When starting out taking paid surveys you are usually eager to get started and might sign up with some less than reputable paid survey sites. The purpose of this article is to tell you what to look for when you sign up with a paid survey site and to help you avoid wasting your time and possibly money.

The first dead giveaway about a paid survey site being possibly less than legitimate is if they want you to pay to sign up. While there are some website that ask you to pay money for access to a database of paid survey websites and may be legitimate, there are also some that will charge you money and then leave you with next to nothing. I would advise you to be on the safe side and not pay to take surveys, only get paid to take surveys.

Another thing that you need to look for is a privacy policy at the website, if there is none then it might not be the wisest idea to join. Since taking these paid surveys means that you are giving away a lot of information about yourself, you want to make sure that the information is not being sold to people other than the intended recipients.

The sign up form to a paid survey site can tell you a lot about the website. If you are bombarded by other offers from their "partners" or whatever they may call them, then I would say that is an indication that you should not join. There are some paid survey websites that have you fill out a member profile in the sign up form, don't confuse that with the other paid survey sites that might have you go through 20 pages of offers for useless spammy products that you are not even remotely interested in. The sign up form should be focused on them getting you as a member to their website, not getting you to join several other websites. Just think about it, if they were a legitimate company than they could make money from sending you surveys over the next couple of years, instead of trying to squeeze all the cash they can out of you right now.

You should also read about them online, there are plenty of websites where you can read paid survey reviews.

The overall layout of a website also should give you an impression of how legitimate the website is. A serious and profitable paid survey company would not have some 2-bit thrown together website. So if the website does not look like they know what they are doing, approach with caution.

How long the company has been in business is a pretty self explanatory thing to look for before joining a paid survey site. A company with a long history has been in business that long by delivering what they promise to their clients and members.