SlicethePie

Slicethepie is a website I started using (today actually) and I think I am going to love it. Basically you just listen to music, give it a rating, and write a review of what you thought of the music. The reviews don't pay great (I have gotten between 6 and 10 cents for my reviews so far), but you can listen to the music in the background while you do something else then write a review. You have to listen to at least 90 seconds of the song before you start the review, but since I have the song playing in the background I just listen to the entire thing.

Also make sure that you are honest in the rating of which genre's you like at the very beginning when you sign up. I said I sort of liked classical music (which I do), but have found that I have a lot less to say about the instrumental and classical pieces that I have had to rate which makes writing the reviews difficult. I haven't found a way to change my preferences yet, and will be sure to update if I do because I would prefer NOT to have to rate classical music.

You have to make $10.00 before you can cash out your earnings which isn't much at all. I don't see anyone making oodles doing this, but it seems like a decent website to make some cash on the side. I did just start using it, so will keep this updated if I run into any problems or find any helpful tips for the website. I think Slicethepie is a great way to hear some new music and get paid to write reviews of it.

Earnings so far: $0.64

Let me know if you try it and what you think of it!

Update 01/21/2014: Once the novelty of this wore off I quit doing it. I believe I have $2.29 there and I doubt I will be making the additional money needed to get to $10.00 to cash out. Overall this was a bust.

Great Turking Tasks Available Today

For some reason mturk had some AWESOME tasks today. I did one that took 5 minutes and paid $3.00 to answer around 10 questions. Most didn't pay that well, but I worked for 1.5 hours and made $18.61 which works out to just over $12.40/hour.

Ideas on why I found so many great HITs today:

-I recently got to over 100 hits accepted which opened up more task options

-I changed my searching technique. I now search for most recently posted that pay more than 10 cents that I am qualified for and then check over what the time requirements are for them. Here are a few quick tips.
           *Good paying jobs are taken relatively quickly, so searching the newest tasks gives you a higher likelihood of being able to find these hits before other people have already completed them. http://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/new/ is a reddit page that lists new and good HITs which is nice, but be aware most great HITs don't last that long and are all still completed quickly.
           *Make sure you read what the description says for a time estimate because the amount of time you will take to complete it and the amount of time allotted are normally pretty different. Requester's don't want you to time out of a task when you are almost done because you read a little slower or have a slower internet connection.
            *I try to make about 10 cents/minute spent working or better. I chose this because it works out to $6.00/hour (which I realize isn't really a great wage) and because it is really easy to quickly figure out. It means if a task pays 50 cents I am willing to do around 5 minutes of work, so if the description says it is going to take 20 minutes I know to skip it.
             *I also do some quick tasks that pay 1 cent and take around 30 seconds because I still don't have that many completed hits and want to get up to 1000 because this opens up more well paying tasks. The quick 1 cent tasks don't pay well per hour, but will make it so I can get to 1000 accepted hits more quickly.

-It is the beginning of summer semester/quarter at many universities. I haven't been doing mturk for long enough to know this for sure, but I think it would make sense that a lot of studies are posted at the beginning of each semester/quarter when students start collecting data. They will want the data early, so they can analyze it and write about it before the semester/quarter is up. I will see if this holds up in the fall when most universities begin (mid-August to mid-September).

6/2/13 Report

Today I only spent an hour or so working online.

I did 100 mturk jobs (I can't do more until I have done tasks for 10 days straight) and that's about it. Jon and I went to the farmers market on the Everett waterfront which was fun, but not very productive.

I am going to write up proposals for a few Elance data entry positions tonight and finish my Squidoo article on how to pick good professors. I would love to do Infobarrel, but I don't believe I can make any income with Infobarrel until I have an Adsense account which I can't get until I am more on top of writing in at least one of my blogs.

