Paid surveys at home are a huge business on the Internet. There are thousands of new surveys being made every week. The large companies that commission these surveys have many pressing questions about what consumers are thinking. They hire market researchers to measure public opinion and report their findings.

This kind of market information is essential to direct the expenditure of over $200 billion in promotional budgets in the U.S. alone. And to measure the effectiveness of advertising. Hundreds of millions of dollars get spent on surveys, focus groups, product testing, comparison testing and related info gathering.

And why would the thousands of people who participate even bother to spend their time answering surveys? They wouldn't, unless they got paid. So the market researchers pay them for their participation. The participants take online surveys for cash. They make money taking paid surveys at home, in their spare time.

The average survey pays $10 to $25, which doesn't take much time but the payment is not a lot of money. However, if you took a $10 survey and a $25 survey each day, in a month you would make over $1,000 for your 20 minutes or so invested daily. Taking online surveys for cash has a good payout on the time invested.

And you are making money with paid surveys at home. There's no cost, nowhere you have to go in order to to make the money. You sit in front of your computer at home (or anywhere) and take online surveys for cash. It's an ideal source of supplemental income.

If you are 18 or older, and have enough computer skills to be able to send and receive e-mails, then you qualify. All you have to do is to get your application on file with 100-200 good survey makers. To do that you will need to get a good list (about 40% of survey makers are no pay/low pay time wasters) of good survey makers.

The best way to get such a list is through a good paid survey membership site. Only deal with those sites that have a strong money-back guarantee. Within the strong guarantee group, choose one with a low refund rate against their guarantee. Low refund rates mean happy clients; high refund rates mean unhappy clients.

Get a good list, then sign up with all of the good survey makers on that list. Set up a separate free e-mail address for your survey business and check your in-box at least daily. Be prepared to cull out and discard the "survey makers" who bombard you with sales offers. Just find 'em, trash 'em and forget 'em.

So if you take online surveys for cash and set out to make money with paid surveys at home, how much money can you make? Well it depends on your demographics (densely-populated suburban/urban areas are better than sparsely populated areas) and your diligence in pursuing the survey business.

That said, most more-or-less serious survey takers report monthly incomes of $200 to $600, with many reporting incomes of $1,000 a month and more.