You can earn money in your spare time doing simple online tasks, but the truth is you don’t earn a lot of money.

Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk or MTurk is part of Amazon. You sign up with your Amazon account. And you will need to verify your identity.

Once you’re verified, you are eligible to do Human Interface Tasks or HITs. There are three levels, and you move up as you build up your reputation as someone who provides excellent work.

Some requestors (people or companies that need tasks done) require a qualification test before you’re allowed to work on their tasks.

The good news is that any money you earn will be in cash, not Amazon credits, and will be deposited to your account.

You can learn more here.

How to Earn More

The most common HIT is a survey. But you can also do audio/video transcriptions, categorization tasks, YouTube video ratings, data entry, and more. You will need a solid strategy to earn more on mTurk.

You will need to build up your reputation to earn more. Many of the better paying gigs require certain level of successfully completed HITs like 100 up to 1000.

Because there’s a lot of people looking for HITs, you’ll have competition. You want to hang around with the professionals. Look for “MTurk Crowd” and “Turkernation” online. They have browser extensions that alert them for the good paying HITs.

Many of the HITs only take seconds, so you can get a lot of them in a short period of time once you understand the system. But don’t’ take every HIT you see once you have experience. Some have really poor pay for the amount of time you need to invest.

Read the directions carefully. If your HIT needs to be approved, and it’s incorrect, that will count against you.

My Experience with mTurk

I had an account for years, and would occasionally login and verify things. I never made more than a few dollars. Then my account was suspended. They wanted me to verify my identity with a driver’s license.

Okay, I can do that.

But here’s the catch. They wanted me to fax it to them. In 2019. And there were no other options at that time. I may look into it again, but I’d rather make better money doing microgigs. There is a cost of opportunity. The more time you spend on mTurk, the less time you’ll have for better-paying gigs.

Sites Similar to mTurk

• Rev.com – transcribe smaller files
• Microworkers – very similar to mTurk
• ClickWorkers – also very similar, and you will need to pass some initial assessments
• FancyHands – Be a virtual assistant

Surveys

There are a lot of sites out there where you can take surveys. Many are quick, but don’t pay a lot. The other downside is that there is a lot of competition, so there often isn’t a survey to take.

Also, a number of sites like SwagBucks pay in points. You can cash the points in for cash, but you need a minimum of $20 usually to withdraw. You can also exchange points for PayPal or Amazon credits and more.

To be successful at surveys, you should register at a number of sites. Bookmark them on your computer and your phone. Then when you have a spare few minutes, you can check for a survey you can do more easily.

Be careful to ensure that the survey company is reputable. You should never have to pay them. Ever.

And do take a look at their privacy policy. They’re supposed to make money helping companies with surveys, not make money selling your personal information.

My Final Thoughts

Both of these methods are nice ways to earn money during down time. But remember that there are a lot of others out there looking to do this too. And some days, there will be a lot of opportunity, but you can go for weeks with almost nothing. So if you choose to do these, remember not to count on the money.

Use these for building up cash that can be set aside for something else like savings, moving, a cool concert coming up, vacations, or whatever else you need. But don’t think of it as something that will consistently make the rent or car payment. You can’t count on it.