Update on Making Money at Home with Amazon's MTURK

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As promised, here's an update to my MTURK experience 
(all of two weeks at this point).

Did I Get Paid?

You betcha, alhamdulillah! As I mentioned in my previous post, Got Some Extra Time in Your Day? Earn Extra Money with Amazon's MTurk, the Amazon MTURK program has two ways for you to get paid: 1) transfer your earnings to your bank account or 2) get an Amazon Gift Card.  My kids (my two oldest, that is) and I chose to get the cold hard cash via bank transfer. The whole process is very quick! (well at least for us it was).

So let's say you did some work. Under "Accounts" in your "Dashboard," you will see how much you have earned. Now that money is not available until it pops over to the "Earnings Available" column on your dashboard (I'm not sure how long it takes but sometimes I have noticed my Earnings Available increasing throughout the day, so it's fairly quick depending upon how quickly the Requestors approve your work).

So when you have earnings available, you can get paid! (in shaa Allah).

But first things first: If you want to turn your earnings into cash, you need to first add a bank account and then get that account verified. You have two ways to verify your bank account:

  1. By logging into your account through Amazon Payments' interface
  2. or by having Amazon put two small deposits in your bank account and you verify the amounts.) This took maybe 1-2 days for us. 
After your bank account is verified, whenever you have transferrable earnings, you transfer them first to Amazon Payments and then transfer to your bank account. It sounds like a bit of work, but transferring your earnings to Amazon Payments takes maybe minutes or even maybe a couple of hours (I can't remember exactly). Once your earnings are in Amazon Payments, you choose to transfer to your bank. When I did this, the funds were in the bank the very next day (I think it really depends upon your bank though so Amazon will tell you to expect 5-7 days for the transfer).  Now, I should note that you can only do 1 transfer of earnings to Amazon Payments each day (but you typically would probably want to let your money stack up anyway, so I found it to be no big deal) and if you don't want it to stack, well hey, transfer new earnings tomorrow, in shaa Allah.

Now, I've only been "turking" for two weeks, but so far, I am averaging $50 a week and about 100 hits/week (I've seen that some people make $100+ in one week or even more amazing weekly amounts). Amazon MTURK sends you a nice little email at the end of the week summarizing your earnings/performance (but you can always check in your dashboard as well).


MTURKING Tips

These past few weeks, I have learned so much about MTURK. I wanted to try to learn as much as I can to become more efficient.  In the process, I ran across some great forums where fellow MTURK workers share tips and great advice. Here are a few:

MTURK Forums

A fellow Muslimah blogger turned me on to a great Facebook Group for MTURK:

Facebook Groups

  • MTURK Members (lots of great support, advice, and encouragement here)

Scripts

Ok, I was very skeptical of  scripts when I first started reading about them. They sounded scary. But once I took the plunge to look into them and installing them, the whole MTURK experience has improved. Now, you have to be careful, because there are malicious people out there who write harmful scripts or scripts to cheat.  Obviously you want to try to stay away from those as they can harm your computer or put you in violation of MTURK terms. So, if you want to use scripts, do your research and be sure to check out what people say in forums about particular scripts.

So why would you want to use scripts? 

Well, there are hundreds of scripts written and many of them can help you be more efficient with your turking.  For example, there is a script that automatically searches out HITS (the tasks) for you. You can set up parameters (such as HITS over $0.50, or HITS with a particular Requestor, for example).  With this script (TurkMaster), it will notify you when it finds HITS that meet your parameters. You can get an audio notification and even desktop notifications if you are not on MTURK pages.  There's also a handy script that makes available to you, your MTURK ID number. Trust me, you will need this ID a lot and I found a handy script that makes it readily available to you while completing HITS (otherwise you have to go back to your dashboard and keep copying and pasting it each time you need it. And these scripts are just the tip of the iceberg.

Quick Guide to Scripts

Two things you need to know to get up and running with scripts:

1. First, you most likely will want to install a browser extension to manage your scripts (If you use Chrome, you can add an extension called TamperMonkey. If you use Firefox, install Grease Monkey). These are nifty because they let you see all the MTURK scripts running on a particular page and you can choose to disable certain scripts from these extensions. A button for these extensions is placed in the top right corner of your browser).

2. Then you look for scripts, research them, and install them. Once installed, they will show up from your script extensions (GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey) if those extensions are running on a particular page (MTURK pages).

So, how I got started with scripts was running across these two excellent pages which tell you how to get started (basically what I explained above but with links) and give you lists of great scripts to start with, so I highly recommend checking these pages out:

And that's how my MTURK experience is going for now......
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