Survey-taking and mystery shopping kind of go hand-in-hand. The idea behind both is to get potential consumers' honest opinion about products and services through asking a series of questions or collecting data from consumer feedback based on the consumers' recent experience with that service or product. Today I'm focusing more on mystery shopping and whether it is actually possible to make any money at it. The answer to that is "Yes". It is just a matter of finding a company that is legit. There are so many scams and so many people are falling for them, that it is hard to figure out what's what. Much like scam survey advertisements, almost all scam mystery shopping ads claim that you can get rich or at least make thousands of dollars per month or even per week. Based off my experience, that's not even close to being true. I will say, however, that once you get the ball rolling and you participate on a regular basis, you probably can earn an extra $50-$150 per month and possibly more if you know what you're doing. Let me share a little bit of my experience:

Back in 2009 I signed up with Corporate Research International (I don't remember how I even found them), but never actually completed a shop for them. It wasn't until November 2011 that I began considering mystery shopping as a source of income again because I had just quit my job and I wasn't sure when my next job would come along. I realized that even after 2 years or inactivity I still had an account with Corporate Research International, so I decided to do my homework and find out a little more about legit secret shopping companies and how much I could possibly earn. In that search I found AboutFace, Intelli-Shop and some other companies that are supposedly legit. It was easy to sign up for all of them and (there's a reason I'm about to capitalize and bold this next phrase) NONE OF THEM ASKED FOR A FEE. Any survey or mystery shop or data entry company that asks you for your credit card or any type of payment in exchange for you getting a job is something that should be avoided. With Corporate Research International all of their partners require that shoppers watch a training video that may last anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour and correctly answer follow-up questions.  Most of the time compensation is anywhere from $5-$10, but it depends on the company and the time of year. I've completed training for several stores, but have only attempted one shop and wasn't successful at completing it because I had issues submitting my report. Since then, I haven't attempted any other shop with them, but I have plans to within the next month or so, I'll let you know how it goes. Anyway, I found that out of all the mystery shopping companies I'm registered with, Corporate Research International has the most opportunities. My first successful shop, however, was with AboutFace when I evaluated a bookstore. What I liked about it was the fact that I was paid a flat fee and I didn't have to sit through a training video. They simply provided me with instructions specific for that shop and after I read through it a few times, I had a pretty good idea of what I was supposed to do. Not counting the drive, the actual shop took all of twenty minutes and I think the fee for that twenty minutes of my time was sufficient. To prove that I was there and to evaluate the checkout process, I had to make a small purchase, but at the time that I submitted my report I scanned my receipt and attached a copy to my report. That was it. Unfortunately, it took several weeks to finally get paid, but I did get paid. After doing a little more research I learned that many companies pay weeks, sometimes months after a successful mystery shop. That was in November 2011. I didn't perform anymore shops until this past week, when I completed two for two different companies, so it'll be a few weeks until I get my payment from them. So, my conclusion is that for the first month or so of mystery shopping you probably won't receive any payment, but you will be building confidence and strategies in the best ways to perform shops and not be spotted as a mystery shopper. In one of the shops I performed recently I had an employee ask me if I worked for the company because she was about to share some info with me that she wasn't really supposed to be sharing because it would possibly turn away my business. I just laughed with her and blew off the question because I also currently work in customer service and have probably been approached by a mystery shopper/auditor, so I knew exactly what she was feeling, but it could've turned into something bad if she had recognized me as a secret shopper. My point is that it can be really easy to fail at this job if you're the nervous type or if you're not well-prepared. I wouldn't rely on secret shopping as my primary source of income unless I had absolutely nothing else to fall on, but it can be a decent secondary income. Let's do a little math: $10 approx./project + reimbursement for the purchase you make up to whatever limit the company sets. Last week I completed a shop that paid $10 + $2 reimbursement and another shop for $5 + $7 reimbursement, which equals $15 earned plus $9 in free products and food. Altogether it took a total of about 40 minutes to complete both shops. That doesn't seem too bad to me. If you have any experience with mystery shopping, leave a comment and share your experience! I'll be sure to post updates on my experiences.
