If you type "make money at home" phrase in Google, there is a good chance that you will get at least two or three offers of working by completing paid surveys. Such offers look legitimate, but most of them seem to promise you quite a lot - earning $4000 a month just by completing surveys seem to be a really interesting work at home idea, right?

Here's how this business works. Big guys do need to know what customers think about their products and what people think in general. This lets them prepare marketing campaigns and improve their products to fit our needs. They need this so badly that they often pay for the surveys you complete. This is done through a chain of middlemen, of course, who take most of the money as all middlemen do. In the end, you can get anything between $2 and $20 for a single survey completed. The payment depends on the length of the survey and the company which asked for it. Usually you can earn some $20 an hour, provided that you get enough surveys. The problem is that you will not be able to work for more than 2-3 hours a month. They would not have more than 5 surveys a month for you to do. It is technically impossible: there are hundreds of thousands people taking part in such programs and the number of surveys performed is very limited. Generally, you can't hope for more than $50-$100 a month.

To make everything worse, in some situations you have to take into account the possibility that you will not be receiving survey for a few months in a row. It's because most of the time you will fail to qualify for some surveys. If you're young, female, drinking and smoking, your chances grow. If you're old, male and free of bad habits, your chances drop to near zero.

Completing paid surveys is an excellent way of making small extra money. Many teenagers take this opportunity and do not regret it. If you are interested in setting up your own business however, completing paid surveys is one of the worst ideas you may have. You will just end up sitting at home, doing nothing and earning nothing.