Goals for June:
-Write in each blog 5 times/week
-Make $50 with mturk (not including the $28 I already made)
-Write 5 Squidoo lenses

I know these don't seem like very ambitious goals, but I have finals and will be gone on a road trip for the second half of June. That won't leave much time for being online.

Can't sleep

I think mturk has turned me into a crazy zombie because I am still not asleep! I did almost 40 new tasks in the last hour, so fingers crossed none of them get rejected!

I also wasted an hour updating my squidoo lenses just for fun. I don't expect to make money off them, so should probably quit messing with them, but they are fun to write

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Update: I have been using mturk much more recently, and have found it is a pretty steady way to make money. I have been making a goal to make $10/day (which I easily surpass most days), and since I make money everyday I have a steady stream of income even if some requesters take the full 30 days they are allowed to pay out in. As of today I have made $761.39 which isn't a fortune, but it is way more than I ever expected to earn when I first started. I think the key is to find a way of searching for HITs that you like and to get over 5k HITs accepted. Once I got to 5k it seemed like I had many more options. I will keep updating with making money there and am planning on writing a stand alone page on what I think the best ways to make money on Amazon Mechanical Turk are.

I was bored this weekend and started using Amazon Mechanical Turk again. I found some great surveys that were quick and easy. I also finally reached over 100 turks accepted which opened up a lot of new tasks for me. I can only do 100 tasks/day for the next 10 days, but I am going to try to do that and see how much I can make. So far I am at $20 for about 4 hours of work which isn't great pay. I could make more than $5/hour at McDonalds, but I do have to admit taking the surveys was pretty fun.

Mturk also allows users to withdraw money to an Amazon accounts and from there it can be transferred (for free) to a bank account or into amazon gift cards once it has reached $1. Yup just $1 is needed to withdraw the money which is AMAZING!! One drawback is that the people who post the tasks have up to 30 days to pay so there is no guarantee you will be paid fast. I have had pretty good luck in the last few days, and have withdrawn $5 of the $20 I made and it only took two days to reach my bank account.

I don't think I will ever make a great hourly wage with mturk and it doesn't have any ways to make a passive income, but I did have a good time and it was money I could make while sitting and watching tv.

Here is a picture of my cash outs from Mturk so far. I still have about $10 pending that I made today, but am really pleased with how fast most people pay on here.

Survey Hell

Today I planned on signing up for one survey site. I can't even remember which one I planned on starting with because I just got shuffled from one site to the next. I would click on something thinking I was completing my registration for one site and BAM be on a new site. I have a Physics exam tomorrow, so I will sort through what all I signed up for tomorrow.

I foresee a lot of spam emails in the next few days, so I'll have to keep on top of unsubscribing from them! I think I might also need to make a new email specifically for survey sites, so if I end up getting a monstrous amount of spam I can just dump the email without having to update everyone on my contacts list. Anyhow today was a failure as far as making money went, and now I need to go study so tomorrow my Physics test isn't a failure too!!

Oh one last thing. Does anyone know of any survey sites that WON'T send you in crazy circles?!

Squidoo

Squidoo is a website where you sign up and create things called lenses. Basically the lenses are webpages that you get to design and write about whatever you want. You get paid when someone clicks on an ad on your page. I will keep you up to date on whether I make any money (I am one of those people that never clicks on ads in articles, so I'm not sure who will click on them). Fingers crossed that I do, but even if I don't I like the website. Creating the lenses is fun and it can be about any topic you choose. It's good writing practice and Squidoo can feature them so they come up in web searches which could help get a wider audience. My first lens has exactly...wait for it...one view which is rather depressing. Hopefully that number will increase or my next one will be about something more people care about.

My current goal is to create at least one lens a day and see how much money I have after a month. Ideally I will write about a variety of topics and with different writing styles and lens layouts, so I can find which one is most likely to make money.

Any helpful tips from people who have already tried Squidoo and made money would be greatly appreciated. Also for anyone who has tried Squidoo and made squat I would like to know what you wrote about and how you set your lenses up, so I can start off knowing what doesn't work.