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If you've ever done an internet search for ways to make money online, then you probably already have encountered several websites, articles and videos about paid surveys. They're everywhere, saturating the worldwide web and you're likely to read all kinds of opinions either for or against taking surveys online. I'm going to tell my experience with a few different survey sites over the next few weeks and allow you the opportunity to make up your own mind after you read this and probably some other reviews online. First, let me start by listing all the ways I make money online (and offline):
  • Surveys
  • Freelance Writing/Content Mills
  • Writing Product Reviews Online
  • Completing Tasks
  • Mystery shopping/Mystery auditing
  • Paid to Click
  • Paid to Search
In the event I actually participated in three or more of these at one time, I would actually bring in a decent supplement at the end of the month. For now, I'm starting at zero and I'll keep track of my earnings for a while to give you an idea of what you can expect with a little effort. I've already written an article on Hubpages about earning money with surveys and you can read it here. Today the focus will be on Swagbucks, although it's technically not a survey site. I wrote a post about it back in 2009 and I am proud to say that I am still a member of this site. A brief overview: You earn Swagbucks/points at random times whenever you use their search engine. If you download their toolbar to your web browser, then every day that you log in, you get one Swagbuck. If you participate in the daily poll, you'll get one Swagbuck for that. In one month that gives you 60 Swagbucks just for opening your browser and participating in the daily poll. I usually do 3 or 4 searches through this search engine per day and win Swagbucks in maybe 1 0r 2 of those searches, usually worth 5-10 Swagbucks, sometimes more. From time to time, if I have some time to kill, I'll go over to their videos section and watch 10 of those videos (usually about 1-2 minutes each) and earn 3 Swagbucks for every 10 videos. You can also earn Swagbucks by completing surveys, tasks and printing coupons. They also offer a sort of cashback deal wherein you earn Swagbucks for every dollar you spend with their partners when you shop online at places like Target or Barnes and Noble. You can save up your Swagbucks and redeem them for gift cards or merchandise or a Paypal credit. My favorite is the $5 Amazon.com gift certificate, which is worth 450 Swagbucks. There are probably some things that I'm forgetting, but I think I got the bulk of it. If you're interested in signing up, just click on the Swagbucks banner on this blog or click here Next time I'll focus more on the surveys. Have a good one :-)
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If you've been to this site a few times before you'll notice that I've made a few changes around here. Change is good. I think this layout is more attractive and more appropriate for a blog of this nature. It is simple, to the point and mature. I hope everyone who visits likes it as much as I do. Anyway, since I'm in the business of change at the moment I need to get something off my chest which totally contradicts change. "Stick-to-it-ness" is what my pastor calls it, but it is also known as discipline. That's an issue of mine that I've been struggling with for the past couple of years. As of right now I work part-time, I'm enrolled in college for my fourth year even though I'm still a junior (I had a few setbacks) and I really want to get some stuff off the ground. One of those things I want to get off the ground is this blog. Here's what I usually do: Work really hard at it for a couple of weeks, get my readership up, then stop posting. All I really knew for sure that I wanted to do was make some extra money blogging, but I often abandoned this baby. So, I'm going to try to exercise a little "stick-to-it-ness" and post here twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday. I've learned some very important lessons about goal-setting, one of them being that while keeping the end goal in mind is very important in achieving it, you still have to take it one day and sometimes one moment at a time because anything can change at any given moment. I'm doing away with the filler content for a while and getting back to the good stuff in the next post.

