Friday, March 25, 2011

Microworkers Tips

Microworkers has money making potential.  In my experience, it’s more suited to doing maybe four or five jobs per day and building up the dollars gradually.  That’s because there are slightly less opportunities for work and earnings than on MTurk, purely because there are usually far less jobs on offer.  If you are like me, however, you use a variety of websites to make money online, not just MTurk.  Anyway, here are my Microworkers Tips.

  • Create alternative email accounts etc. to use specifically on Microworkers.  That way, if you get spammed later, it’s not effecting your main personal account.  You can also do this with Facebook, Youtube etc. for some of the tasks that ask you to rate/favorite/like specific businesses etc. but be careful, as the requester may reject you if they work out what you’ve done!
  • Always read the job carefully before you agree to do it.  This might seem one of the most obvious of my Microworkers tips, but it’s quite easy to mess up and slip below the 75% approval rate if you’re not careful.  I came very close one time just by me making making mistakes with two small tasks.  One more mistake and I’d have been out of action on Microworkers for a couple of weeks.  (Microworkers is more generous than MTurk and allows your approval rate to recover over time.)
  • This is maybe my best Microworkers tips on how to make money online and learnt from experience.  Always check out the success rate of the workers who’ve completed the job previously, it will give you an indication of whether the job is easy to get right and also whether the requester is legit.
  • I guess it’s a question of conscience, but I personally avoid jobs that I think might be scams or not legitimate in some way.  I really don’t want to be responsible for posting some fake job advert that might defraud some desperate unemployed person.  (I would like to see Microworkers clean up their site where it comes to scammers and spammers, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon!)
  • I find that some of the competition voting is quick and easy money in Microworkers.  You can sign up and vote three times in ten minutes and earn a dollar.  The same goes for the facebook liking and twitter following etc.
  • I always say it with MTurk, but the same is worth mentioning for Microworkers, and that’s to always prioritise your own security and don’t give out personal information to requesters that could be used to defraud or spam you.  Always be wary of requesters who offer large sums for apparently simple tasks.

See links in sidebar for more Microworkers articles and make money online ideas.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

How much money can I make with HubPages?

What is HubPages?


HubPages is an online knowledge-sharing website, where members publish informative articles, known as “hubs”, and interact with other members, who are nicknamed, “hubbers”.  

As well offering membership of an online community and a source of knowledge and information, HubPages also promises, and in many cases delivers, much bigger earnings than the average online money-making site.  

Whereas most sites offer rewards in cents, Hubpages earnings are more often measured in dollars.  Making money with Hubpages is not instant, however, and most of the people who’s Hubpages earnings are large have achieved it through hard work over an extended period of time.


So how do I make money?


Money is made through advertising, principally through using Google Adsense and Amazon adverts.  

The Google Adsense money is split between you and HubPages, with you getting 60% and HubPages getting 40%, this is actually a pretty good rate when you compare it with other sites, such as MyLot or Squidoo, where the income rate tends to be lower in my experience (although I can only speculate as neither site publicly reveals the exact proportion of money that they pay out to their users).  

The Amazon rate works on a different principle, you get 4% cut of any money spent on Amazon products after a viewer has clicked on one of your adverts and HubPages don’t take anything from you.  This can work out as quite a decent payout if you strike it lucky and someone buys a computer or TV from Amazon.  (Ebay and Kontara can also be used to generate income, but are used much less by hubbers than Google Adsense and Amazon).


How much money do people actually make on HubPages?

Some HubPages users have done very well, with HubPages earnings of around $300 - $1000 per month.  Most of these people, however, have written hundreds of hubs to achieve this, something that may well have taken them months or years to achieve.  Recently, however, traffic and HubPages earnings were hit for most users by Google altering the way that its search engine works.  

Many Hubpages users have consequently lost between 5% and 50% of their earnings*.  HubPages are currently trying to resolve the situation with a subtle redesign of their site, improving the quality of hubs generally, and by introducing higher earning adverts that will work alongside the Google adverts.  I must say, however, that even for users who have lost out, their Hubpages earnings still seem considerably greater than those on most online earning sites.

