First Attempt - Mechanical Turk

So the first thing I decided to try was Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

What exactly is a mechanical turk you ask? Basically amazon has setup a service where people can log in and complete mundane tasks that computers and A.I. can't quite accomplish yet. There are Companies/Universities/Etc. that have a bunch of busy work they need done, so they outsource it to whomever wants to do it. usually for pennies on the dollar.

Be warned that this method does require actual work. You choose a task (called a HIT) and if you complete it you will get paid. There are some scammer's on there so you should probably be somewhat careful as to which HIT's you accept. However in my experience they are few and far between.

HIT's range from anywhere from $0.01 and I have seen some as high as $18. Now you do have to be qualified for the high paying HIT's and most of those require that you be very good at writing. If you are, and are willing to churn out articles for Travel blogs or any other type of article, then I guess you could actually make a lot of money. While my writing isn't that great I figured I'd start small and go from there.

The website that is extremely helpful here is another blog called:  HIT's worth turking for. Basically, Justin tries to go on every day and find some easy hits that pay between $0.50 and $1 and link to them on his site.  His efforts are appreciated and he has quite a following. Because of that some of those HIT's don't last very long, so if you're interested it pays to check his site a couple of times a day.

-Personal Experience-

So I started Turking on 1/08/2012 and so far I have been very pleased. I found a guy that has a bunch of Spanish to English translations things that he needs done. They only pay $0.15 per hit and I average about a minute and a half per hit. I'm afraid I've gotten kind of addicted. If you figure it out hourly it's not even minimum wage, but for time i would have wasted at night watching TV or browsing the web, I have no qualms about it.

I found out that you have to be active for 10 days before they will pay out. (I don't think it's consecutively, just ten total day, meaning you don't have to be on straight for 10 days...) You can either link your bank account with your Amazon payments account, or just opt for an Amazon gift card. I linked my account and so I can just transfer the money over if I want to. Even though most of my purchases will be on Amazon, it will be nice to just have the option to put money into my account if I'd rather.

Have a look at my first 9 days, and tell me what you think:

Click the picture for a larger version.

So far so good. I don't think I can keep up with the 100 HIT's a day though. I think it would burn me out. If I can get on and spend half and hour to make $5 a day, I think it's totally worth it. Let me know if you have any questions, and I will try and respond.

Until Then, Happy Turking!