Lights, Camera, Action!
Over the past few months, I've ventured into a few new (to me) online money making panels. Last month, I gave a short Jingit review here (which I am pleased to now offer my full endorsement as I've consistently earned roughly $1.00 a week over the past 2 months). Around the same time I published the Jingit post, I signed up for a membership with the MindSwarms survey panel. I held off blogging about it until I was able to become more familiar with it.
While most online surveys consist of 5 - 50 minutes of clicking check boxes or radio buttons and typing text into restrictive text box fields, MindSwarms offers you the opportunity to voice your opinions -- literally. After signing up and providing your preliminary demographic information, MindSwarms allows you to record a short sample video about your musical tastes using your computer's web cam. You are then presented with various survey screeners (much like the other standard online panels) where the end client determines if you meet the demographic from which they are looking for feedback. If you are lucky enough to be selected, you then submit short (about 60 seconds) video recorded responses to one or more questions from the sponsor. With limited spots reserved for each survey and a limited time to get in your video responses, you'll want to act quickly when you receive an invitation. It may take quite a few attempts before you qualify for a video survey, but trust me when I say that it is worth it!
The preliminary screening is usually less than six questions that only take about a minute or two to complete, so you aren't drawn in to a time consuming 15 - 20 minute time investment with no payoff like you see in some of the other online panels. But if you are lucky enough to get the "call back" to submit a video survey, you will earn $50.00 for your short 60 second opinion! I don't know about you, but I'll answer a few short qualifying questions any day for the shot at earning $50 for a 60 second survey!
I joined MindSwarms on November 21, 2012 -- then briefly forgot about it when I couldn't get my webcam to work with their site. (TIP: For some reason, the Firefox web browser would not allow my web cam to communicate with the MindSwarms site and only displayed static video, no matter what settings I tried to adjust. If that happens for you, try using the Chrome browser instead -- that cleared up my problem instantly.) Once I finally troubleshot my video issues in the first week of December, I uploaded my sample video to MindSwarms and started responding to their screener surveys. I didn't figure I would qualify for anything, but to my surprise, I was invited to do a video survey on December 8th. Although most surveys can be done using a PC webcam, this particular survey required use of an Android or iPhone with the MindSwarms app installed.
Without disclosing product details, the survey required me to purchase a product and give my honest opinion about it. To address the obvious questions you might have: this purchase was less than $5.00 and was something I likely would have purchased at some point even had I not qualified for this survey.
I made my purchase Saturday evening, recorded and submitted my 60 second opinion about 20 minutes later, and then received confirmation that I would get $50 in my PayPal account within 24-48 hours. That confirmation came on Monday evening.
Like anything else: "this message does not guarantee successful results and actual user results may differ". . . but getting an extra 50 bucks two weeks before Christmas that I otherwise wouldn't have had was worth it for me!
Now GO MAKE SOME MONEY!!!