There are tons of ways to qualify and participate in these studies. Most of them require you to sign up for certain sites and keep your profile up to date. By keeping your profile up to date you will qualify more frequently and receive more notifications/emails. My favorite site to be part of for focus groups is called 20 20 Panel! Last year 20 20 Panel alone paid over 3.5 million dollars to their participants. In 3 months I qualified for 3 to 5 studies. One required 45 minutes on the phone about health care while the other required 30 minutes for 3 consecutive days logging onto a site and answering questions. Each study varies depending on what the company is looking for and most are willing to pay you greatly for your time.
Another great site to keep an eye on is Find Focus Groups. This site is less profile/sign up based and more area based. A lot of the focus groups offered on this site come from the west coast. Most are area based due to needing participants to come in person to participate but there are a few that are done online. If your on the west coast you will want to book mark this site and even if your from another region still keep a check every now and then just not as frequently. Other sites to join include Chasen Research and YouEye (Web Cam Studies). Although both of these are not as high paying as the first two these are still very quick easy ways to earn some extra cash and are still worth your time.
Tons of sites offer rewards and incentives for participating in surveys and/or completing task. To learn more about those you can visit our Navigating Reward Sites page, as those sites are quite different than the focus groups. You can also visit our Newbie Links page to make sure you are signed up for all of the cash back and freebie sites as well!