The purpose in this post is to market growth and patience. Why? Because...because... well, just 'cause. :-) Just kidding (Not totally). Seriously, patience is a virtue and that's something I wish more people would realize or acknowledge. I have a part-time job that pays fairly well for the amount of work and I currently attend college, but my part-time job, regardless of the fact that it pays well for the amount of work involved, I don't work enough hours to pay for my phone bill, my Tae Kwon Do class, my groceries, my car maintenance, my credit card debt, etc. Around Christmas my phone bill got extremely high and the week after Christmas I cut my hours at work to have more time for school and just that quickly I got behind on my finances. The cost of getting my computer fixed and textbooks for this semester had me using up all but $8 of the money I had saved up in the past month and at this very moment I have a grand total of $4 to my name. Thank God tomorrow is payday. That's where the paid surveys, freelance articles, and incentivized search engines come in. That's also where a little bit of patience comes in because when your finances get that low, no amount of money can come quickly enough. You can be promised a million dollars and even have proof of this guarantee, but if you're not due to receive it for another year and your phone is due to be shut off today, then it doesn't really make much difference...or maybe that's just the way I think. It's times like this I take a few moments to rethink some of my priorities and try to GROW. I look back at some of my very first posts to this blog and see that I have come a mighty long way from where I was. I've tried so many different money-making opportunities and some were better than others. Is it possible to earn $50 to $100 per month doing paid surveys? Yes, it is. Is it possible to really get gift cards without having to complete a bunch of "free trials" and receive a whole bunch of spam emails? Yes, it is very possible. And it doesn't have to take years to do it either. It takes a little patience, which is difficult to have in an instant gratification society, but it is possible. Let's all make resolution for the New Month, for the New Day, to have a little more "stick-to-it-ness", and see how much money we can earn and save and how much stress we can dump.
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This past weekend I had an almost deadly battle with a little something called malware. It's not something I'm unfamiliar with because I dealt with it on my last computer, but the creators of this stuff get better at it every year and I thought I had lost my computer. Here's a few details: Malware is a computer virus, only worse. Viruses are not necessarily harmful, though most of the time they are. The malware my computer had been infected with was called Win 7 Home Security 2012. WARNING: If you ever get any strange pop-ups or web pages with that title or something similar, open up your antivirus software as quickly as possible. If you have an anti-malware or anti-spyware software, make use of that, too. I was surfing the internet as I normally do when I got a strange pop-up saying that my computer had been infected with a virus and needed to be scanned. The pop-up proceeded to scan my computer and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The ultimate goal of the malware was to obtain my credit card information by making me believe that my computer had really been infected with a virus and I needed to purchase their software to fix my computer. I remember the malware I had on my previous computer did a pretty good job of imitating the appearance of actual Windows programs, but it was still fairly obvious that it was an imitation. This time the creators of this malware did a very good job in imitating Windows because I had to look twice at it to make sure it wasn't real. Even though I have an antivirus program on my computer, it can only do so much, especially with it only being the free edition. At the end of this post I'll provide some links to some helpful websites to help keep your computer and personal information protected. It took four days and $50 (which is actually cheap considering some places charge upwards of $100 to even look at a computer), but I finally got my computer back. I don't think it'll ever be quite the same as it was before. There are still a few quirks with my laptop that I'm noticing that I don't believe were there before, but it's in good working condition and all of my malware and virus scans come back clean. Be very careful when you're surfing the internet and be sure to do regular scans and updates on your computer to keep you protected.

Defining Malware FAQ's
More info on Win 7 Home Security Scam
Free Anti-Malware Software

