How to make money using Amazon Mechanical Turk?

Hey, Angie Nelson here from theworkathomewife.com. In today’s video, we’re going to be talking about Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk for short. Now, Amazon MTurk is a popular short task site. And if you’re looking for just a little something to do in your spare time to supplement your income, this can be a great place to start learning the work at home ropes. In this video, I’m gonna be providing you with a quick overview of what to expect and also a few quick ways that you can increase your MTurk earnings.

Make sure you stay ’til the end of the video and find out how you can get my seven-day series on finding work at home free. Now, many people that are looking to work from home are looking for a full-time job that’s going to replace their day job income, but there’s still a lot of others that are simply looking for a little something to do in their spare time that’s going to supplement their earnings and maybe provide them with a couple hundred dollars a month extra. And Amazon MTurk is going to be a site that’s going to provide that for you. It is a legitimate offering from Amazon, and this is going to be what’s called a short task site in that there’s going to be a lot of small little tasks on their site that you can pick up and do as you see fit.

There’s no hourly commitments or scheduling requirements. It’s simply something that you can hop onto the site when you have a few minutes and pick up a few tasks to complete on your spare time. Now, this is going to be a job that is not going to provide you with a very high wage. We are generally gonna be looking at probably six to nine dollars per hour if you have a steady workflow, based on some of the recent reviews that I have seen. That being said, a lot of these are a lot easier tasks that a lot of people are looking for when they’re first getting involved in work at home. And as I said, it’s a place that kind of, if you’re brand new to this world, it’s gonna give you a little bit of insight into how work files and communication is held over the internet.

So it can give you a little bit of practice there. And you’ll know what to expect when you’re ready to move into some of the other positions that are available online. Now, you may be wondering, what is a short task? We often refer to sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk as a short task site or a crowd-based platform. What that means is that instead of being handed a big project that you’re gonna work on from start to finish, you may be working on just a small little chunk of it. We may be talking about a few minutes of an audio file that needs to be transcribed. You may be identifying the objects that are in a photo. There’s occasionally some small data entry tasks involved, research, things like that. These are things that aren’t gonna involve a lot of training or a lot of onboarding. You can simply pick ’em up, get ’em done, and hand ’em back in.

Now, as I discussed before, the trade-off for these kind of, you know, short task-based sites is that these are generally gonna be entry level work, and especially when you get into non-scheduled entry level work in the work at home world, you’re going to be talking about, you know, a really low wage. Usually, we’re talking about making minimum wage or less once you’re, you know, this piecemealed work has been completed. So that’s something that you definitely wanna keep in mind. If you’re looking to pay the bills, MTurk is probably not going to be your best bet. But it is something that will allow you to make a little bit of extra money in your free time, if that’s what you’re looking for. Now, if you’re wondering how MTurk works, this is going to be kind of like a marketplace.

These buyers or requesters is what Amazon calls them will come to the site, and they’ll submit the task that they need done. And, they will rate, or, excuse me, give the rate that they’re willing to pay for each of those completed tasks. There’s no back and forth here. Whatever they say the rate is is what you’re going to be paid. And Amazon refers to these tasks at HITs, or human intelligence tasks. These HITs are gonna be listed on the MTurk site, and then you can pick them up as a Mechanical Turk worker, often, or excuse me, referred to as a Turker. Now, there are no set schedules or minimum hours to work, though you do need to complete at least one HIT per day during your first 10 days as a worker. There’s also gonna be a max limit there of 100 HITs per day during those first 10 days. You can pick and choose the tasks that are appealed to you.

Nothing is going to be assigned to you automatically. And you will find everything from surveys to categorization tasks over there. There is some incentive to putting in some time. The better-paying HITs are gonna be available once you hit the levels of 100 HITs completed, 500 HITs completed, or 1,000 HITs completed. So, during those first 10 days, focus on hitting those milestones over the actual money. Now, before you can get paid, your HIT needs to be approved by the requester. That generally is done within 24 hours, and once approved, the payment will be available on your dashboard. There is an initial hold period of 10 days for new workers. You won’t be able to cash out during that time. After that, you can request a disbursement of earnings to your Amazon payments of Amazon gift card balance once per day, if you’d like.

