Naab - Side Hustle From Home

Side Hustle From Home

How To Make Money Online With Amazon Mechanical Turk

Michael Naab

www.topmoneyhabits.com

Copyright 2016 by Michael Naab

All rights reserved

Please note that all links contained herein have been tested and are functional at the time of publication. Due to the ever-changing nature of the internet, I apologize if any links have become inactive over time.

As a special thank you for purchasing this book, Id like to offer a copy of the guide The Simple Way To Outperform Wall Street Investors for FREE. You can get it through my website, Top Money Habits, by following the link below:

www.topmoneyhabits.com/subscribe

Table of Contents

I discovered Amazon Mechanical Turk in August of 2013. I had a full time job but I had been reading up on ways to make additional money online when I stumbled upon a Yahoo article about the best ways to make money from home.

Most of the things listed were things like babysitting or pet sitting which was not what I was looking for. They listed selling things you own on Ebay or creating an online shop on Etsy but this still wasnt what I had in mind. At the end of the list, it mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk, a way to answer surveys for money online.

I had heard of many different survey sites where you can make money but I always doubted their legitimacy. It was the old if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is (especially on the internet). But I figured since it was in a Yahoo article, it probably had some credibility. I did some independent research and I liked what I saw about MTurk. I felt comfortable enough moving forward with it and giving it a try.

I didnt really use any resources getting started on the site and figured out the basics on my own. It wasnt until I got involved with some of the online communities that I really started taking off with the money I made.

Now when I say taking off with money, Im not saying you will get rich using this website. I still have a full time job and Im not expecting MTurk to ever replace that. However you absolutely can make a good amount of cash on the side. I can typically pull in about $150-$250 on an average week. It really depends on the time and effort that you put into it.

The purpose of this book and what I hope to achieve is to give you the insight on what Ive learned that can help get cash in your pocket without leaving the comfort of your couch.

The aim of this book is to give you tips, tricks, tools and resources on how to make money using Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk. MTurk is an online community where requesters submit jobs, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that they crowdsource to workers.

The type of work on these HITs varies greatly. Before accepting a HIT, you can see a basic description of the job, how much it pays upon successful completion and the allotted time to complete the task.

Most HITs have qualifications that you need to meet before you can do them. The most common qualifications are a HIT approval rate above a certain percentage and/or a certain number of HITs approved. The more HITs you complete while maintaining a high approval rating, the more high paying HITs that will open up to you.

Most approval rate qualifications are 95% or greater but its best to maintain an approval rate of 99% or higher. More HITs open up to you when you reach the level of 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 HITs completed.

These numbers may seem daunting if youre just starting out, but it tends to grow exponentially. The more HITs you complete, the more that open up to you, the more you can complete and so on. I would say that 1,000 HITs is probably the magic number that opens up the greatest number of HITs. Once you reach that level, youll be able to do almost anything on there.

Your approval rating suffers when requesters reject your work. The most common reason for this is because you failed to answer an attention check question correctly. These most commonly appear in surveys and will ask you to click on a specific button or write down a specific word in a box to make sure that youre reading the instructions. Youll come to see that the same attention check questions come up repeatedly in different surveys so the more you do, the easier they are to spot and the quicker youll notice them and be able to answer them correctly.

HITs range from academic and consumer surveys, categorization, transcription, and content writing to name a few. I would recommend trying a broad range of HITs. You may find that you are better or quicker with some types than others or you may find that you enjoy a particular kind more. Some people swear by surveys while others refuse to do them. Personally, I think that surveys are a great way to make decent money as long as youre selecting the right ones which Ill get into a little later.

There are also better times than others to work on MTurk. Here is a screenshot of 45 days of activity for me:

At a glance, you might notice that I usually have stretches of 5 solid days and then 2 lower days which just so happen to correlate to weekdays and weekends. While you can sometimes find good stuff on the weekend, theres usually not a high volume of work on those days. I tend to not do too much on the weekends because I end up spending more time looking for worthwhile work than I do actually completing it. Holidays are also notoriously slow as you might expect.

The bulk of the work comes in on weekdays. You can find work any time but it usually starts picking up around 9 AM and begins to slow down a bit around 3 PM EST. However a good HIT or good batch can pop up at any time so theres always a chance to find something good whenever youre working at it.

The most important thing is to set realistic expectations. Its most difficult to make good money when youre first starting out and dont have the numbers built up to qualify for the better HITs. Ill go over some strategies that can help you boost your numbers so you can qualify for more HITs faster. Just dont get frustrated right away if youre not pulling in $20 days right from the start but you can absolutely get there and beyond with some patience and persistence.

One of the best things you can do that makes life much easier on MTurk is to install scripts on your browser. I would strongly suggest using either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome as your browser when working on MTurk. These 2 browsers have the most scripts written for them. In this section, Ill talk about some of the scripts that I use to optimize my time working on HITs.

Greasemonkey (Firefox) and Tampermonkey (Chrome) are add-ons that allow you to manage the individual scripts that you download. I would recommend getting this first which will allow you to store all of your scripts in one place and toggle them on or off if so desired.

The single most useful and most vital script you can download is Turkopticon. This script inserts a little red triangle beside the requesters names. When you hover over that arrow, a box appears showing you a 5 point rating that the requester has received from other turkers in regards to communication, generosity, fairness and promptness.

This is incredibly useful in helping you to decide which HITs and which requesters are worth working on at a glance. Also in that box is a link that you can click on to read reviews that people have left that requester: