Amazon Mechanical Turk review

I recently ran across the Amazon Mechanical Turk in my endless quest for finding a job. Seeing that they were a reputable company, I signed and gave it a shot. Here is a review of my first week of using this program.

Signup for Mechanical Turk from Amazon is fast, simple and easy. It probably took less than a minute to go for the money making part of the program. Mechanical Turk calls these HITs and they are just small jobs that people need doing. You can scroll through the hits and choose which tasks you want to work on. The work is extremely simple, such as commenting on blogs, labeling images, rewriting sentences or paragraphs, writing short articles, and other easy works. The problem is that Mechanical Turk pay only what those tasks are worth. A penny or so for the labeling of images, perhaps 50 cents for the rewrite of a few paragraphs, $1.50 for putting up 15 posters, etc. So this is not a place to get rich.

While most of the tasks at Mechanical Turk pays only menially at best, there are tasks that pays $5 or more. Usually, this involves writing articles, rewriting articles, writing fairly extensive reviews, etc. While you could possibly make money doing this, it is probably better use of your time to work on something else. However, if you are unemployed or unable to work outside of the home Mechanical Turk may still be a source of income for you. In addition, some HITs offer bonuses for quality work. I have not met one of these HITs to determine the probability of obtaining a bonus so I can't really comment on them. Once a HIT was accepted, you have a deadline to complete the HIT, but in my experience, the period is much longer than necessary.

Payments on Mechanical Turk is quite fast, usually within a day in my experience. Payments are put into your Amazon Payments account. Payments may be transferred to a bank account or used on Amazon.com.

Although payments on Amazon's Mechanical Turk will not make anyone rich, the program is a little addictive. Once you get rolling, it is difficult to stop. I have sat for 15-20 minutes to complete 10 and 20 cent HITs only because they were fun. If you spend much time on the Internet playing games you might as well become addicted to completing HITs on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and make some money.

Make Money On The Internet With An Amazon.com Affiliate Site

You've probably heard before a lot of hype about how much money you can make with affiliate programs. Maybe you've even set up a site yourself, only to find that after buying the domain, a few bucks a month in hosting, software or a web designer to design your site, etc., that the piddly affiliate fees hardly even covered your cost. Well, here's the hype-free way to really make money with an Amazon.com affiliate site. And it'll only take a day to make the site. The secret? Low cost, low effort.

Here's How:

1. If you don't already know it, learn some basic HTML. You have to do this to keep your costs down and still get what you want. Even if the site is basically laid out for you, you're going to need to know how to insert images, create hyperlinks, and do some basic text formatting.

2. Decide on your topic. You're going to be doing product reviews and recommendations, so pick a topic that you enjoy and know something about. If you can't stay passionate about the topic, that will show, and it also won't hold your interest. Choose a narrow enough niche to be distinctive, e.g., bands from your city, left-handed guitarists, music for a certain kind of dancing, authors of a certain religion, books about arts & crafts, etc.

3. Choose your domain name. Make it keyword-rich, not clever. Think how people will find your site in the search engines. Here are some ideas (all available when I first wrote this, though a few have been snatched up):

Music: BandsFromTexas.com, BandOutOfBoston.com, SouthpawGuitarists.com, ClassicPsychedelia.com, Non-Stop-Hip-Hop.com, Merengue-Music.com
Books: Mormon-Authors.com, Arts-and-Crafts-Books.com, Books-by-Stephen-King.com, ClassicBusinessBooks.com
Others: Best-Baby-Toys.com, MomsMags.com, FelliniMovies.com

4. Register your domain name. If you're not technically inclined at all, register your domain wherever you set up your hosting in step 5. Otherwise, you can save a few bucks by choosing a lower-cost provider. Not a big deal for one or two sites, but it can be for ten or twenty. I use GoDaddy, who have great domain management tools and are less than $10 a year. The least expensive I've found from a reputable source is 1&1, whose price is around $7 a year last I checked.

