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Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) - Part 1

Welcome to Part 1 of my review/guide to Amazon Mechanical Turk, or mTurk. The is a real, legitimate way of making money online working from home.

Getting Started

What you will need:

A computer with internet (derp)
An Amazon Account

...and that's pretty much it! If you want to be paid in cash (as opposed to an Amazon payments balance, which you can use to pay for purchases on Amazon and other websites), you'll also need a US bank account to transfer the money into.

Here is the webpage: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

You'll want to sign up as a Worker. If you already have an Amazon account, just log in with that. Otherwise, create an Amazon account and then use it to sign into mTurk.

Find Work (HITs)

Okay so we have our account set up. Next thing to do is go to the HITs (which stands for Human Intelligence Task) tab and search for HITs. The easiest way to do this is just click the check box that says "for which you are qualified" and search (more on qualification tests later). You'll come up with a list of potential tasks. You can preview any task by clicking View a HIT in this group. Some tasks will only have one HIT, others will have hundreds or even thousands of HITs. Once you found a HIT you would like to complete, click "Accept HIT" on the bottom, follow instructions, and then submit it.

Which HIT should you take? A couple things to be aware of here: 1st, be suspicious of HITs that pay a high amount ($10 or more) for an easy task. If any HIT directs you to a goo.gl or tinyurl link, don't trust it, as the "employer" here creates throwaway accounts and will NOT pay you. The caveat is that there ARE some high-paying HITs, but these are usually transcription or writing articles with strict requirements.

2nd, it is important to decide what type of HITs you would like to accept. Do you want to complete many HITs that are easy and quick, but pay very little (5-15 cents per HIT)? Or do you want to complete tasks which are more difficult and take longer, but the pay rate is higher ($2-5 per hit, or more). Once you determine this, it will be easier to find tasks which appeal to you.

NEXT TIME: mTurk Part 2- which HITs to trust, how you get paid, and my personal review!

27 comments:

  1. Interesting. I've heard about this before. I even considered trying it once. Hmm, might have to give it another look. :)

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  2. interesting indeed, could be something to try one day!

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  3. Will try it at some point. +followed

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  4. I will have to try this one day, I'll put that in my notes to self.

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  5. What sort of tasks do they want you to do? :s

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  6. I do Mechanical Turk here and there. It's definitely ligitimate, although the pay can sometimes be atrocious. I prefer to do the smaller tasks (2-5 cents) and the translation tasks when in it's a language I'm familiar with.

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  7. we just stack money and watch these haters get mad

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  8. @Jay there's a lot of different things. most of them are surveys, translations, transcriptions, and writing reviews or articles. then there's a bunch of odd tasks like categorizing web pages and tagging images

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  9. Really love things like this blog! Who doesn't want to make extra money! Followed!

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  10. My mother would be very interested in this article, i'll link her! Good work!

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  11. Wow, love this - followed for sure! :-)

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  12. i only have a single experience with mechanical turk, it was transcribing a 1 hour long audio file, for which i got paid 65 bucks(which isn't too bad for about 2 hours of work)

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  13. very intresting i will probably have to try this or something similar such genius!

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  14. I need to give this a try thanks

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  15. Wow, this looks interesting... Can't wait for the update, I'd really like to see what I can get out of this. With the job market like it is here in America, I've been job hunting for over 3 years now. Still nothing.

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  16. I'll need to give this a try :)

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  17. if only i could get this elusive thing you call the internet

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  18. I'll have to try this site. Great post.

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  19. it's a shame that i have no access to a us bank account

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  20. interesting, very very interesting.

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  21. interesting, I'll check it out sometime

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  22. These are great tips, i never knew about indexing through search engines.

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  23. It's a pity I don't have an american bank account.

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  24. I think the amount of money you make with mTurk is just too small :(

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