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.