I talk about this thing called MTurk, or Amazon Mechanical Turk in my book Balancing Your Bipolar. It has been a lifesaver to help us make ends meet working from home. It is hard to have it cover all your bills, but I did make $800 one month and like I said it saved us at one point.
I now use it mainly for a little boost. I tend to make about $100 a month or so at it. This is done fairly easily with a goal of about $5 a day and doing a few surveys to get there.
I enjoy the work and at one point used it as a therapy essentially. It really helped me feel productive when I was depressed. I would do mindless tasks while watching Netflix and make a few dollars an hour instead of wasting all my time on Sudoku or some other such thing to get my mind off being depressed. It worked well to shut off the negative noise in my mind.
So as far as a review I’m just going to do a simple pro and con list.
Pros:
- Make money from home
- work as much or as little as you want, no min, and the max is so high you probably won’t ever reach it.
- get paid relatively quickly
- pay straight to bank with no fee
- interesting work that furthers research
- varied work
Cons:
- hard to make good income
- takes time to learn
- lots of crap on there like receipts, NEVER do receipts
- some pay is horrible. It’s always a good idea to keep a running calculation of your time and keep it above $6 an hour. I shoot for more like $10
- sometimes the good work is mind numbing
- It’s not a get rich quick, sorry
It also worked well when I was hypomanic and needed something to keep me busy.
So without further ado, here is my guide to getting started with MTurk:
The first step is to apply to join MTurk Get Started. Then click “Create a Worker Account”.
Once your account has been accepted, which could be a long time, short, or never. Here are two really good guides. One is included within the other as a link, but I included it first here: Your First 1000 Hits
It helps with information on how to sign up. I would recommend signing up now just in case it takes a while to be accepted. Then once you get the account you could start with 10-30 minutes a day working on the basics of that initial guide getting your account out of probation.
Then when you are ready you could move on here:
Beef up Your Game
Update March 2019:
I use a number of scripts to make my job easier. Recently I found one that combines a number of others. It is called Mturk Engine.
- It makes it easy to see a total of how much you earned for the day. How much is pending and totals ready to be transferred.
- It also allows you to set up watchers to grab hits that you have missed or that you want in your queue.
- The other feature I like is searching fro new hits and showing you ratings from Turk opticon the site that combines reviews.
Let me know if you have any questions. I don’t want to overload anyone with info which is why I gave you the guides you can take one step at a time.
Update July 2019:
We are now working together my husband and I to make $1200 a month. We use Mturk engine and we make $40 6 days a week together. So each $20 is the goal. We are usually done in 3-4 hours and have the rest of the day with our family.