Remember the days of email and zip poll/survey offers being all over the place, and how they would pay out $1-$2 per lead? Back before GDPR and data regulations were in place, these offers were everywhere you looked. They still are today, but just not as popular as they once were. While these offers aren’t getting the same attention and promotion as they used to, personal data is big money and these same types of offers are still generating millions of dollars daily.
In addition to the “Complete this survey to get a free _____” offers that you’ve seen all over the place, the survey niche is still stronger than ever before. However, it’s not so much the smaller zip and email submit offers that are getting so much attention, but actually the data companies behind them. You’ve likely seen these names and brands before — InboxDollars, Pinecone Research, Vindale Research, and Survey Junkie are some of the more popular ones.
WAHadventures.com highlights many of these surveys on their site and say it possible to make over $250 per month by using survey and incentive networks like Survey Junkie, SwagBucks, MySurvey, InboxDollars and PanelPayDay in your spare time. If you are already making good money online, this might seem like nothing to you — but the average person, getting paid $250+ to take online surveys is like a dream come true! With this same concept in mind, this is why email and zip submit offers do so well. People want free stuff!
Even more, when you start to add a viral or personal interest factor into the mix, that’s when you will really start to see some great results. Just take a look at BuzzFeed quizzes and how they are still one of the most popular sections on their site. People love taking surveys, seeing results, and when you throw an incentive, prize, or money into the mix… big things happen!
The Business of Online Paid Surveys and Giving Stuff Away for Free
On the business side, these offers still do well because customer data is worth a ton of money. Most of the data from these survey sites are sold for huge multiples over what they are actually paying for people to complete a survey. They are also making a huge profit because a large number of survey takers will simply never get to the point where they can cash out (hitting the usual minimum $25-$50 thresholds), which ultimately just keeps that money sitting within the data company.
With all of that being said, millions of dollars are being spent daily from these ‘get paid to complete survey’ companies in advertising, content creation, paid search, and of course, affiliate marketing. To make the most out of all of this money up for grabs, be sure to follow some of the recommended steps below.
How to Promote and Make Money with Online Surveys
Now that we have an idea on the offers available, you will need to focus on how to drive traffic and convert these surveys to audiences that actually convert into leads. One of the best ways to bring in low-cost traffic and convert them into leads is through a survey/poll site or creating an ad campaign with an attractive call to action. Using surveys to generate leads is nothing new, but I will break down the process for you and show you how easy and effective it is.
PRO TIP: Before moving forward, you must check the affiliate promotion guidelines for any specific offer you promote. For example, many zip/email submit offers will allow you to create a custom landing pages, but other high-end survey offers might only allow for text or banner ad placement. Either way, just make sure you are promoting the offer in the required method so you don’t get all of your leads reversed.
Step 1: Find something that everyone is talking about!
If you want to get cheap clicks and grab the attention of audiences around the world, you need to find what everyone is talking about today. For example, “Donald Trump” is likely to be a hot topic for several years now, while “Lebron James” going the Los Angeles Lakers is bound to be a hot trend throughout the next NBA season. This also works well for any highly searched celebrities as well, or anyone is currently trending in the news. The good thing about both of these examples is that it would be quite easy to target these audiences through Facebook Ads, Media Buying, and Social Media.
Still can’t figure out what a good topic is to base your survey or ad campaign around? See what’s currently trending on Google Trends, Twitter, and Facebook.
Just for example sake, let’s take two celebrities (Jennifer Lopez and Jessica Alba) and plug their names into Google Trends. We can immediately see that there is a steady flow of searches being made for both and that they continually have a solid following online. Let’s move forward with that.
Step 2: Create a survey/poll landing page.
Using the topics above, I created a simple landing page that can be used for media buying (or banners if you were to resize it). This literally took two minutes to create within Canva. All you need to do is add some fancy images, create a title and make it look like an interactive survey.
There is really nothing that special about this landing page/media buying copy. Make sure you have a clean design and to the point. I also enticed the visitor to place a vote, by adding “BONUS: Vote Now & Qualify to Receive a Free Gift Card!“. (This can vary depending on your backend offer) All you want the end user to do is click on the image, button, or text you might have in place here.
Again, this is very simple, and depending on the time and effort you put into this, you can make it more advanced or even collect user data for yourself or a newsletter.
Step 3: Finding your backend offer
The next step in the process is to find an affiliate offer that you want to promote. Ideally, this should be a simple email, zip, or one-click submit type of offer. Once you have an audience click on your initial survey/vote offer, you can then pass them along to the affiliate survey offer to complete. You can either setup your own landing page and pass the user onto a confirmation page with stats, or pass them directly to the offer. Make sure you check on marketing options available for the campaign before promoting.
Leadbit currently has this offer active for audiences in the UK and is paying out .70 per lead. The offer can be promoted through mobile, display, emails, search and pop — which allows for a nice range of data, traffic, and split testing purposes.
Step 4: Promotions and getting traffic
Now that you have created your landing page or media buying ad copy, you are ready to go. The best way to generate targeted low-cost traffic would be Media Buying (popunders) and possibly Facebook Ads and using Facebook Fan Pages or Groups (direct relationship or ownership of a group). You could also start targeting news/celebrity sites/blogs through the use of Google Adwords (context display network), native advertising, and popunders ads.
To start playing around with demographic targeting and see how much of a demand there is for a topic, you can use Facebook Ads campaign tool (shown below), or play around with search reports on a tool like SEMRush — which currently shows ‘jessica alba’ at 368,000 searches per month, and ‘jennifer lopez’ with 823,000.
Step 5: Tweaking and watching your numbers
The last step of making money with surveys/polls and news is to continually tweak your landing pages and ad copy to try and get the best conversions. Don’t put all of your traffic to one offer, the reason I went with celebrities, is that there is pretty much an endless supply of traffic related to them out there. See what works best with your traffic, and then expand out into different countries when you start finding success.
This concept is not just limited to celebrity campaigns, however with all of the attention towards the latest hot movies, celebrities attaching the President, and everything else going on… it’s a good market that hasn’t died down and likely won’t.
It all starts with a click…
A few things to point out here…
- This concept is nothing new, but it should act as a reminder of how to reach new markets
- Customization and creating unique landing pages and ad copy is key here
- You also need to split test the end affiliate offer, as this will sway heavily
If you haven’t done anything with affiliate marketing or CPA zip/email submit offers, it’s one of the best ways to get started — as the conversions are usually very high, and the payouts are low. Which means you can start split testing campaigns fast and know right away if you are going to soon find financial success.