Let Me See You Turk

So many “work at home” scams out there.  How do you know which one is not the scam?  Well, I’ll tell you which one I’ve been turking on and we’ll see if it’s something YOU think you can do. 

It’s called Amazon Mechanical Turk and (of course) it’s through Amazon.  They’re a pretty reputable company, right?  You’re NOT going to get rich on this site at all.  But the great thing is that you move at your own pace.  It doesn’t matter if you can type fast as long as you can type accurately.  

It’s basically data entry.  The first stop is heading to Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk (just click on that to get you there) and register to be a Turker.  It takes about 2 minutes to fill out your junk.  Maybe less if you’ve memorized things like your name and address and where to send your emails.  

Now you wait.  The site says it takes up to 48 hours to approve you.  It doesn’t.  You should be ready to browse the HITS (Human Intelligence Tasks) the very next day.  

Once you’re accepted, you will spend an hour being overwhelmed.  But go to the YOUR ACCOUNT tab at the top and then under that go to ACCOUNT SETTINGS.  Do what you have to do on this new page, but most importantly fill out your payment information on Amazon Payments.  This is an important step because you’ll want to get paid.  You can send your payments to a bank account you specify, or send it to an Amazon Account so you can spend your Turks at Amazon.  The GREAT part about all of this is that you get paid when YOU want.  You won’t have to wait until a Friday comes rolling along.  Nope.  If you’ve got $20 waiting to be transferred (or dumped…that’s what I call it)…then go for it!  I go through Bank of America.  It takes 24 hours for my payments to show up on my account from the time I “dump” it.  

Again, you won’t get rich quick.  The HITS range from  1 cent to 50 cents (some go over that) depending on what you choose to work on.  You can do surveys that take 10 or so minutes, to transcribing grocery receipts that take a half an hour.  It’s up to you!  You can always view the HIT before you accept it , you can deny it if you want.  Or work on it.  Your choice.  There are no bosses.  Just you. There are most times a bonus attached to the HIT.  Even though the HIT is listed at 0.05 a HIT, I usually get a bonus of 0.15 on top of it making that HIT worth 20 cents.  Woohoo!  Not big money, but it took me 10 minutes to do it while I sit in pajama bottoms listening to the B2K Radio REPLAY.  (Yeah…shameless plug there.) and munching on Doritos.  

I know of three other people in my bubble that are doing Turks.  One of them does it only like 10 minutes a day.  One of them only does surveys.  She gets stuff in the mail everyday because when you do some surveys they send you things to use and then make public comments on it, and one lives with bears in the mountains.  I think she’s still alive.  I won’t know until I hear from her on the weekends.  I have personally dumped (transferred) $150 so far to my bank account and all I had to do was some simple data entry stuff.  

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a legit place to supplement your income.  Not fast.  Again…you won’t get rich.  But if you need emergency gas money, or money for beer…then go Turk for a few hours.  Below is an example of MY MTurk dashboard so you can see how much I’ve made in the past few days.  If you end up turking and have any questions, feel free to contact me.  I’ll answer what I can.  What I can’t..I’ll point you in the direction of the MTurk forums.  Good luck!  And have fun with it.