Earn Extra Income In Your Free Time with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

The average person has ample spare time in their daily lives, during which they normally spend it watching television or playing games. This time is actually a figurative gold mine of wasted potential that could be used to make extra income, which would be perfectly suited to be used on leisure activities, or luxury items, or even other bills and debts. It takes time, but using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, you can earn a few dollars a day at your own pace, and it will all add up in the long run.

Mechanical Turk is a program affiliated with Amazon, and was established in 2005. It allows for Workers, who are people that have come to complete assignments for payment, to perform one of several thousand small tasks in order to earn money for each one. These tasks are called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, and they are set up by Requesters, who human intelligence in order to accomplish things that computers cannot, hence the name.

You start by registering to be a Worker, and then you take a qualification test, which will determine which HITs you can take, aside from ordinary ones. Some qualifications are earned through your actions, such as having a high enough success rate performance, while others require you to manually take another test in order to be acknowledged as eligible. After you’ve qualified, you can start picking out which HITs you want to begin working on and proceed from there at your own pace.

The easiest way to start earning is to begin with the HITs that pay five to ten cents, because while it may be a small amount, the tasks are relatively simple to complete and take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to finish. Often the HITs will have you compare and verify information, addresses, numbers, and websites, or add feedback, comments, photographs, or descriptions for products after minor research. You can accept HITs from the same group to work faster and seamlessly, piling your earnings consistently.

Occasionally, you will run across HITs that will have a total reward value over a dollar, which are normally for people who have specialized skill sets, such as translating from one language to another, transcribing audio, or writing longer articles. If you have talent in one of these fields, I would suggest using them to their full potential to earn a higher profit, at an even higher rate. There are also surveys, which are rarer, but they can usually be done by anyone, barring a few exceptions.

After you have earned enough, you can use Amazon Payments to transfer the earnings over to your bank account, or you can exchange it for a gift card to be used on your Amazon.com account, which is used for online shopping. You must have at least a minimum of ten dollars to transfer over to your bank account, but anything above a single dollar will transfer over for a gift card. So there’s no need for delay, give it a try when you’re sitting down bored, with nothing else to do.

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Cheryl Zhao
Cheryl Zhao

Cheryl Zhao, a financial expert, has been a part of our team for five years. After earning her MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, she worked as a real estate broker before turning to blogging. Cheryl’s extensive knowledge of the housing market and trends, coupled with her passion for financial literacy, makes her blog posts an essential read for anyone considering becoming financially independent.

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4 Comments

  1. I tried Mechanical Turk a while back and it is populated by scammers. Worse Amazon will not police the scammers so they are free to keep refusing to pay while looking for more victims. I completed several gigs there and every single offer refused payment on some fabricated excuse. My advice, stay away.

    • Rick, thank you for letting us know. So we’d have to proceed with a lot of caution 🙂

      I hate it when people don’t pay for the products/services they asked for.

  2. It is a shame that people are stabbing other people in the back for a few extra dollar. If Amazon was getting serious negative publicity regarding this, I’m sure Amazon would step up their game.

    • Loc, welcome to DB.net.

      Amazon should do something about it, that’s true. If people are complaining about being scammed and started sharing their experience online, this would surely translate into decreased activity and business.

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