Made My First $100

I made my first $100, it took exactly 45 days, at one hour a day. If we do the math, that comes out to about $2.22 an hour. I've learned a few things since the beginning and i'd like to share them:

Don't do jobs under that pay under a dime. They are usually just not worth your time.

Learn to write if you don't already know how too. Most of the decent jobs require that you write articles.

Avoid the spam, it's popping up everywhere. Although you can make a decent buck off these jobs, they require you submitting personal information that is used for God knows what. It's not hard to detect 'spam jobs'. Be aware.

Learn to recognize the reputable Requesters on Mechanical Turk, there are some that have been around since the beginning and are very reliable. Use the Mozilla Plugin that I mentioned in a previous post.

The good jobs go fast, so you need to be on your toes if you intend to take Mechanical Turk seriously. One job got posted with a pay of $5.55, and there were two available HITS, and it was gone in seconds, I luckily got to it, and it was a very simple job and well worth my 15 minutes.



You can't make a fortune using Mechanical Turk, but you can make some decent spending money from the comfort of your own home. I spoke to one Mechanical Turker who makes $200 a week, I didn't believe him at first, but he proved it to me. Granted, he spents a considerable amount of his time getting that amount of money. You learn to recognize jobs that are worth your time, and jobs that are not -- and I think that is the most important thing to consider.

Things seem to be slowing down

Greetings, I haven't been doing many jobs lately, because there really has been very many good ones. It also seems more spam is appearing on the site from an abundance of requestors. Best way to deal with that is to simply ignore it.

Review Of Amazon's Mechanical Turk

So far I have been on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service for exactly two weeks trying to make some additional money from home. I have made a total of $72.84. I am pretty conflicted about the service. Firstly, there is absolutely no monitoring done by amazon. That means if you do work for a specific user, and he or she doesn't pay you, guess what? Outta luck. Amazon does absolutely nothing about it if you are not paid. A useful method for dealing with this weakness in the service is to download a plugin for Mozilla Firefox, which is called Turkopticon. It lets you(and anybody else who uses it) rate requesters. That way you can get some idea of how fair a requestor will be if you do their work.


Secondly, although there are an abundance of jobs to do on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, there is not an abundance of good jobs to do. Many jobs pay cents or nickels and are simply not worth your time. I think one of the most important things about making money on Amazon's service is selection. I did one specific job which paid $2.00 per HIT(Human Intelligence Task), and it involved doing a google search and entering information from the top 10 results. I did one first to see if it was worth my time. I was able to complete it in 4-5 minutes on average. With this specific job I was making over $10 an hour, which isn't bad from the comfort of your own home. That is why it is important to refresh constantly if you are using Mechanical Turk. Good jobs do come up, but they get eaten up by the workers very quickly.


Lastly, there is quite a significant amount of spam starting to appear on the service. By spam, I mean requesters who are posting jobs that require you to click on advertisements and enter in your information to sign up for a service and so forth. This can be combated with the addon I mentioned earlier in the article. Despite these weaknesses, I think the service is pretty good if you are looking to make some extra spending cash immediately by doing relatively mundane tasks. I will continue to use the service and make updates as I proceed.