Many of you may be looking for ways to make money from home. It might be extra money to help supplement your current job, you might be a stay-at-home mom looking for a way to contribute, a college student, or retired and looking how you could make some extra money.
I am going to take a look at if you can make money on Mechanical Turk, by working from home. I have joined the program, so I will be able to share with you my experiences, frustrations, successes or failures. I have worked the program hard for the past 2 months to gain a better understanding on what works and what you should avoid.
What Is Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that has been created by Amazon, also known as Mturk. Mturk has tasks available that workers can perform virtually, or from anywhere in the world. These tasks have been outsourced by businesses or individuals for tasks where people can still do a better job than computers.
Tasks can include data validation, research, survey participation and much more and each task can take from seconds to complete to possibly up to 60 minutes to complete.
There are no special skills that are required to be eligible, you simply need to sign up to join Mechanical Turk. (I don’t receive any compensation for you joining, I am just providing you with the link if you are interested.)
Can I Earn Money With Mechanical Turk
I am going to be honest with you, if this is the only income that you will be earning, it will be hard to survive on what you can earn doing tasks for Mturk. If you are looking for a supplemental income, this might be of interest to you.
Tasks have a wide range on what they will pay, starting as low as $0.01 for a task on up. The most I have seen is $15, but not very often. Tasks are not always fairly priced either. I have done some tasks that have taken me 2 minutes to complete and earned $0.75 and other tasks have taken me 15 minutes to complete and I might only earn $0.20 for the completed task.
There are bonus opportunities on many of the tasks for a job well done, which will help your earnings increase, but there is also the potential for your work to get rejected if you didn’t do something correctly on the task, which means you earn nothing for the task.
Like I mentioned above, I have been working on Mechanical Turk for about 2 months. I have been trying to get a better feel for it to help pass along relevant information.
If I had to estimate the amount of time that I have spent doing tasks or looking for tasks to complete, I would guess it is probably around 20 hours per week that I am focused on gaining earnings.
The totals below, are for the last 6 1/2 weeks of me working on Mturk. You can see that my bonuses have helped with bonuses of $46.56. I do still have 33 tasks that I have completed that haven’t been approved yet.
As you can see, this is not enough money for me to live on, but it is a nice little boost of income to help out with expenses.
The chart below will give you a breakdown of my weekly earnings. You can see how many tasks I have done each week, how many were approved and paid, how many are still pending and the rejected tasks.
Drawbacks To Mechanical Turk
There are several drawbacks to working for Mturk that I have faced since starting working with them. I would like to share them with you, so you aren’t surprised later if you decide to work with them.
- Pay is low.
- Tasks get rejected and you have no idea why it is rejected.
- Some tasks are slow to pay.
- There has been several surveys that I have completely worked through and when I get to the end, there is no survey code, which allows me to get paid for the task.
- Higher paying tasks are gone quickly and you might not always find tasks that you like doing.
- Many times instructions are very confusing on how to properly complete the tasks.
- Hard to find quality tasks on weekends or evenings.
- Many times the pay doesn’t reflect the required effort.
Tips For Mechanical Turk Earnings
I have discovered several tips to help increase my earnings for Mturk that I would like to share with you. Hopefully they can help you be more successful quicker.
- You can sort the tasks or hits as they are called. I recommend sorting the “created” column for the most recent. That will give you more of an opportunity to find tasks that are still available.
- When you sign up, make sure that you do at least 1 task for 10 days in a row. That is needed for your final approval. After the 10 days, it doesn’t matter if you don’t work on tasks every day.
- Use the preview option. If you hover your mouse over preview, you will see how long it takes to get paid, along with the percentage of hits that are approved. Especially when you begin, avoid tasks that could be rejected.
- Surveys seem to pay the quickest with the least chance of them getting rejected. I have found several surveys that pay over $1 and might just take minutes to complete. You can also receive bonuses from surveys if you do a good job.
- You will need to hit different levels of approved tasks or hits to qualify for better tasks. Start out by completing as many tasks as possible that are easy and not usually rejected. This will help you see higher paying tasks that you will qualify for. Some targets are 500 completed, 1000 completed and 5000 completed.
- Watch your rejection rate. You will not qualify for many tasks if you have a high rejection rate. Many tasks will require that your approval rate is 98% or 99% before you qualify for better tasks.
- Get qualifications. There are several items that you can answer questions that won’t accurately pay anything, but it will help you qualify for better tasks.
Conclusion
You can make money on Mechanical Turk, you just won’t be making large amounts of money. If an extra $300 per month is something that can help you or your family out financially, than it is probably worth you taking a look at the program. I do believe that you can get to at least $300 per month and possibly more, depending upon which tasks you are willing to do.
The competition to get jobs can be a bit frustrating at times. There are many times that I keep clicking on jobs to do that are filled before I got a chance to do the job.
Another benefit with Mturk is that you can choose when and how you want to be paid. You can be paid weekly or monthly and paid with Amazon gift card, direct deposit or PayPal. I am being paid monthly with a direct deposit.
There are many other survey businesses that you can take a look at for earning extra cash like Swagbucks, but I have done both, and feel your opportunities are much better working for Mturk.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below and I will get back with you. You can follow momsmakingmoneyathome.com on Linkedin for all the latest updates.