*UPDATE: Since the time of writing this, HubPages have introduced changes to the way that their website is structured and early signs are that many hubbers have or are experiencing increases in internet traffic and earnings to their hubs.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

How to get the best hits on M Turk

The best M Turk hits are what all of us M Turk workers are after, of course, whenever we visit mturk.com!  Although to some extent there’s a subjective element involved with getting the best hits, we all seek certain things.  For example, we all want the M Turk requesters that we work for to be honest and pay on time, the M Turk hits to pay us a decent/good rate, and we also want there to be an abundance of the best hits to be available once we’ve found a source on mturk.com, not just a one-off hit - finding good M Turk hits is like discovering gold, once you’ve found a vein, you want there to be plenty more hits of the same type that you can mine.  In my experience, the four main ways to get the best M Turk hits are:

1.  Get the M Turk Turkopticon toolbar.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this Turkopticon toolbar is the best thing going, as far as working at mturk.com goes.  It’s free, so I’m not getting paid to sing its praises, I just think it’s the best invention ever for M Turk workers everywhere.  Basically, once installed, you can point to any request on mturk.com and it tell you how previous m turk workers have graded the requester in terms of paying on time, honesty, how communicative they are etc.  Some M Turk workers write reviews of requesters on there too.  You’ll need to be using a Chrome or Firefox browser though, I don’t think there’s an MTurk Turkopticon toolbar for Internet Explorer.  It’s well worth installing Chrome or Firefox just for the toolbar, if you’re an M Turk worker.

2.  When you find a good hit, stick with it, because if you go away and don’t come back for a time, there’s a good chance that others will use all the hits up while you are gone!  I don’t wish to insult my fellow M Turk workers, but sometimes they behave like piranhas - if they spot one of the best hits, they’ll strip it down to the bone before you can count to three.


3.  Improve your search technique on mturk.com.  M Turk doesn’t give you a great deal of options, though.  I wish it was possible to search for specific requesters on mturk.com, or to be able to save certain searches or settings without mturk.com putting everything back to the default settings.  It’s not always easy to navigate through the 80,000+ M Turk hits you normally find on mturk.com.  All you’ve essentially got is the ability to search for certain keywords such as “survey” or “youtube”, and then the ability to sort them into an order by value of hit, age, etc.

4.  Read the forums, such as MTurk Forum and Turker Nation for the latest news and gossip.

Friday, March 11, 2011

10 Reasons Why I Hate Amazon MTurk!

Whether you like it or not, Amazon Mechanical Turk (aka MTurk) is one of the  commonest ways of earning money online at the moment.  Working from home is fine when it is going well, and awful when it is not.  This blog will give my  thoughts and ideas regarding MTurk as well as charting my progress, knowledge and experience.  (If you want to read some more of my earning money online articles, check out the links below and in the sidebar)

1.  Many of the hits on Amazon MTurk are just rubbish.  They either pay ridiculously well, because they are scams, or they are genuine jobs, but they’re paying you 10 cents/hour!

2.  It’s difficult to know who the good Amazon MTurk requesters are and who are the bad on MTurk.  You could spend hours working on there and then get ripped off.  Not only do you lose the money, but you get a bad rejection rate too!

3.  Amazon do not regulate the site enough.  That means that there are rip-off artists and scammers operating openly on MTurk.  Okay, the workers can flag bad requesters, but considering Amazon are making money from the site, you’d think they’d feel a bigger moral obligation to maintain it?

4.  When you do find an Amazon MTurk requester who offers decent jobs, pays at okay rate, pays on time, and doesn’t rip you off – they suddenly disappear, just when you’re getting used to the regular money!  You have no way of knowing if the requester will be back in a few hours, a few days, or never again!

5.  There’s lots of MTurk hits and requesters, but navigating around the Amazon Turk site can be a pain in the backside.  Why can’t you save your favorite requesters, or your favorite searches?  Have your own little My MTurk part of the site?  Wouldn’t that make it a lot easier for regular MTurk workers?

6.  There’s no effective comeback against the MTurk requesters who rip people off.  Okay, you can report them to Amazon.  But that doesn’t stop them in their tracks or get you your wages.  Eventually, I guess Amazon will ban them from the site, but by then they’ve made lots of money!

