You Actually Can Earn Money by Taking Online Surveys

Earning money out of your home, online. Many people play with the idea, and some  even go after it. There are various ways to pursue it. One is to write, like I do, for websites or blogs. If you’ve got it in you, I recommend you to do it. We’ve written in the past about websites to earn money writing, check it out.
But not everyone’s got the feel for it. There are of course other ways. You can, in fact, earn money taking online surveys or company offers. That’s right, you can get paid for giving your opinion. Before I began to work at MakeUseOf, I worked this possibility for a time. A 16 year old boy, in Belgium, gathering some extra cash. This only begins to show how ‘open’ this all is. Your age and nationality matter little to none, the only thing you need is an internet connection and some time to spare.
Today I’d like to show you how to tackle this line of ‘work’. The various tips and tricks involving successfully engaging it, and the trustworthy places to go for your survey fix.

Step One – Get Real

Before you start trying to earn money taking online surveys, there are a few things you’ll need to realize.
Do not expect to make money in truckloads. You (most probably) won’t get hundreds of dollars a week, thousands a month, whatever the ads try to tell you. True, when you participate in a multitude of high-roll surveys daily you can make a fair amount, but things don’t work out like that in real life.
Those high-roll surveys will be a sporadic surprise, rather than routine, and depending on how many company aims you hit or miss (do you handle the budget at home, or do you live off your parents? Are you a jock or a nerd?), the amount of surveys you receive can differ greatly. Also, when considering the hourly earnings – some surveys can take up a lot of time – you’re not exactly well-paid.
However, if you enlist for a reasonable number of survey services, you can certainly score some extra bucks. Best of all, you don’t need to be able to actually do things, just have an opinion – and everyone has one of those. Just keep in mind that this is a little extra money, instead of your new job.

Step Two – Get Ready

You want to be properly set up before you go. Besides cluttering your address with surveys, you’ll encounter some false – spamming – services if you go venturing on your own.
I highly suggest registering a new email address for the job, to keep pleasure and business apart, so to speak. Go with Gmail (a lightweight and easy interface is advised in days to come, it’ll also be needed to set up our filters) and pick an easy to remember name.

Filters

If you keep the different suppliers separated, it’ll be easier to see where the occasional crap is coming from. Don’t worry, you won’t need to register twenty-odd different addresses, Gmail helps us with that.

1. If actual@gmail.com is your email address, use actual+service@gmail.com for the different services. (e.g. if I were to enlist myselft on GTM, I’d use the mail address simonspam+gtm@gmail.com). As Gmail completely ignores the addition mark and suffix, all emails will arrive in the same inbox, but we’ll be able to separate them by using filters.
2. Creating the actual filter is a lot easier than you’d think. However, you’ll have to repeat the process below for every service. First, press the Create a Filter button at the top of the page.
   
   Next, enter the actual+service@gmail.com as the receiving address, and head to the next step.
   
   
   You can then choose how to manage this part of your mail. Choose for it to skip your inbox and be added to the service’s label. You’ll be able to access it in a separate folder at any given time, located on the left portion of your screen.
   
   

If you ever receive spam on one of your pseudo-addresses, you can easily put a halt to all incoming traffic. Just edit the right filter, and select Delete it.

Step Three – Get Paid

The final and most simple step. Register on a multitude of (trustworthy) survey suppliers, and wait for the ‘work’ to come. You’ll quickly notice that different sites work different ways, with different systems and paygrades. Usually you’ll need to wait until you’ve reached a certain amount (ten to twenty dollars) until you can cash out – sometimes a wiring to your bank account, most often Paypal.
Below you’ll find three of the highest recommended sites, by us and other satisfied users over the internet. All are international.

1.  SurveySavvy

If you’re going for the bucks, you definitely need to enlist for SurveySavvy. Each survey gets assigned a dollar value, between 2 and 20 dollars. Even when you don’t fit any of that month’s surveys, you get automatically entered in the monthly sweepstakes, where they give away fifty 10 dollar prizes.

2.  American Consumer Opinion

Don’t be misguided by the name, they work worldwide. They pay between 4 and 25 dollars per survey, and also automatically enlist you for their monthly sweepstakes. Don’t pass on any surveys you receive.

3.  Harris Polls

One of the most respected survey sites out there – both by users and professionally. They award you relatively generous with Hlpoints, which you can redeem for gift cards, prizes, and sweepstakes. They work internationally and “are continuously investigating international laws regarding sweepstakes rules and eligibility”. More information on their questions page.

4+ Other Sites

You’ll want to enlist for as many survey suppliers as possible. Check out Online Paid Surveys for other websites. You can filter them on geographic availability and get more information out of the reviews.
This is where we round up this article. I hope you’ve learned something and will be able to put it to use. If you’ve got any other questions or comments, head straight to the comments section below.

GetMooh Gets You Out Of Sticky Social Situations

GetMooh will save ya.

Love that song but don't know what it is? Tunatic can tag it for you!

Ever thought ‘what is this song?’ Let Tunatic hear it and you will get the artist's name and the song's title within seconds. Tunatic is the very first song search engine based on sound for your computer. All you need is a microphone and Internet access.

	Download Tunatic v1.0.1b for Mac OS X v10.2 or better
	Download Tunatic v1.0.1b for Windows 2000/XP

1 - let Tunatic hear the music. All you need is a microphone and Internet access.	2 - Tunatic identifies the song. Follow the white arrow to get links for the song.

