Paid surveys are an easy way to make some additional income. You can stay within the cool confines of your own home and get paid for giving your opinion on products. This sounds simple enough but unfortunately all that glitters is not gold. While there are some legitimate companies offering money for taking surveys, the very nature of this kind of scheme has given birth to numerous tricksters and con artists.

So how do these paid surveys actually work? Well, there are new products being launched everyday. The consumer market today is dynamic and erratic. The companies launching these products want to get an idea about consumer reactions even before they introduce these products. This is to help them gauge how well their product will be received when launched. So they conduct surveys where consumers have to fill in a questionnaire where they are given a chance to voice their opinions.

Now, it's important to know that not everybody who's interested in these surveys will be selected to participate. Interested consumers will be given a kind of eligibility test prior to taking the survey to determine whether money is the only motivation or whether they'll take the survey seriously. The short-listed participants are given the survey and are rewarded with money or free products. It's a win-win situation all around. The consumer is compensated for his time and effort with money and the company gets concrete information about consumer perception about their new product.

The flip side of these surveys is that there are many scams based on these paid surveys. Many sites run by third party middlemen claim to give consumers access to a database of companies running paid surveys. While some of these are genuine, many are complete rip-offs. They generally operate in 2 ways. They ask for some kind of one-time fee in return for access to this database and then give obsolete information. Or they take the fees and then vanish into thin air. So you have to be very wary of getting cheated.

You can protect yourself from getting taken in by these scams by doing some research on your own and reading forums and product reviews. This will help you distinguish the scams from the legitimate sites.

After you chance upon a genuine site, read the fine print and go through the terms and conditions carefully. Pay attention to their payout conditions. Don't get taken in by tall claims. Read between the lines to make sure you don’t get cheated. You won't make a fortune taking online paid surveys but it is an easy and painless way to make some extra income.