Survey tips

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I belong to a few good survey sites now. They're a nice alternative to 'head work' and pay well. In the lead this week is Surveyhead, although surprisingly Valued Opinions is racing up the inside on the home stretch. Toluna was left in the stalls - mainly because I was screened out 3 times over. Lightspeed took off quite well, but now seems to be flagging on this softer ground. Ciao, meanwhile ... Um. Yes. The last survey was about on line betting shops. Is it just me who thinks these survey groups read like the racing times?Anyhow, I've been getting variable results from surveys but, on the whole, things are improving. I thought I'd share tip no 1 with you right now: A lot of the better paid ones are corporate surveys - office PC usage etc. For heaven's sake, DON'T say you're unemployed or a self-employed sole trader! The subject of the survey should be enough to tell you what section of society you come under. If the title says: Company technology, for example, it's fairly obvious they're looking for someone with a working knowledge of PC structure and usage within a commercial enterprise, rather than how many MyLot tasks you completed last night. A lot of the time, these questions come down to things like - do you instal your security programs from a commercial site, or do you have in-house security programmers? You may well have the knowledge they seek even if you don't work in that environment, either by being on the sidelines or knowledge gleaned elsewhere. (For example, as a technician in the NHS I had a fair idea of how their internal network structure was organised, so felt happy 'becoming' middle IT management for half hour. Another time, I called on my experience at a large multinational corporation that closed down to shift abroad) So put yourself in the box the survey thinks you belong in, and consider if you have enough knowledge to give informative answers to a few questions. This isn't cheating - you'll still be answering truthfully (see below) Open some spare tabs. Surveys aren't timed, but it pays to be organised. If you're not used to 'CEO in-talk' you'll be stumped by some of the product names. Google up a few - you'll soon realise that they're basically asking you questions about what you're typing on right now, only with a lot more remote ports and a damn sight dearer. Don't waste too much time away from your survey 'home tab' though, or you WILL be timed out. I don't work as the CEO in a big organisation, but I have - ahem - an ongoing personal relationship with someone who is. So I become him for a while, about the time I got a survey on business travel. Besides, I live on top of Gatwick and often go there to look wistfully at all the posters. If anyone knows about how naff the new Lufthansa logo looks, it's me. Look at it another way - the mainframe goes down all of a sudden whilst a corporate senior is playing at scrabble the figures. Does he get ink on his fingertips? Like hell he does. He gets his PA to tell the tealady to call an IT technician out of bed. I mean, How many senior executives do you know who waste time doing paid surveys anyway?! Aside from the NHS, naturally.