How would I go about starting an incentive based survey site?

I want to start a site that goes something like this.

My site would work this way:

A. I would have prizes on my site worth a certain number of points.

B. This is how the money would work when they take a $4 survey:
Amount paid to me by surveyor: $4
Minus the amount used to buy the survey taker's prize: $2 = 1 point
Profit = $2

C. Once they accumulate enough points (8 points for a $16 dollar prize, 10 points for a $20 prize, etc.), they cash them in for the prize, which I would buy for them.

How do I go about getting this started? I plan on using a .info domain as I don't feel the person trying to get these prizes will care about the domain extension since they're trying to get something that costs money by doing anything but paying for it.

Time travel back 10 years ago.

But seriously, I'm assuming you have no scripting ability and that's going to be the most important part. You're going to want your own incentive script made for you or buy one and have it custom tailored.

To be honest if you can't get $8 together for a .com then you probably can't do what's needed to get a functional incent site.

Work on some more accessible projects and when you have some cash and (for some reason) still want to run an incentive site, do it right.

You can try offerpal. Farmville and such use it. Buy/try offers and get points, pretty simple. I've never really looked into it though

interesting...any idea on the price to get something like this up and running if you paid someone to do it for you?

Okay, I'm probably going to use a .com just to make sure people know it's legitimate.

Also, my plan is very similar to this site here:


But with slightly different prizes, mostly online video game paid memberships/currency. Most of the people that play online games like maplestory, club penguin etc. are 13 year olds that don't have any money but still want all the things you have to pay for.

Place an ad to hire a programmer, show him the site that you just linked to and pick his brain before you hire him.

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You're way in over your head. I ran an incentive site for years and it's a never ending process. Incentive offers come and go every day so updating your selection is time consuming. Even if you managed to get things running, every user has 10 questions. You'll spend countless hours responding to the never ending requests for help. In all honesty I recommend you head in a different direction.

smashedpumpkins said:

You're way in over your head. I ran an incentive site for years and it's a never ending process. Incentive offers come and go every day so updating your selection is time consuming. Even if you managed to get things running, every user has 10 questions. You'll spend countless hours responding to the never ending requests for help. In all honesty I recommend you head in a different direction.

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I couldn't imagine this being as hard as you're saying. It seems pretty simple to me. I wouldn't mind keeping the offers up to date, plus I could just make a Frequently Asked Questions section so people would hopefully not need to rely on me for the answers to basic questions.

Nakota757 said:

I couldn't imagine this being as hard as you're saying. It seems pretty simple to me. I wouldn't mind keeping the offers up to date, plus I could just make a Frequently Asked Questions section so people would hopefully not need to rely on me for the answers to basic questions.

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I had a very large detailed FAQ. I had over 30,000 users and we had 5 support representatives. I built my site back when the time was right and the competitors were small. Since then the site slowly died. Another factor that you haven't accounted for is fraud. I lost over $87,000 in 2007 from affiliates that refused to pay me basing that the traffic was fraud. I took more than 2 affiliates to court to get payments. There are MANY people that fraud. This forum is filled with chinese and indian frauders. It's very common and tough to fight. You need telephone verification and email verification. If you can't design or code then you need to hire out. If you'd really like I can sell you my old business. It's not exactly like the site you'd like to start. I had a points site as you mentioned, but I also have 18 other sub sites that are referral based. Each site has a very professional design that I paid a lot for. If you're interested PM and I can get you some more details.