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Feeling Good 01/12/2012
 
It's a new year and a new day. Another opportunity to begin life again. Another opportunity to be productive and earn a little money at the same time. I'm going to try something a little different with this blog. I'm going to be putting a little more effort into my writing and I'm going to start another (yes, another!) blog, all with philosophy and social observations, as well as some of my poetry and some useful links and entertaining videos and things I stumble across online. I have a million different blogs it seems, but I'm going to attempt to consolidate them all into two blogs and one webpage. We'll see how that goes. As I said back in November, I'm not abandoning this baby. This baby will receive more attention in the very near future, with online earnings updates and website reviews. So far, I've made $3 from Pinecone Research. I'm off to a decent start. It's a new day! Let's move.
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It's been a long time. A long, long time. Like a year and six days too long since my last post. I honestly thought about abandoning this blog altogether. But I can't do that. This is my baby, though if this were a real baby I would be in jail for neglect. Thankfully, it's not, but it's close enough to a baby that it deserves more attention from me than what it receives. So, the past year in a nutshell: I've been up, I've been down and I've been somewhere in the middle. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle. My online earnings lagged a little bit because I starting working full time. Now things are a little bit different. I could go back and say that I regret doing certain things and letting certain things happen, but it won't change where I am now. So, here's where I am now: I do online surveys, I've gotten into mystery shopping, I use incentivized search engines and I write freelance articles here and there. I'm also working on writing a few articles to publish on Hubpages and possibly some other sites. As a matter of fact, I jus got a $3 from Pinecone Research for a survey I did last week. I'd say that's a decent start. It's time to pick up and move forward. Let's go!!!

Update: You can now visit me from your mobile phone!
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Is it Worth It? 11/22/2010
 
How often do you ask yourself about whether what you're doing is worth the effort? Over the past few months I've been having to question my judgment about a lot of things. It all stemmed from my personal life and made its way up into my professional and academic life. Something that I've learned from both business and personal experience: if there appears to be little profit or gain, or if there's no chance of breaking even, then get out of the game. How many personal relationships have you put effort into but never really got the return on the emotional investment that you made. How often have you been the cause of another person's anguish or been the trigger to their mental/emotional meltdown? It's not always a personal relationship that sparks the flame of emotional/mental distress, but oftentimes it is. In my experience, work can be extremely stressful, but it is much easier to cut out certain activities than it is to cut out certain people that make your head spin. So you have to ask yourself  "Is it worth it?" Is salvaging a business that barely breaks even or loses money really worth all the long hours of work, missed time relaxing and enjoying the people and things you used to enjoy, the stress of worrying about how to make it survive? Is salvaging that relationship with a friend, family member, spouse or lover who doesn't care as much about your feelings as you care about theirs and show no remorse for their actions really worth the tears, the stress that comes along with trying to prove your point and show how much you are hurting, the effort of offering up apologies and forgiveness and never receiving an apology in return? There comes a time when you need to make a list of priorities. Deciding who and what should be on that list is not an easy task. Enforcing that list is not an easy task. It is much easier to stay in the negative and regress whenever you take a step into the positive. Don't take that as doctrine, though. This is just my experience. It doesn't hurt to ask yourself these questions, though.

On another note: the job offer in the previous post is still open. There have been a few changes, however. The base pay per article is $4 instead of $3 and there are bonuses available. For more information check out the Help Wanted page or read the previous post.
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My money is funny and my change is strange! I need some help managing this workload so that I can maximize my earnings. That's why I'm willing to pay someone to help with that. Now, let's be honest, experienced freelancers who are used to making a lot more money than what I'm willing to offer are out of my budget, however I will consider those who don't mind a little side gig. Actually, aside from making life easier for myself, I actually want to kind of "pay it forward". What I mean is I want to help some other newbie to the online income and freelance writing world by providing him/her with info and opportunities that I either didn't have, or had to work a lot harder than I probably should have to get. So, below I am going to post the ad that I've posted on a few other websites and hopefully I'll get a good amount of interested parties. There's been some changes in my life and there are going to be quite a few more in the very near future. Getting the career in order is one of those changes. Btw, somebody is having a birthday tomorrow...can you guess who? ME!!! I'm finally 21 years old, but don't let the age fool you. I've been at this money-making game a long time, since I was 14, and I have some overall lessons about life, love and money that would have you thinking I'm a 50 year old divorced woman. I guess that's what happens when you're not really afforded the luxuries and fun that most kids and adolescents get to have. Our refrigerator was always empty and there was always at least one utility that was either shut off, or about to be shut off. That's why I got into this. But enough about me, look at the ad below and let me know if you are interested by using the Contact Me page.