Now, when we’re talking about earnings, as I said before, for the most part, people work for average earnings of six to 10 dollars per hour. Those people that are gonna wanna focus on the easiest tasks like surveys often report an even lower wage than that. But there are a few ways that you can increase your MTurk earnings. Now, the first thing you can do to make more money on MTurk is to be available. The best paying HITs are generally gonna come up during business hours and on the week days. That’s generally when most requesters are online submitting their tasks. Now, there are also a few forums out there that you can join where they share the top paying HITs of the day. MTurk Crowd and Turker Nation are two of those. You’ll also find there are a couple of browser extensions out there available for Chrome as well. There’s one called HIT Scraper that is going to automatically refresh your browser to find good paying HITs that you qualify for.

There is some qualifications on over there at MTurk that you might have to take a few tests in order to qualify for certain tasks that are available, and this is going to scrape those out and make sure that you’re getting notice of the ones that are the best paying for your qualifications. Now, as I said before, there are no minimums to work on MTurk, but there are some benefits to staying active. A lot of high paying requesters only make their HITS available to experienced workers who have 5,000 or 10,000 HITs under their belts. So, staying active and getting a lot of approved tasks is gonna definitely increase your earnings potential over time. Now, you may also wanna get involved in Reddit if you’re going to be working on MTurk. Reddit is a site that a lot of people are over there sharing different things.

They have these things called subreddits, which are like little forums for specific things, and there are some over there that are just for MTurk workers. And again, there, like in most forums I mentioned, people are sharing the highest paying HIT of the day. So that’s one place that you may wanna work, get involved with. One of the subreddits over there is called HITsWorthTurking. So you might wanna check out that. Now, in addition to staying active, you’re also gonna wanna be accurate. A lot of the requesters over there require workers have an approval rating of 98 to 99%. So, handing in subpar work is not gonna get you anywhere. It’s just gonna lower your rating, and you’re really gonna be limited as to the HITs that are available to you. So, make sure that you are following the directions and getting your work done before, appropriately, before handing it into the requester for approval. Now, as I mentioned before, there are some HITs that are gonna require qualification, and a lot of those HITs that are paying more do require that qualification. These qualifications, there will be a tab where you’ll be able to see on your dashboard what qualifications you can take, and those are gonna be little tests that are going to, going to try out different skills that you have, and being qualified is gonna definitely cut down on your competition for those HITs. Now, if you get involved at MTurk and you find out that this is really the type of work that you like, you really like these little one-off projects that you can pick up in your spare time, there are a lot of sites like MTurk as well. You might wanna look into Clickworker, CloudFlower, Fancy Hands, iSoftStone, as I mentioned in another video recently, rev.com offers short transcription files, or Microworkers is another one that you might wanna check out. These are all really similar sites in that they’re just little piecemeal work that will allow you to earn some money in your free time. Now, as I said before, even with the best of tips, I wouldn’t rely on Mechanical Turk to pay your bills. It isn’t gonna happen, in most cases. If you’re looking for something a little more reliable and with a flexible schedule, it may be worth pursuing some of the freelance avenues, if you find there’s specific type of HIT that you are really enjoying and interested in, whether that be, you know, writing, transcription, doing short little virtual assistant tasks.

Those are all avenues that you can pursue once you’ve really decided that this work at home world is something that you wanna get involved in on a full-time basis. I hope you like today’s video. If you did, please give it a like and a share, and make sure you’re subscribed to my channel so you’ll get notification of the next video. And make sure you check the description for a link to a big post on how increase your MTurk earnings along with links to a lot of the things that we just discussed. And I’d love to hear what tips you have for earning more on MTurk, or let me know if you have questions as well, and I’ll be happy to help out if I can. Until next time, I wish you best of luck in working at home, and I’ll see you over on theworkathomewife.com.

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