Make Money from Surveys with Surveyhead

Companies across the world need to check out with consumers what we think about their products or advertising campaigns. After all, iIf they proceeded with developing products without even considering what their potential customers think then this could lead to financial failure. As a result these companies are willing to invest a great deal into finding out what we think. One way of doing this is through online surveys. The participants in surveys gain not only by gaining a sneak preview of upcoming products or new movies, but also receive a payment, either in the form of gifts or cash. There are various surveys sites available where you sign up and take part.

One such survey site is Surveyhead. Although the site is US based it offers surveys to people across the world. Each paid survey usually lasts between 15 to 20 minutes and are easy to follow.

Surveyhead offer a particularly wide range of rewards. Of course there is cash payable through Paypal, but as well as this there are MP3 downloads, merchant codes for many top brands and virtual gaming currencies for gaming communities and Facebook. To start you off you even get a $5 bonus just for signing up.

So why not help shape products of the future and earn yourself some extra money or one of the other various rewards available through taking surveys for cash at Surveyhead

End of Year Report for 2011

Another of trying to make money online has passed, so time to review my progress. This year my focus has been on trying to earn money as an affiliate, although I have earned money through other means as well. I have tended to move away from using Squidoo to earn money through Clickbank. This, it seems, was a good move as Squidoo are getting stricter on what you can put on your lenses anything deemed "overly promotional" will be locked and subsequently deleted.

Instead I have tended to move more towards making money from Amazon and setting up a number of review sites. A couple of these performed fairly well over the Christmas period so this bodes well for the future.

I have been guilty of flitting from one thing to another over the last year and I think that my earnings have suffered as a result. I did become a little more focused in the final few months and I think this did help my earnings.

So here are my totals for the year (previous year's total shown in brackets):

Clickbank: $184.74 ($364.08)
Amazon: $129.74 ($0)
Adsense: $101.22 ($101.42)
Private Advertising: $423.70 ($60.00)
Surveys: $296.43 ($358.09)
Squidoo: $30.10 ($54.32)
EBay: $426.90 ($232.44)
Swagbucks: $40 ($45)
Zlio: $1.67 ($0)
Hits4Pay: $25.18 ($0)
Blogsvertise: $25 ($25)
MyLikes: $1.65 ($0)
Quickpenny: $40.66 ($0)

Total Earnings for 2011 = $1726.99

Earnings for 2010 were $1367.30 so an increase of $359.69. A bit of an increase, but certainly not enough to radically change my life!

Let's just also review my targets from last year:

1. More One Week Marketing campaigns. I only actually did one more over the whole of last year. The reason for this is that I put a lot of time into the one I did and it did not produce any sales at all. As a result I became disillusioned with using Squidoo as a basis for selling products.
2. List Building. This never got going. I had intended to use Squidoo as a basis for building a subscriber list, but decided against it given their recent tightening of their rules.
3. Create and sell my own product. Nope, didn't manage this one either. My wife was going to create an ebook which I was going to sell for her, but this hasn't yet got off the ground.
4. Create more niche sites: I achieved this although my original intention had been to make money Adsense from these. Most of the site I have made have been more focused on making money from Amazon. Some of these have been quite successful, but some have not. I have learned that it is better to work more on a few sites and get them to succeed rather than to try and spread my efforts over lots of sites.
5. More Squidoo lenses. I have become a little disillusioned with Squidoo over the last year and have come to the conclusion that it is better to have your own sites.

For the coming year I intend to focus on:

• Focus on my new blog for which I intend to become a complete go-to resource for my niche. I intend to build content and traffic over the coming months. Alongside this I intend to build a related subscriber list.
• Further build content and traffic on my existing niche sites. Some of these sites are also suitable for list building so this is something else I intend to pursue.
• I may build more niche/review site, but only when I am satisfied that my existing sites are performing the best that they can.

This is a much smaller and more tightly focused list of aims than previous years. And this, I believe, is more likely to lead me to success in 2012.

Monthly Total Earnings for December 2011

Well this is the last monthly earnings total for 2011 and it brings with it some interesting developments. I had hoped to have set up a number of Amazon review sites in time for Christmas. Whilst I did achieve this I had not developed them as much as I would have liked nor did I think I had done enough to get decent traffic. Nevertheless a couple of the sites did attract quite a bit of traffic in the run up to Christmas and made a number of sales. In total I made 64 sales on Amazon.com and 60 sales on Amazon.co.uk this month. This made me a combined total of $229.00. This smashes my previous record by a significant margin. I do have to be realistic though and recognize that sales will plummet in the months following the Christmas rush. However, it is very encouraging that I have been able to achieve this and if I can develop the other review sites further then I should be able to expect some sustained growth in commissions.

Unfortunately Amazon takes a couple of months to verify its commissions so I won't get to see this money until February. Traditionally in these monthly earnings posts I only count what I have actually received so the total is not nearly as impressive. Here is what I have received this month:

Clickbank: $20.58
Surveys: $6.21
Squidoo: $1.23

Total = $28.02

Not a very impressive total in the end, but I am looking forward to receiving my Amazon commissions in February.

Why Has Squidoo Locked My Lens?

I have been building Squidoo lenses for quite a while now, although recently I have been spending less time on them preferring instead to build my own sites. It seems that recently Squidoo has been getting stricter on lensmasters who do not keep to the terms of use and any dubious lenses are locked. The reasons for getting a lens locked usually relate to things like containing duplicate content, being overly promotional or just plain spammy.

I have had a couple of lenses locked previously and to be honest I don't think I had much to complain about as there was some duplicate content lifted from Amazon and the lenses existed purely to sell a product with my Amazon affiliate links. I figured there was no real way back for these so I just deleted them.

However, I have more recently had another lens blocked that contains entirely original content and is not promotional - it does contain three Amazon affiliate links to books related to the subject, but this is entirely within the rules. It also contains Squidoo's Ebay module. It contain a dead link which is what I am guessing tripped off Squidoo systems. This was to a Clickbank product which no longer exists - this was one single link at the end of the lens. I have now removed this link.

I have e-mailed the folks at Squidoo a while ago now and have had no response. This is very frustrating as if there is no response within 60 days then the lens will just be deleted from Squidoo. This is all rather ironic as this is probably the most original of my lenses and I really put it together to be useful to other people rather than to make any money. It is the lens that has had the most comments and positive feedback and one of my most visited lenses. Ultimately if I get no response then I will have to export my content elsewhere.

This has dented my faith in Squidoo somewhat, but has reinforced for me the need to focus on my own websites rather than relying on making money from posting content on someone else's.