How does this work? When you click Tunatic's ‘search’ button, Tunatic transmits the song's features to the Tunatic server. The server searches its database and returns the matching song. More Q&A

Are you Sure your Email isn’t being Hacked?

In the interests of full disclosure, I didn’t come up with this idea. I read about it in a computer magazine a year or two back but of course when I wanted to refer to it for this article, I couldn’t find it! But someone on Digg eventually managed to find it so here is the original article if you want to see it.

As email providers give away more and more storage space, more and more personal information is being stored in those accounts. People are increasingly using their email accounts for more than just email - it has become their online document storage area with backup documents such as passwords, bank account numbers, account usernames, scans of correspondence and much more. Even if you don’t use your email for this purpose, you may still be inadvertantly revealing personal information in general conversation emails to family and close friends. A 6GB Gmail account or an unlimited space Yahoo account is potentially an information bonanza source for identity thieves who manage to figure out your email password and then go snooping.

But if someone HAS cracked your email password, it may not be apparent to you. A snooper can easily read an email then mark it as unread again. So the best thing to do would be to set up an “electronic tripwire” so if someone breaks into your account, you’ll know about it.

Here’s how to do it :

1. Sign up for a website hit counter at www.onestatfree.com. You can leave a fake name and whatever URL you want (I used Google.com for mine).

2. You will then receive a welcome email from OneStat with a text attachment called OneStatScript.txt. Download this attachment to your computer and then delete the email (you don’t want any email snoopers finding it later). But before deleting the email, write down your OneStat account number as you will need it later.

3. Change the name of the text document to something that will make the email snooper salivate such as passwordlist. Also change the file format from a text document to a website page. So make it something like passwordlist.htm .

4. Email this newly-renamed file as an attachment to the email account you want to monitor. Make sure the email subject title also lures the snooper in (maybe something like List of Passwords. You get the idea :).

5. The trap is now set. Basically if someone opens the email and opens the attachment, OneStat will record a hit. If you then log into your OneStat account say once a day, you will see how many hits you have had to your attachment.

The OneStat account page then gives you details on each “visitor” including the date and time they accessed the web document and more importantly their location and IP address!

So how does having this information help you? Well first of all, it will alert you to change your password to something stronger. Secondly, if you see the snooper’s location and you only know one or two people there then it narrows down your list of potential suspects.

By the way, I recommended signing up for One Stat because the author of the original idea mentioned them. But if you know of any other hit counter services that send text documents to your email address, then please mention them in the comments. I don’t have any financial advantage recommending One Stat so I am perfectly happy to consider alternative companies.

6 Online Tools for Text to Speech you would not want to miss

Once in a while, all of us face a need to get some text synthesized into speech. Maybe we want to know how someone would pronounce a complicated word, or sometimes we just want an entire passage to be read out to us.

These online tools are a great help when you face such a requirement. Some of them will allow you only to synthesize a small passage; others would read out entire PDF or DOC files to you!

1. Vozme

vozMe an online text to speech tool with an ultra-simple interface; a baby could use it! You have a large text box where you type or copy-paste whatever you want to convert to speech, and click the 'Create MP3' button. That's it. A new window would open, and in a few seconds, your MP3 file would start playing. Large chunks of text were translated - the text field seems to accept a pile of text easily.

Save as MP3 file. Integrate into websites or blogs (WP plugin available) Add as iGoogle gadget

2. Expressivo

This text to speech conversion tool from Expressivo has a maximum limit of 200 characters. So large chunks or text at one go are out. But it is easy enough to use. Type or copy-paste your text, choose one of the four voice options (You have female US-English, female Romanian, male Polish and female Polish accents as options), and hit Read Me.

Epressivo produces a short URL to the speech file you created which you can email, IM or blog Option of entering text directly into the address bar of the browser

3. Cepstral

At Cepstral, the text to speech conversion converts the text into a .WAV file. Type in the text, hit Say It, and you will be asked to download s small WAV file. The ability to save the file is a great convenience here.

4. Ivona Speech Synthesizer

The Ivona Speech Synthesizer text to speech conversion tool online has a charcter limit of 200, and the same voice options as Expressivo. Ivona, however, allows you to save the converted speech file as an MP3 for private, non-commercial use.

5. SpokenText

SpokenText is packed with features - but it wants you to register, a small hassle. The registration is a bit too comprehensive - but I think it's worth filling it out. Once you click on the link in the activation email, your registration is ready to go.

Log in, and click on the button 'Create a New recording'. Choose from one of the 5 voice options, choose a words-per-minute speed for spoken text and - there is no text box! You have to upload a PDF, .txt, .DOC or .PPT file.

Conversion from multiple file formats. Conversion status indicator Email notification on conversion Filter words Your own Spokentext web address to share your recordings

6. Talkr

Talkr is not so straightforward - but that's only if you land up on the site looking for a text to speech synthesizer. Talkr is not for that exactly - have an RSS feed you want read out?

Yes, this one is for instant podcasts - it converts RSS feeds into MP3 files for podcast! Once you sign up, all you need to do is to point it towards a feed of your own or someone else's and it converts it into an MP3 file.

• Player to embed the mp3 file into your blog
• MP3 voice mails
• Listen to text only blogs anytime!