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[mturk] Amazon Mechanical Turk Tutorial: Earn money from home

Posted on 2017-11-07

Are you a stay-at-home-mom looking to make easy extra income from home? I found easy ways to make money online while taking care of my lovely and active toddlers! I’m going to share them with you.

This first one is called Amazon Mechanical Turk or mturk.

What is mTurk?

Simply put, it is a service offered by Amazon who acts as a matchmaker for companies that need people to do simple tasks, called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that a robot can’t do. In exchange you get pay anything from $0.01 to $100. It doesn’t seem like a lot but believe me, it adds up very quickly. I bought the iMac I’m writing this on by turkingfor a few months in my spare time.

How much money can I expect from it?

It depends. I used to make an average of $500 a month, turking 1 hour to 3 hours a day. Some people who turk 8+ hours a day earn more than $2500 a month. I have mom friends who get $200 a month turking only now and then.

Are you interested in mTurk? Great! I wrote this tutorial to help other mommies like me get started. The first step is to create an account here: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome.

This is what my dashboard looks like. Note that I haven’t been turking for a while since I’m now a full-time blogger.

How do I get paid?

The HIT companies prepay Amazon so once you’ve done a HIT and it’s approved, Amazon pays you. Your earnings are transferred into an Amazon Payments account. From there you have the option of direct deposit into your bank account or if you’re like me and have an Amazon shopping addiction, you can use your Amazon Payment account balance to buy directly from Amazon.

The day 10 Probation

You need to know that the first 10 days of turking can be challenging, you have to hang in there, it’s totally worth it! At first, you’re only gonna be able to complete boring and not-well-paying hits. Once you reach 100 hits approved, it gets easier. 500? Much easier! 1000? You can do 90% of the hits on reddit.com/r/hitsworthturkingfor.

Also, during that initial 10 days of turking you are limited to 100 HITs per day. You also have to complete at least 1 hit per day for 10 days in order to withdraw money.

What are the different types of HITs?

There are basically three types of HITs:

Survey
Transcription
Data Entry

I mostly do surveys because there are easy to find and generally quick once you get the hang out of it. Be aware though that you can’t just randomly answer the questions. First because it invalidates the data you’re giving to the requester and secondly because requesters very often include attention check (ACs) and memory checks (MCs) in their surveys in the form of a trick question. If you fail to answer them correctly, your work will be rejected.

I don’t have any experience with transcription but if you’re good at it, the pay is usually very fair!

Data entry HITs are great. The pay is usually low but they usually come in batches, which is great at upping your numbers (your total HITs and approval percentage).

How to find good HITs?

A good rule of thumb is that a hit is worth turking for if it’s at least 10 cents per minute ($6 per hour)

The first weeks, I’d recommend searching for these requesters. They post hits that require low qualifications:

Endor
GS
Agent Agent
411 Richmond
Venue Quality
Tagasauris
Christian Lewis (>100)
Crowdsurf
ClariTrans
ProductRnR

Additionally, you can check the subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/new/

Then, look for hits that don’t require qualifications. After the title of the hit, two numbers will be displayed; they are the qualifications needed to complete the hit. The first number (>x) is the number of hits approved needed. The second one (>x%) is the percentage of approved hits needed. If you’re wondering what your % and number of approved hits are, you can check on the dashboard here: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/dashboard

TurkOpticon (TO)

Also, there’s something you need to know about mTurk. Not all the requesters are fair.A small minority of them is just looking to get free work done and they’ll reject your work for no reason. A few others are very slow to approve your work and some others don’t pay well at all. To be sure that you’re not completing a hit for a scammer or simply a hit not worth turking for, always check TurkOpticon (abbreviated ‘TO’)! It’s a website where turkers come together and rate the requesters that they work for. Additionally, there’s an extension that you can download here, , that shows you their rating just by hovering the cursor over their name.

Rejections

If you followed these rules and still got a rejection, don’t worry! There’s no need to panic. I clearly remember getting very pissed after receiving my first rejection but first, if it’s only one, it won’t affect your approval rating that much so you’ll still be able to access most of the hits. Moreover, even if a requester rejects your work and it has an impact on your approval rating, you can kindly email them to ask why they rejected your work and they may reverse it.