An introduction to the Mechanical Turk… Read on.
Ever wondered how you could make
some extra dollars in your spare hours? Mechanical Turk offers you just that.
This website is owned by Amazon,
the online marketing giant. Mturk.com displays thousands of HITs (Human
Intelligence Tasks) on its pages. These tasks range from simple to complex and
the payment for doing them also ranges from a few cents upto even tens of
dollars. The simpler tasks can involve taking a survey or writing a few
paragraphs on a given subject or commenting on a particular forum. The more
complex ones can require some web design or writing entire reports or doing
some market research. There are also audio transcription jobs that can fetch
you a few dollars for transcribing 5-10 minutes long audio clips into text.
Mturk is a great way to train up
for more specialized online jobs. If you start writing a few 100 or 200 word
articles here, you can gain the skills and confidence to take up larger
freelance writing assignments on sites like ODesk, Elance and GetAFreelancer,
which we will discuss in the next chapters.
If you get the hang of audio
transcription and become reasonably accurate and fast enough, you can
eventually move on to fulltime medical or legal transcription which are high
paying fields. You have to train up for these specialized areas, but Mechanical
Turk gives you a good start with simple tasks.
Within a few hours or days, your
work is checked and payment is credited to your Mturk account. The trick is to
be on the lookout for high paying tasks, where for example you earn a couple of
dollars for a survey which takes only a few minutes. Or writing a 400 word
article on Tourism in Iceland
which earns you 3 dollars! Even if you are not familiar with the topic, you can
quickly read up on the Net and make a fairly decent and factual presentation.
After all that’s what many journalists and media writers are doing today!
Payments are made by checks in
local currency (for certain countries) or transferred to your bank account, or
you can use the money in your account to purchase goods from Amazon.com.
A good way to get started on
thousands of easy tasks and train up for bigger things to come! Don’t let a
spare hour go to waste. Become a Turker today. And don’t forget to browse a
good Turker forum for the latest buzz and loads of good and useful advice.
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