Time For a Revamp!

A new year has started and I am working on revamping this website to give it a new look and feel, hopefully making it even more useful and informative for those people who are earning online.

I started this blog back in 2011 when I was new to the world of earning online.  I thought it would be great to write about my experiences of working on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk and share my knowledge and experiences with others. I have learnt a lot of things on the way, some of which I’ve shared, but there is lots more that I want to post.

Consequently, I am going to broaden the scope of the site and cover some of my experiences with earning methods such as affiliate advertising, as well as covering MTurk and alternatives such as Bubblews, which I’ve been playing around with a lot recently.

I have earned more than $40,000 online over the past couple of years, it’s not enough to live off full time, but it is a more than reasonable part-time income.  Part of that money came from sites like MTurk, but I’ve also done well  from websites like Hubpages and Squidoo, as well as through creating my own sites, mainly creating sites using the blogging site: Wordpress.org and then hosting them with my favorite website host: HostGator.

I have discovered and used a lot of resources over the past three years and I want to share my discoveries with others – posting some of my mistakes and bad experiences, as well as the good ones.

Despite me semi-neglecting this site, it still gets an awful lot of traffic, and I’m hoping that with a new look and feel and some fresh material, it will reclaim, or even exceed its previous glories!

I am looking forward to this new project!

Watch this space!

Disclosure:  Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links – that means that I earn a small commission if someone uses them to sign up or buy something. Using an affiliate link does not cost or cause detriment to you in any way, however.  Also note that I don’t recommend anything unless I have experience of it and have found it helpful in achieving earnings targets.  I greatly appreciate the support of everyone who uses my affiliate links.

MyLot no longer an earning site!

One piece of news that I noticed last month was that the MyLot website has been completely revamped and is no longer an earning site.  They seem to be going for a social networking style debate site.

I must confess that I virtually stopped visiting the old version of the site.  The full page ads annoyed me and the earnings seemed to be measured in cents rather than dollars.  Some people claimed to earn a reasonable amount, but they must have been putting in a lot of time, as far as I could see.  Plus, it is always best to treat earning claims with a degree of skepticism in my experience.

Now the website has a cleaner, more user-friendly design, but I'm not sure that I will use it.  I am pretty content with using Facebook and Twitter for my social networking and I'm not sure if the new MyLot brings anything new to the table.

The old MyLot did have its fans.  I've met people online who said they preferred it to sites like Redgage.  But I suspect that there were a lot of people like myself who used it for a while, and then moved on to other earning sites.

The best way to earn some quick cash online is still Amazon MTurk in my experience.  The best way to earn long term is through affiliate advertising and a lot of hard work writing articles that people want to read.

One last thing, I did have some earnings in my account before the MyLot change which have now disappeared (there was a $10 threshold for payments, I seem to remember).  There was only a few dollars in there, but it makes you wonder how much there was in total, if you add up all the earnings money of all the MyLot users?

MTurk qualification tests

What are Amazon MTurk qualification tests?

One thing that pretty much every turker comes across sooner or later are the MTurk qualification tests.  These are set by the requester and are generally a way for them to restrict the turkers who do their HITs, essentially by trying to weed out workers who lack certain qualities or skills.  The qualification tests are in addition to the other restrictions that the requesters can impose, such as minimum HIT acceptance rates and nationality.

What do the tests involve?

There is no set answer to this question as there are numerous types of qualification test.  It all depends on which skills or attributes that the requester is looking for.  The test will in most cases reflect this in the form it takes.  For example, if the requester wants to assess your English language skills, you might be given a series of sentences and asked to judge which ones are grammatically correct.

Some tests are as simple as just pressing a button, or answering a yes or no question.  Other qualification tests can involve elaborate tasks which are difficult and time-consuming.  Of course, if you spend a long time taking a difficult and time-consuming test and ultimately you are told you have failed, it can be very frustrating.

Should I take an Amazon MTurk qualification test?

Generally speaking, I would say yes in the majority of cases.  As I mentioned earlier, many of the tests are very easy, and even if they aren’t, you haven’t got too much to lose from trying, apart from your time. 

Don’t take a test if you clearly don’t fit the criteria, however.  If the HIT involves translating text into German and you don’t speak German, then common sense dictates that the test will be checking your German language skills and it isn’t worth taking.

Some tests will also fail you for things that you can’t control, such as where you live.

The advantage of taking tests is that if you succeed, they can sometimes open the door to you doing some of the (relatively) better paid HITs.