Prolific Survey: A Great Online Survey Site

If you look hard enough you can always find ways to earn money online. Don't get me wrong, sometimes you have to put the time in to get very little in return. But sometimes it seems like taking candy from a baby (albeit still a small candy...).

I don't tend to get excited about the world of surveys. They seem to take forever and you really don't get a lot in return very often. The one survey site I do like to have plenty of time for, however, is Prolific Academic. I signed up to be a survey participant back in December and I've been fortunate enough to get signed up for quite a few surveys.

The surveys themselves tend to be academic in nature (hence the name of the site) created by universities all over the world, so some of them are actually quite interesting. Face perception, the relationship between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words, apparel shopping, your willingness to buy a solar charger were all among them.

From experience, they tend to take anywhere from a few minutes all the way up to 30 minutes to complete. They also pay from about $1 a time up to about $6, if you are really lucky in being part of the right demographic -- not a bad return for a survey. The minimum checkout level is around $7.50 (essentially it's denominated in pound sterling and so has a checkout at GBP5.00) and gets paid through PayPal. It just seems like a win-win to me.

So take a look -- there are far worse ways to earn a few dollars online than Prolific Academic.

Getting Focused on Income Initiatives

The trouble with the Christmas period is that it's so easy to get derailed from all the grandest of intentions. One minute you're thinking about slowing down in the run up to the main days in question, the next minute it's the first week of January. And you've been extremely unproductive for a solid three weeks.

So that's where I am now, trying to get a bit of momentum, focus and grit into my money earning approach. What the downtime did, though, allow me to do was to do a bit more reading and research about the whole active-passive income world, and how I might be a bit more strategic in my approach.

This was the backdrop to me falling upon Side Hustle Nation, which I guess is like a movement promoting your sideline enterprises which, if you so choose, can come to replace your 9 to 5 job existence.

So far I've only managed to listen to one of the podcasts on there but it was incredibly inspiring. Essentially, there are plenty of us out there trying our hand at creating a bigger and better earnings world than we are currently experiencing. And it's sites like this that can only be good for keeping us connected to like-minded people (it sounds like I'm evangelizing like a paid spokesman, but I'm certainly not associated with the site - I just like the principle).

I also signed myself up for the regular email updates, again viewing it as a way to stay connected with the type of conversations I need to hear. Pretty useful stuff. One that stuck out was an interesting insight from a recent email that talked about getting the balance between time spent on your active and passive income streams.

I'm currently still in the building phase of my coaching and freelance writing space, both of which can be viewed as active income areas - areas which need to monetize sooner rather than later if only to help cover the bills.

Then there's the passive income space - the information product and eBook ideas. These require upfront investment without any promise of a return. If I build it people still may not come, but I need to build because that's part of my long-term income strategy. So how should I split my time? Well, I've decided that currently it should be a 75:25 split, where 75% of my time I'm working on the active income areas and passive income makes up the rest.

Importantly, though, it's the very fact that I've added time allocation to both spaces that's significant. I hadn't until this point been focused enough to think in these terms. The ratio itself may well change very quickly once I get a better sense of the amount of time I should be spending on both. But at least I'm finally having the conversation in the first place.

It's a great way to get more focused for 2016.