Spammy emails and phone calls

So I am not sure signing up to be a mystery shopper was a good idea. As I said before it seems like it takes a small investment to be able to make money at this, and at the time being I have no money to invest in eating out and shopping EVEN if I get paid for them in the long run. The company I signed up with has sent me about 50 emails with job offers since I signed up a week ago and called me 4 times in a row yesterday without leaving a message. When I checked my phone and saw 4 missed calls from the same number I thought someone I knew was having an emergency and calling me from a toll free number. Needless to say I was a little miffed when I realized this was just the mystery shopping company calling to offer me a gig at a store nearby. I may have to quit the mystery shopping before I even started simply because they are so spammy. I will be looking in to a way to stop the emails and phone calls until I have more free cash that I can invest in mystery shopping.

Kgbanswers

So yesterday I signed up for a program called kgbanswers. Basically people post questions on the site and the site pays people to answer these questions. You take a series of tests and in the end are informed someone will get back to you. It probably took around two hours to take all the tests. I did pass them all, but sadly today I got an email informing me that they are not in need of more people to answer questions. I think this was just their polite way of saying my areas of expertise are not needed by them. I wouldn't recommend this site just because the application process takes a long time and they are not in need of more people at this time. If you have a very specific skill set that very few people have you most likely will have a better chance of being able to work for them.

Superbowl

No money making attempts today because I am watching the superbowl  I'll start back up tomorrow

Notebook of Ideas

I decided to start a notebook to store all the ways to make money online that I haven't tried yet and to keep notes on the ones I am trying. Here's what it looks like so far!

For the next few weeks any ideas on how to make money online would be greatly appreciated. Let me know about places you've heard of that you haven't tried yet and would like a review of or have tried and loved!

InfoBarrel

I started InfoBarrel today. It is a website that allows users to write articles and post them on the website. The idea is that other people read the articles and click on the links or ads. This allows the writer to generate money. You are allowed to write about a ton of different categories, so can basically pick your subject material. I don't have a Google Adsense account, but will be signing up for one after an article or two of mine have been approved. So far I have submitted on article and am working on another. They recommend that people write thousands of articles in order to generate the most income which sounds somewhat daunting, but over time I believe I could write that many. I will keep you updated on whether my articles get approved and how signing up for Google Adsense goes.

Edit: My first article was rejected because it sounded too much like a promotion for a product :(. I submitted another article and have no word back on that yet. I am done writing for tonight. I found with both articles I submitted I wrote a lot more than they required, and need to work on writing less or these will take forever with minimal payout.

Mystery Shopping- Market Force

I signed up for Market Force, a mystery shopping site, a few days ago. Signing up was easy and they have a lot of opportunities to do mystery shops in my area. I signed up for one that I will do next weekend. It looks like there is a lot of paperwork involved and I don't own a scanner, so I'm not sure how well mystery shopping is going to work as a way to make extra money. I think we have scanners on campus, so I am going to look into using those. I will let you know how my first attempt at this goes next weekend.

It also seems like it takes a month or two before I will get paid anything. Since I have to spend my own money to do these shops I won't be doing many until after I get my first check/deposit into my Paypal account. I want to make sure this company pays in a reasonable amount of time and that they pay out for all shops I do. It would be terrible if I spent money to eat or shop somewhere and then didn't get paid or reimbursed for it!!! I will keep you updated on how my first shop experience goes.

Have you ever been a mystery shopper and how did the payment system work when you did it? 

Greetings

Well hello and welcome to my blog. I am currently a college student and looking for ways to make money that work well with my schedule. I will be attempting various ideas I have thought up or found on other sites and reviewing how well they work. Ideally I will find a way to make money in ways that have flexible scheduling and pay as well as having a traditional job would. There aren't many part-time jobs in my area that fit into my class schedule and pay decently.