7.  It can be complicated working out what money’s where.  You have the total money earned section on your MTurk website dashboard, which is often not up to date because of late paying requesters.  Then you have the Account section of Amazon, which is often not up to date because the money takes time to be paid over from MTurk.  Then you have the money in your bank account which is always delayed by several days when it comes from the Amazon Account.

8.  MTurk can be very addictive.  There’s always a temptation to just do one more job.  The next thing you know, it’s in the morning and you have to get up at 7!  Or your wife is getting fierce because you haven’t spoken to her for 2 days!

9.  You can lose all perspective with MTurk.  Before you know it, you’re ranting and raving and your day/week has been completely ruined, all because a requester has failed to pay you some measly sum like 10 cents!

10.  The number of jobs fluctuates wildly on Amazon MTurk.  One day there’s 150, 000 jobs on there, the next day there’s only 45,000.  Either there’s more jobs going than you can possibly handle, or there’s absolutely nothing on there that’s worth doing!


MTurk Links

Amazon Mechanical Turk Top Tricks and Tips

How to avoid MTurk scams

10 reasons why I love Amazon Mechanical Turk


Sites like MTurk

The Pros and Cons of Making Money with Microworkers

Other Work at Home Websites

How to Make Money with MyLot

Earning Money Online with Swagbucks – The Pros and Cons


Recommended Reading

Work at Home Now: The No-nonsense Guide to Finding Your Perfect Home-based Job, Avoiding Scams, and Making a Great Living
Work From Home Jobs Directory

More Jobs in Data Entry Work From Home

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

10 Reasons Why I Love Amazon Mechanical Turk!

Love it or hate it, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (otherwise known as MTurk) is one of the most popular ways of making money fast online.  Working from home can be great when it’s going well, and dire when it isn’t.  This blog aims to give my (random?) thoughts regarding MTurk as well as charting my financial progress and know how.  (If you want to read some of my more formal articles and reviews, follow the links at the bottom of the page, where you’ll find my tips and advice at HubPages.)  Below are 10 reasons why I love Amazon Mechanical Turk.

1.  You don’t need any special skills or go through a job interview to sign up to Amazon Mechanical Turk.  All you have to do is fill out a form to sign up and you can start “working” straight away.  Okay, you have to pass tests to do some of the hits, but most of them you just click your mouse button and start!

2.  It is run by Amazon, not some dodgy fly-by-night company.  It’s totally legit.  And it’s free.

3.  They can pay you in Amazon gift cards!  And you can buy almost anything off Amazon nowadays.  I bought myself a new stereo system with my Mechanical Turk money.  My wife bought herself some jewelry she wanted and some very nice coffee.

4.  You can get your Amazon Mechanical Turk money transferred to your bank account, if you want.  I’ve never done it, I normally just get the gift cards, but if you give them your bank account details and ask them, Amazon will transfer the money for you.  Cool.   My wife has done it and she reckons it takes a few days though.

5.  You get your Mechanical Turk money pretty much straight away.  Well, in most cases, anyway.  I have had some requesters who’ve delayed their payment for a week, but most of them pay within a day or two in my experience.  In fact, some of my favorite ones pay within a few hours.

6.  You can pick and choose when and where you want to work with Amazon Mechanical Turk.  You don’t have to follow office hours, or travel anywhere at rush hour.  That saves you a great deal of time and money and an awful lot of hassle!

7.  You don’t have a boss hanging over you with Mechanical Turk.  You can do the work at your own pace, play some music on the stereo, eat at your computer, dress how you want, and do as little, or as much work as you feel like.

8.  You get a variety of jobs.  Okay, some of them are pretty tedious and you have to sit at a computer all the time you’re working on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but you can do a couple of market surveys, then write a music article, then get paid to watch and comment on Youtube videos…

9.  You don’t have to put up with irritating work coworkers and customers all day when you're using Mechanical Turk.  Okay, I know some people at work at great people, but there are lots of annoying ones too and they can drive you crazy if your with them for 8 or 9 hours/day and 5 days/week.

10.  Amazon Mechanical Turk is new technology and it’s awesome to be involved with something that’s revolutionizing working.  I have been trying out different sites since I started with MTurk and it’s opened up another world to me!





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