More Amazon Mechanical Turk Tips

I wrote my first lot of MTurk tips for Turkers a couple of months back and received positive feedback, however I thought it would be good to do a follow up and include some of the stuff I didn’t include the first time around.  So here are some more Amazon Mechanical Turk tips for you.  They are aimed at MTurk workers, people who earn money online, and are meant to supplement my previous tips.  Depending on your level of experience with MTurk, some of them might seem pretty obvious, but I hope you can glean something of use from them.  I have actually learnt quite a bit by putting them together as it has made me think about my approach to Mech Turk and reminded me of some of the mistakes that I made early on when I didn’t know any better!  Anyway, here are my More Amazon Mechanical Turk tips.

1. It is easy to skip the qualification tests sometimes, but they can be useful.  Sometimes they open up a whole vein of good MTurk hits.  Sometimes you don’t even have to do anything other than click a button to qualify (presumably they are trying to weed out bots?)

2.  Sometimes it is worth doing lots of low paying MTurk hits just to increase your hit approval rate.  You will also sometimes need to rescue your hit approval rate when it when your hit approval rate has fallen.

3.  Your hit approval rate can be important as it determines which hits you can and can’t do.  I myself didn’t realize this at first and managed to mess up early on in my turking career and it took me what seemed like ages to recover! 

4.  Opinion varies on which browser is best, but I personally would use Firefox or Chrome.  Some of the Amazon Turk hits demand that you don’t use Internet Explorer or that you use Internet Exporer with a Chrome frame.  I have Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome all installed, just in case!

5.  If an Amazon MTurk requester rejects you and you think that they wrong to do so, contact them directly and ask them what the problem was.  Be polite but firm.  It is surprising how many non-payers will pay up after being contacted.

6.  Maintaining good communications with the good MTurk requesters never does you any harm and if you can build up a trusting relationship you can sometimes be offered more opportunities to earn money online outside of MTurk by the good MTurk requesters.