Mechanical Turk Strategy

If you’ve stumbled upon this article, you’re probably wondering if there is anybody out there who actually makes a decent amount of money on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I thought that as well when I first started several months ago. My opinion was the people that actually worked on there were crazy. That is, until I really gave it a shot and developed a strategy. Now, it makes me crazy to read the forums of people complaining they’re only making $2.00 an hour when they turk. I think if they spent more effort developing a strategy to make more than $2.00 an hour instead of writing up posts on the forum complaining, they wouldn’t have to! I have only read bad reviews and articles from people who use Mechanical Turk. I can only imagine that the people who do have success on it, like myself, don’t write about it because they don’t want people stealing their work. Luckily, I’m willing to share my turking strategy.

I can honestly tell you that I make at least $250 a week on Mechanical Turk depending on how much time I have. Last week I made $388 from mturk alone. And, no. I don’t turk from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. I’m actually trying to think of how many hours I do put into it so you can get an idea of how much you can make an hour. But, I honestly don’t have a clue. Sometimes I work in five minute chunks and sometimes I’ll sit and power turk for two hours or so. But, it is possible to make $250 a week turking part time.

I will note that it helps if you type really fast. I type almost 100 words per minute. That means I can do more work in a given hour. I suggest you work on your typing speed if you don’t type fast. It’s a good investment of your time if you want to make more per hour on Mechanical Turk.

On to the good stuff. It’s important to have all of your qualifications for certain tasks that require them. Take the time to do that because if you don’t, you’ll miss out on some pretty good opportunities. Also, keep in mind that the people who are complaining about the pay probably spend too much time sifting through the HITs to find something they feel is worthwhile. Well, browsing doesn’t make you money. It’s also important to note that it will take you at least a couple of weeks to figure out which requesters you really like working with and which just aren’t worth it.

When you sit down to work on Mechanical Turk, the first thing you should do is see if any of your favorite requesters have HITs and start working on those until there’s none left. You *must* check the box that says “Automatically accept next HIT”.

If you can find a batch of HITs that pay even $0.01, if you auto-accept the next HT and do them really fast, say one every 3-5 seconds, that’s equivalent to $7-$10 an hour. It’s also a good idea to go through them faster, depending on the HIT, after you click on the answer, tab once and hit enter. This will submit the hit for you. It’s quicker than using your mouse to click submit. In my opinion, the only $0.01 HITs that are worth it are the ones that I only have to navigate to one page and on that one page I don’t have to look for or do anything.
Sometimes you’ll be asked to look for an e-mail address or something on the page you navigate to. $0.02 is good for that. You’ll typically just have to go to the webpage, scroll to the bottom, click the contact link and copy and paste the address into the HIT. If it’s taking you longer than 10 seconds to do the HIT, it’s not worth it. You can find something else that pays better for your time.

You’ll see batches of HITs wanting you to rewrite a sentence. Use the “skip” button to go through them and do the ones you can rewrite from the top of your head. If the sentence is a run-on sentence with lots of words and details, just skip it. These HITs are cake. I mean, it’s not hard to turn a sentence that says, “She really liked the movie” into “She thought the film was wonderful”. I’ll do that for $0.04 - $0.06. Of course, I go to through the batch of the ones that pay more first, and you know which requester I’m talking about. So, request that qualification for sure.

When rewriting articles, take a look at what you’re asked to rewrite and if you think you can do it fairly quickly, do it. If not, skip it. I’d rather write a 300 word article that I can spin real quick in ten minutes for $1.50 than a long, complicated one on a topic I know absolutely nothing about for $4.00. Considering it will take me longer to write it, the $1.50 is more per hour. If you think like that, you’ll do better.

Some of the transcriptions pay decent. However, if you plan on working for Casting Words, you do have to do some of the lower paying ones before you’re qualified to work on the better paying ones. In my opinion, it’s not worth it to do a Casting Words HIT that is a regular audio transcription. You’ll make the money doing the ones that are express, difficult and have 125%, 150% or 200% the base rate. And that’s coming from someone who types real fast and can do them faster. Of course, to get to those good Casting Words HITs, you do have to do some of the crappy ones. So, it may be a wise investment.

There are other transcriptions you can do as well that pay more than Casting Words. Usually, those go fast. So, if you listen to the audio before you accept it, chances are it’s not going to be there when you click accept. Accept it first. Then listen to it. If it’s too challenging, just return it.

There are two good ways to sort and look for HITs. One is by sorting by “most available”. This will get you to see the ones you can do in batches using the strategy I talked about earlier. Sometimes, there aren’t any good ones. So, I sort by “newest first”. Sometimes, if you refresh a few times, a really good one will come up that pays $10 or more. Act quick because those go FAST. Remember, you can always say, “Oops! Just kidding”, if you look it over and decide you either can’t do it or it’s not worth your time. Don’t be afraid of returning HITs.

Another great thing to do is if you find some HITs that are really good, accept a bunch of them first and go back and do them one after another. One of my favorite requesters every few days puts up a batch of transcription HITs that pay $2.00 for 5 minutes of audio. There will be about five total. I accept them all and then go back and work on them one at a time. This works out for me to about  $10 for 40-60 minutes of work because I can transcribe those five minutes typically within 7-10 minutes. Mechanical Turk allows you to have up to 10 HITs assigned to you at a time. This ensures nobody will take the stuff you want. Just be sure you can complete them all in the allotted time because if you accept 10 HITs that will each take you 15 minutes to do and you’re only allowed an hour for each of them, you’ll lose some of them. So, just be mindful of that.

There are two points in the week where it’s not worthwhile to turk. That is in the middle of the night and sometimes on the weekends. The weekends are usually pretty slim pickings.

The key to making more money in mechanical turk is to keep two things in mind:

Be quick: We talked about accepting high paying HITs before reading the details so you don’t lose it in case it’s good. Return it if you don’t like it. We also talked about doing HITs in batches so you don’t waste time browsing and hitting tab then enter instead of clicking submit. These tips right here alone will increase your hourly wage.

Be less picky: Get on there and do something. Don’t spend 10 minutes browsing through the HITs. In that 10 minutes you could’ve made at last $1.00 if you were actually doing something.

One last tip I have for you is to set a daily goal. I can easily make $50 a day on Mechanical Turk. But, I also have all my qualifications and am familiar with a lot of HITs I like. If you’re currently making $2 a day on Mechanical Turk set your goal to $4 or $5 and work from there. Of course, it will vary how much time you have to put into it. But, set a realistic number every day that you want to make.

My goal is $35 a day because I like to make at least $250 a week on Mechanical Turk. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the time to do that and sometimes you will find a day where you log in and there’s not much to do. So, if you’re having a day you’re doing really well and there’s lots of good HITs, keep going! It will make up for the days when it’s slower. Good Luck!