10+ TOP Survey Affiliate Programs [2024]
Paid survey affiliate programs are among the most profitable affiliate marketing opportunities. These are the programs that pay you for each referred user that completes a survey on their website. Since users don't need to pay and are only required to put some time and answer questions, survey affiliate programs convert much easier than CPA offers.
Perhaps you're looking for a way to further monetize your website by advertising survey offers. Or maybe you do affiliate marketing for a living and are looking to get into a new, easily converting niche. This article lists the best-paying survey affiliate programs. It will also include a comprehensive guide on everything you need to know about this vertical.
About Paid Online Surveys
These programs aren't throwing money away for free. Major researching companies conduct surveys as a marketing strategy for their clients. Companies pay them to analyze data from the surveys. Most of the data from survey companies will be sent to their clients, and they will use them to improve their products and marketing efforts.
Data from the customers and consumers is invaluable to every brand. And they are more than happy to pay to know their customers better. This is the main—albeit not only—reason online market research programs pay users and affiliate marketers to refer users. The more people participate in a survey, the better and more enlightening its data analysis will be. So their clients will be happier, and they will still make a huge profit since they earn a lot more than they pay the affiliates and users.
Survey affiliate programs are among the most successful and popular affiliate niches. Not having to pay anything really drives people to participate in surveys. Plus, surveys can also be a fun thing. Therefore, paid surveys are a great niche for those just about to start doing affiliate marketing. Like most other affiliate programs, these are also free to join.
There is a slight difference between the two types of survey programs: referral and affiliate programs.
Types of Survey Affiliate Programs
Referral program: The online survey referral plan is for survey committee members and GPT sites with paid survey offers. Under the provisions of the paid survey program, anyone can sign up to earn a commission by referring organizations. Each time a reference buys a subscription, the referrer will be paid a commission. The commission will be given either a percentage or a fixed amount. Since you're referring organizations to partner with the online survey company, the commission is much higher than you would get for referring users to complete surveys.
Affiliate program: An affiliate marketer can sign up to a network offering survey affiliate programs. In contrast to referral programs, you need to be an established affiliate marketer to start earning. You can choose among the three types of paid survey offer on the affiliate networks. These include SOI offers, DOI offers, and CPA offers. The payment condition of cost-per-action or CPA offers is that the referral completes a survey.
SOI (Single Opt-In) and DOI (Double-Opt-In) offers are more selective regarding traffic quality. These offers require assurance that the user completing the survey is not a bot and is one individual. SOI offers ask only for one action from the user, which might be asking for their email address. DOI offers ask for more than one action, such as confirming the email or perhaps entering personal information.
How to Promote Online Surveys
Knowing what offers there are isn't enough to start making money. The next step is focusing on driving traffic and finding the proper channels and audience. You need to find an audience source that could potentially convert to leads and then ensure they will convert by creating an advertising campaign and an attractive call to action.
A great way to convert low-cost traffic into leads is through a survey/poll site. A more accessible and cheaper way would be to create a landing page. A landing page is one of the most used affiliate tools. It allows you to create a personalized and audience-focused page without coding and website development knowledge. However, you must check the affiliate promotion guidelines for any offers you promote first. Some high-end survey offers might prohibit custom landing pages and instead only allow for banner ad placements. It's highly likely you know about using surveys to generate leads. Still, we will explain the process so you can quickly and effectively practice it.
Step 1. Finding a Hot Topic
One way to attract people and get their attention, and consequently their click, is by finding what everyone's talking about at the moment. Celebrities are always a source of public interest. But keeping up with the times is more than beneficial. For example, the number of searches for famous actor Johnny Depp and—for obvious reasons—actress Amber Heard has seen a tremendous rise recently. Another example would be the 45th U.S. President, Donald Trump, which maintained a consistent interest over time.
You can find out what the hot topics are by checking what's trending on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Trends. While at it, make sure to factor GEO into the equation. A trending topic in the UK might not be that interesting to people in Russia.
Step 2. Set Up Your Landing Page
Once you know of a hot topic, you can focus on creating your landing page. Affiliates need the simplest of landing pages to promote survey offers. It's one of the benefits of paid survey affiliate programs. It takes minutes to make a converting design for your landing page if you use the right tools. Canva, for example, is something every affiliate marketer could make use of in creating their creatives. Then you have to use your copywriting skills to come up with an enticing title and make it look like an interactive survey.
Simplicity and minimalism go a long way in advertising. Your landing page should also be clear and to the point. You can further entice users to enter their info (for SOI and DOI offers) or complete the survey if your backend offer allows by saying things like: "complete this survey to qualify to receive a $20 amazon gift card." Often, surveys actually do use sweepstakes as a form of incentive. Fill out a form and qualify for a sweepstake. That will get people interested.
