One of the best places to start when looking for online survey companies is Survey Police.

They provide large list of legitimate research companies with numerous feedbacks from actual panel members. In some instances Survey Police even help panelists to resolve problems with survey companies.

After you have chosen and joined some survey panels here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Use contact email that you check most often and try to complete surveys as soon as you receive invitations. Many surveys are limited to certain number of users and as soon as this amount responses is received – opportunity is closed.
2. Fill out all profile fields – this may help you to qualify for more opportunities.
3. Be very careful when you are answering pre-screening questions. For example if survey is about movies – don’t say you haven’t been in the theater for over a year…
4. Don’t rush, read every question in full or you may get disqualified half a way into completing survey.
5. Many survey panels may NOT work in browsers other than Internet Explorer so to avoid loosing opportunities always open surveys in IE.

I’ve heard from many webmasters participating in online surveys that average earnings per month could be around $150 -$200 if you are lucky. Some month you get more offers, some – nothing at all. So… The conclusion is – you can make some extra pocket money from online surveys but I would not count on it as a steady full time income.

If you are good on what you doing, your website has quality unique content and you are generating good amount of traffic – most likely you will not have problems finding advertiser to pay you directly for ad space.
For majority of new websites it’s not the case and the most common website monetization tactic is inserting Pay-Per-Click advertisement feeds (like Adsense, YPN, Kontera) or banners from affiliate networks. Now your earnings will be determined by how many people click on your ads.

Can you make money with PayPerClick ads? Lets take a deeper look…

It will depend a lot on the theme (or niche) of your website. For popular competitive niche there will be a lot of advertisers bidding for the keywords and paying higher price per click to be in the top spot. In this case every click may earn you few dollars. For less popular subjects competition will be much lower and earnings per click could be just a few cents.

Second determining factor for making money from PayPerClick ads would be placement those ads in high visible spots but in the same time not affecting visitors browsing experience. If it’s a text links – ALWAYS adjust colors to match main theme of the website.
I am not going to go into details about proper ad placements – there are tons of tips and recommendations on each and every ad network.

Let’s get back to the main subject – how theme of the website affects amount of money you may potentially earn… For you to get paid people have to click on your ads. Who is most likely to click on those ads or content links? People who doesn’t know that it is an ad or not aware (or don’t care) that you are getting paid for those clicks. The worst possible category of visitors in the view of bringing you any kind of commissions are WEBMASTERS! No matter how perfect you place ads on the website and blend it in with the rest of the content – they will see them and will go extra mile not to click on it (even if they are very interested in this advertisement).
In other words less tech savvy is the visitor – more likely he will click on the banner or text link.

Next time you get an idea for a new website keep in mind these little tips:

- make sure there is a large potential market in this niche. Do some Google search for related keywords and see how many results there are.

- check few search results pages deep and pay attention how many different advertisers you see in the sponsored boxes: more often you see the same ads – less advertisers are bidding for these search terms and less money you will get paid per click…

- try to target less tech savvy people (kids, women…) and STAY AWAY from anything webmaster related!