Sep 21 2008
I Turked therefore I am.
I spent some time Turking this morning. I used the Amazon.com login that I established for purchases and went to http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false.
I rewrote some sentences for business articles and home security systems. The pay was .05 per sentence. I also commented some blogs for .60 per comment. I earned about $5 which is not much. However while working I: was in my jammies, did not have to think hard, didn’t have to research anything, had a variety of tasks to do within the hour and did not get bored by them.
There are higher paying Hits to work. You can write book, movie and game reviews, blog posts and articles for $1.00-$7.50 each. I wasn’t feeling very ambitious, so I steered clear of those.
The cool thing is, you don’t have to apply for this site. Just go and start working. they buyers do have to accept or reject your articles but it is pretty much instant gratification.
I think I will use the money for Amazon gift certificates and make this my NY Times book fund. You do have the option of having your earnings transferred to a bank account if you’d rather.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is not appropriate for your resume, but it is a great source of extra cheddar for the young(ish) freelance writer who is just starting out.
Hey George, I checked out your blog (http://tumblemoose.com/)- it looks great. Definitely some helpful info.
Direct orders are definitely the way to go with Textbroker, unless you have all day to devote to writing articles for them. It looks like you can get direct jobs through Amazon Turk as well (there is a section for “Hits Assigned to You”). Not sure what the payout would be on those, but I’ll keep you posted!
I tried Amazon Turk not too long ago and couldn’t get into it. Maybe I’ll give it another try.
-Diana
http://single.today.com