Despite the proliferation of Internet scams designed to lure you in with the false promise of a job, there are many legitimate ways to earn a little extra cash online. Here are five to choose from:

Although there are many scams in the survey arena, legitimate companies seek feedback from the public on a variety of consumer products. 

However our new book, “Work at Home Now,” points out the following: “Bear in mind that you may not qualify to participate in every survey. Each survey comes with its own ‘target market’ requirements, and survey companies select users on that basis. For example, a survey involving anti-aging facial cream might be open exclusively to women between the ages of 35 and 55.”

 Some sites to check for this kind of work are:

• SurveySpot

• Opinion Outpost

• PineCone Research

As lifestyles accelerate and time becomes scarce, people want immediate answers to questions without having to do the research themselves. Companies hire home-based researchers to meet this need by going online and finding answers quickly for a modest fee.

Some sites to check for this kind of work are:

• Kgb

• ChaCha 

• Weegy

Scammers have been extremely active lately in the mystery shopping field, often ensnaring their victims with promises of high fees and “free” shopping at high-end stores such as Nordstrom. Victims wire “leftover” funds to the con artists (who are usually abroad), only to discover that the cashier’s check they relied upon was counterfeit, leaving them liable for the transferred funds. 

But on the positive side, many legitimate companies use undercover shoppers to evaluate products and services from the customer’s point of view. (For more detail, see our list of 100-plus companies who hire mystery shoppers.) 

Some sites to check for this kind of work are:

• NARMS

• Secret Shopping Services

• Service Performance Group

Many companies pay home-based workers to handle odd jobs and miscellaneous tasks. Pixazza, for example, pays people to match online photos of products with merchandise offered by its affiliates. Miles of Marketing pays moms to promote products by talking to friends, distributing samples, putting a magnetic decal on their car, etc.

Some sites to check for this kind of work are:

• Pixazza

• Miles of Marketing

• Amazon Mechanical Turk 

Bringing a new product or service to market, or improving an existing one, can cost a great deal of money, and companies want to minimize the risk of missteps. To do this, they pay consumers in “focus groups” for their feedback. The comments of the focus group are often gathered online or by phone.

Some sites to check for this kind of work are:

• 20/20 Research

• Focus Forward Online

• AlphaBuzz

The Internet is steadily widening the variety of smaller projects and tasks that can be done from home. (For more ideas, be sure to check our site.) Although the scam ratio is growing, too (according to our research, it now stands at 59-to-1), there’s plenty of work to go around if you know where to look.    

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