Profiles & Screeners - What You Should Know

 (Picture from Survey Savvy)

It is common to here someone say "It seems like I hardly ever receive surveys". I know when I started signing up for a bunch of survey sites I didn't bother going through and doing all the profiles for every survey site. The result, hardly any surveys to participate in. If you aren't getting many surveys it may be that you haven't completed these profiles, which are crucial to receive surveys. If they don't have idea about your lifestyle then how do they know what surveys may be of interest to you?

Screeners, what are they? Screeners are short surveys, usually less than 5 minutes long. These help them understand what activities you are interested in, what foods you like to eat or what brands you use, etc. Screeners are send you are for a reason - to increase your eligibility for surveys or studies. If they know what activities you enjoy from a sceener the more likely they will send you a survey when market research is being done on that particular subject.

You are probably thinking profiles and screeners sure do sound like the same thing. You are partially right, they are similar. However, the reason why you receive these is becuase your profile stated you were interested in that subject. For example: Your profile said you were interested in sports, there is a new survey coming up on sports, sometimes a particular sport. They then send you a screener to see if the sport they are conducting research about is one of your favorites. This helps them target a specific group of people to get the most accurate results possible.

Survey Tips

•Before you start signing up for survey sites you might want to consider creating a new email account just for survey sites. Make your email address name something that is easy to remember. You may also want to use a different email account provider than you main account, that way you are able to log into both your main email account and your survey site email account.

•To make signing up for survey sites easier you may want to download Roboform and use it to fill in the survey forms. This will make the process faster, especially if you are signing up with multiple sites! (Note: You should not use Roboform to fill in actual surveys since most surveys will see that you are going though it too fast and will disqualify you, they may think you are using a bot to complete it.)

•Some survey sites require you to have a PayPal account, if you do not already have one you can sign up for one Here.

•Sign up to as many survey sites as you are interested in and have the time to participate in, some survey sites send more surveys invites than others. You may also receive product tests as well, this may require you to be home for the delivery of the product.

•Bookmark the survey sites that you are a member of and make a folder name such as "Survey Sites" in your favorites. This will make visiting them a lot easier.

•If you have your own personal computer you should consider saving your usernames and passwords for each site. Depending on what browser you use, it will ask you if you want to save your password or not. This makes it less of a hassle since you might have an array of different passwords and usernames. If you share a computer, you may not want to save all your password on it. If you are afraid of saving them on your computer you can always write them down in a notebook if you like.

•Fill out all of the "profiles" or "profile boosters" for any of the survey sites that may have them, this helps the company know what kind of survey invitations to send you. The more they know about you the more survey invitations they will send you. Some Survey sites won't send you any surveys until these "profiles" are completed.

•Be sure to visit the survey sites at least once every week, sometimes more depending on the survey site. The reason why you want to do this is because with some sites there are surveys that are posted on the site, these you usually won't get an email about them since they are posted for everyone to participate in.

•Check your email often, you may receive invites to participate in surveys which may close within a certain time period. This is especially important if you are a member of more than 10 panels since you will most likely get constant survey invitations and/or product test invitations.

•Sometimes it can be difficult keeping track of what survey sites you are a member of, especially if you aren't an organize freak like me (lol)! But there is an easy way to find out. Just following these steps:

• Go to the website or login page
  
• There should be a link under the login box that says "forgot password" or "password recovery"
• Click on the link and then enter your email or ID, whichever it asks for
• Press "submit", "send" or "enter"
• You should either get a message on the same screen saying that the password has been sent to you or that your email address/account could not be found in their database.
  

If it says you have an account there, just check your email to get your password. Now if your email address/account could not be found then you can sign up for one! Yep, it's that easy, you don't have to search through emails trying to find your member info.

•Are you getting the following message when you click on a survey link, "Our records indicate you have already taken this survey"? If so, you may want to deleted all your browsing history and try again. Not working? Try using a different browser, if you were using Internet Explorer try FireFox or Safari. Sometimes deleting the browsing history isn't enough, so switching browsers when this message comes up may help.

•§• Remember if it sounds to good to be true, them it probably is! When a site says you can make $150 an hour by participating in surveys they are full of it. Stay away from survey sites that ask you to pay for membership! They will take your money and give you a list of survey sites that you can get of the internet already. •§•