Do you need a little extra cash on the side? Do you have a knack for writing? If so, read on for more information about getting started with freelance web writing.

Get started in the freelance writing game by writing ten or more articles per week. Gain experience and build your freelance resume'.

Pay will be approx. $3 per article. Articles are usually 400-500 words in length. Payments will be made every Friday via Paypal. This job will last until January 28, 2011, then you will need to find another means of income. This job WILL NOT replace a full-time income and is most appropriate for beginning freelance writers who need some experience or experienced freelance writers who do not mind lower pay or need something on the side. You will be free to write on your own time, however there is a weekly quota that needs to be filled. There will be no work on holidays. Weekends are optional. Some experience preferred, though not necessary.

Requirements:
*All applicants MUST have a working email address that is checked at least twice a day.
*There should be a proficient level of knowledge of word processing, spelling and grammar. Any articles that have too many spelling and/or grammar errors will be rejected for payment.
*No college education is needed, though a high school diploma is preferred.
*Must be available to work at least 16 hours per week, typically Monday through Thursday. Weekends are optional.
*Provide a writing sample by responding to one of the writing prompts below.
*Must be able to meet deadlines
*MUST NOT PLAGIARIZE. Plagiarism is never acceptable. All work WILL be checked for accuracy. Any work that is found to be plagiarized, even if it is your work that has been previously published elsewhere, will be rejected from payment and your employment will be immediately terminated.
*Must agree to any and ALL of the terms specified here and upon approval of employment.

To apply, please contact me through the form located on this website (preferred method) or by sending an email to t11moore@msn.com. Provide your name, email address, a response to one of the writing prompts and your desired work schedule or times of availability. A phone interview may be conducted to verify information or to better determine work ethics. A resume' is not necessary. ONLY NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS WHO RESIDE WITHIN THE UNITED STATES SHOULD APPLY.

Once you submit your application, you will receive notification within three (3) business days of whether your application was accepted.

Writing prompts:
Respond to one of the following in 250-350 words.

Why did you choose to pursue a career in freelance?
or
Name three goals that you would like to achieve within the next ten years. Explain why you chose those three goals.
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 I thought long and hard about what this post would be about. It's been over four months since my last post and there is absolutely no excuse! I thought about what I would say to possibly make up for all the lost time. Should I tell much about my personal life? Well, if I didn't, this blog really wouldn't be "Real Life Business" because in real life, bad things happen to and for business. Bad things like stress at home or school. I had both. Over the summer I was very stressed out over money and the fact that I had none. Then in August, the day before fall classes began I suffered an emotional meltdown, which I am still recovering from. As a result of all of that, my finances have suffered and so has my freelance career. What else is left to do but recover? That is what I am in the process of doing now. Recovering from the emotional meltdown that involved a whole bunch of crying and restless, sleepless nights. Now, it is all about getting back up on my feet and that means meeting quotas. Write so many articles per week and doing so many surveys per week. Spending so much time promoting the blog every week and visiting other blogs to leave feedback and exchange links. Buckling down at school and making it through this semester. Not losing my mind completely before the end of the year. Stuff like that. I got enough to keep me busy and distract me from the superficial and emotionally stressful situations that have kept me down for the last two months. There is money to be made and bills to be paid.
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A month later... 06/14/2010
 
Here we are a month later. In previous posts I talked about switching businesses. I spoke of turning to writing full-time. Well, business is looking up. I stay pretty busy and I'm notorious for neglecting my babies aka my blogs. SFI is really getting on my nerves and the MLM thing may not totally be for me. So, I'm sticking to what I know. Freelance writing and surveys are paying the bills right now and relieving some of the credit card debt. It is always one of my goals to focus more attention on the blogs. I hate disappointing readers and I'll work harder to un-disappoint.
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