A real paid survey is conducted by a legitimate market research firm. The market research firm is hired by a company to gather information about a certain product or advertisement. An example of this would be:

A major cell phone company wants to change their logo and slogan and wants to see which one of their ideas has the most appeal to the public. They hire Luth Research to conduct a study of people 18 - 35 in major cities who own a cell phone. Luth Research then sends a survey to their online panelists via their online paid surveys division, Survey Savvy. They may send the survey to 10,000 people. Each of those 10,000 people are paid $5 to answer questions about the way they feel about the advertisement, which logo and slogan they think is best and why. The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete and the panelist is mailed a check a few weeks after the study is complete.

There are hundreds of paid survey panels that you can join that are legitimate and do exactly what Survey Savvy does. The problem is finding a resource for paid surveys that actually promotes real paid surveys. There are sites where you can pay a fee of up to $60.00 just to get a list of legitimate paid survey panels. These sites are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't know that the same information is available free all over the internet. You can try searching any of the major search engines like MSN.com for a Free Paid Surveys Directory. This will bring up several sites that actually have everything a paid membership site has but is totally FREE.

From my experience the best paid survey panels you can join are Greenfield Online, Opinion Outpost, Survey Savvy, Lightspeed Research, and NFO My Survey. All of those can be found on any free paid surveys directory or by searching a site like MSN.com for the "Top 20 Paid Survey Panels"

When starting out in paid surveys it is best to at least join the top 20 paid survey panels. Each panel will not send paid surveys everyday. Some may send a survey once a month, while others may send you 5 a week. It all depends on who they need and when they need them. So the obvious thing to do is join as many as possible. That way you are almost guaranteed to receive at least one paid survey a day. Sometimes more.