5. Set up your web hosting. This is where most people get burned. For this kind of site, you do not need $10 a month web hosting! Find a cheap Web Hosting for Under $10. Some are as little as $4 a month, with unlimited domains, i.e., you can run several sites like this on the same hosting package.

6. Install blog software. "Blog, you say?" Yes. It will give your site all the structure you need, plus make it easy to quickly post new content. My pick is Blogger, which is open source (i.e., free), easy to install and use, and yet very powerful. Many hosts have a one-step installation process for it, or you can download it and follow their installation instructions.

7. Make it pretty. One of the great things about Blogger is the huge variety of templates available for it -- they can completely change the look-and-feel.

8. Set up categories. Most blog software allows you to create sub-categories to help organize your entries. This will help visitors narrow in even more specifically on their interests. For example, BandsFromTexas.com might have one group of categories for genre — rock, country, blues, etc. — and another for city of origin — Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc.

9. Sign up as an Amazon Associate. It's simple and free. Just visit Amazon and click on the Join Associates link at the bottom of the page (here's a direct link for your convenience). Your site should already have at least the basic setup done, even if you don't have any content there yet, as they'll review the site manually before approval.

10. Create your blog posting bookmarks/links. There are two links that are going to be essential for you to make this easy. First is the blog posting link. In your blog software, on the posting page (see their instructions), at the bottom of the page there should be a "bookmarklet". Click on the link (and hold the mouse) and drag it up to your Links toolbar in your browser (assuming Internet Explorer), or your Favorites menu. This will allow you to blog a product with one mouse click.

11. Create your Amazon Build-A-Link bookmark/link. This will make it easy to build the link with your affiliate ID built in. Log in to Associates Central, look in the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-Link, and under Static Links, find Individual Items. Click and drag this onto your Links toolbar or Favorites menu.

12. Build your first link. Go to Amazon and log in with your Associates account. Find the product you want to review and use the Site Stripe (gray stripe at the top of the screen that you'll see when logged in as an Associate) to get your personalized link to the item. They also offer a variety of other options for creating links and banners.

13. Blog your review. Write your product review, choose the appropriate categories for it, including a link to the product with your Amazon Associate ID built in, and hit Publish.

14. Build out your site. Before you promote your site, you want to have some substantial content there. Write several product reviews. Have at least 2-3 in each category you've created. You may also want to make a categories for articles, news, and commentary about your topic. The more content your site has, the better. And the great thing is that while you're writing all this, the search engines are getting notified automatically, assuming you turned on the notifications mentioned in step 6.

15. Promote your site. The best free way to do this is to communicate with other bloggers writing about similar topics, and to participate in online communities where your topic is discussed.

Tips:

1. You have to learn some basic HTML and basic concepts about running a web site. It's just not that hard. If you have to rely on purchased software, you won't be able to get exactly what you want, you won't know what to do when things go wrong, and you'll end up spending money you don't need to. Spend the time to learn it. It will be well worth the investment.

2. I slightly recommend music over books and other products, mainly because you can listen to the clips of an entire album in about 10 minutes and get a good enough feel for it (without buying it) to do a short review. If you have another topic that you're passionate about, great, but make sure you have a unique angle on the topic. People can get reviews about a lot of those consumer products anywhere. You need to give them a reason to come to your site.

3. To pick up some extra pennies, sign up for Google AdSense. It probably won't generate a lot of revenue, but it's free to sign up and completely effortless to maintain.

4. Set reasonable expectations for earnings. You've only invested $20. You're going to make 5% on most products. That means that you need to sell $400 worth of stuff to make back your investment. To make $20 an hour, what you write must generate $400 worth of purchases. You get credit for other purchases customers you send make while at Amazon besides just the product you linked to, so it's not as hard as it may sound. It won't make you rich, but it's not hard to be profitable, and it builds over time.

What You Need:

* A credit card with about $20 available