Step 3. Find a Suitable Offer
The third step in the process is to pick an offer you want to advertise. You want something straightforward, with few rules and regulations. For this reason, a basic email or one-click submit offer would be ideal. Your leads will be sent to the affiliate survey offer. However, you might potentially redirect them to your landing page first to enhance conversion and assure high-quality traffic. Before you promote, research the campaign's marketing options.
Top affiliate networks provide survey programs that can be marketed via email, pop, search, push, and mobile traffic, providing a diverse spectrum of data and traffic.
Step 4. Traffic Source
You're almost there now. To drive traffic, one of the best ways to go would be media buying or popunders. Another converting strategy would be using Facebook ads or Facebook fan pages and groups, especially for our celebrity-oriented survey ads and custom landing page. You might also utilize Google Adwords (context display network), native advertising, and popunders ads to target news/celebrity sites/blogs.
Use your affiliate analytic tools to experiment with demographic targeting and determine how much demand is for a topic. There's a wide range of them available, and they can help you develop the best marketing strategy. A well-known one would be the Facebook Ads campaign tool. You could also experiment with search engine marketing companies such as SEMRush, which currently shows Johnny Depp at 1M searches per month and Elon Musk at 1.8M. But remember, there's a massive competition for these keywords. You might want to choose a hot one that's less impossible, like the star actress of the returning Stranger Things TV show.
How to Convert Leads
Driving traffic to the destination link is the easy part. You can get lots of clicks but still, have trouble converting that traffic into leads. This is because there are many steps from traffic to lead generation.
Landing pages. A well-done landing page might have the most chances of conversion compared to other funnels. After all, the whole idea behind landing pages is to maximize conversion rate. The clever idea is to offer your potential leads something of value in exchange for their email address. For survey affiliate programs, that's usually sweepstakes. Affiliate marketers can also use their digital assets, such as ebooks, webinars, or subscription plans if they have one. These are lead magnets. Of course, they'll have to fill out the form you require to access these free products.
The most important tip, whether you're creating a landing page or writing your next weekly email to your subscribers, the most important tip is to personalize it. Take some time to know your audience.
Blog/website marketing. Blog marketing is when you promote your offer through the means of a blog or a website. This includes marketing via adverts placed on blogs and recommendations and reviews by the blogger. But blog marketing isn't limited to these. Blogs are cheaper and more manageable than websites. Proper knowledge of SEO is a necessity of having a successful blog or site which you can advertise on.
Website or blog owners use affiliate programs to monetize their assets. If you do have such a sales funnel that gets high visitors daily, you can utilize it to both drive traffic and convert them into leads. Like email newsletters, your blog visitors have willingly visited your page because they are interested in your content. As a result, promoting deals appealing to your visitors is more likely to result in a conversion.
Email marketing. A great way to convert leads, as used and suggested by the legends of the marketing world. The three lead magnets mentioned above are actually most effective because they give you a valuable list of email addresses.
Step 5. Optimization
As always, you always need to watch for your numbers and optimize. If you want to make money with survey/polls affiliate programs. In that case, the key is to constantly tweak your landing page, copy, and ads to get the best conversion rate. You always learn new things while running a new campaign. Thankfully you can implement that newfound knowledge to make things run smoother.
Don't direct all of your traffic to one offer. Celebrities are a good choice since there's an almost infinite amount of traffic. But first, you need to see what works best with your traffic. Once you've found success, grow out into other nations and try new traffic.
Payment Models
We've favored affiliate programs that pay with cash rather than credits. But many survey companies don't feature an active public affiliates program with cash payment.
You’re either paid a fixed amount or a percentage depending on the offer. If you're promoting a CPA offer—where your referrals must complete a survey—you're usually paid a fixed amount per each lead you bring in. That is, payment per each user that completes a survey while redirected from your affiliate link.
CPL offers payment differ from country to country. But buying traffic there is cheaper as well. People in TIER 2 and 3 also show an interest in surveys. An excellent country to target if you want more affordable traffic but with high conversion would be India. Suppose you're promoting referral programs; remember that you are eligible for payment each time your referral completes a survey and not just for the first time.
Some survey companies have affiliate programs that task you to bring in partnering companies. Similarly, these offers either pay a fixed amount—high ticket—or a percentage of the plan your referral purchases.
Conclusion
Survey affiliate programs are among the best ways to get started if you've never done affiliate work or CPA offers before, as conversion rates are high and payouts are low. Low payout means you can start split testing campaigns and focus on optimizing without worrying about money.
