When it comes to making money online with Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) there are definitely different strategies and philosophy for making money. In an earlier post I talked about a low impact strategy of taking on low reward HITs in high volume. In this post, I will flip this strategy on end and discuss high reward/low volume strategy with a focus on writing.
Two Criteria
The first two criteria for taking on writing HITs on Mturk are:
One - you should be able to write. That doesn’t mean writing Pulitzer quality material, but you can string a few sentences together and make sense
Two - you have to want to write. If you want to work for this low of wage, you should at least enjoy it.
To SEO or Not to SEO
There are a multitude of writing HITs on Mturk. Many are ones that you require you to write SEO (search engine optimization) targeted material. You’re basically given a topic and have to include a phrase about that topic two or three times in the article. These articles usually have to be between 350 and 600 works, but sometimes requesters want 1200 words. Rewards vary on these and sometimes you can make $3.00 on these HITs.
There are also HITs that aren’t SEO related. These work pretty much the same as the SEO articles, but aren’t as stringent in the phrasing of phrases and words.
General Writing Assignments
I tend to prefer general writing assignments. If I can get into a groove, I can knock out three and sometimes four articles in an hour with average pay between $1.70 and $1.90 per article. If I do hit that sweet spot, I’m making over $5.00/hour.
In the past month alone I made over $300 taking on writing assignments in my spare time. And I mean my spare time. I usually write an hour in the morning before work, then over my lunch hour and maybe do a couple in the evening. If I can get six completed in a day, I can average $10 a day and that gets me to $300 a month.
Speed is the key to making this work. You have to be able research and write quickly.
Research
If you get bogged down in the research, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. I basically do a quick Google search of the topic and then find a primary source to work from. That source needs to substantive. If there’s only a couple sentences you’re going to run into trouble stretching the story to the required word length.
Conversely, if you have too much source material or the material is dense and complicated, you can lose efficiency. I’ve abandoned many HITs because the topic was just too complicated to summarise quickly.
Writing
Once you’re ready to write you need to get the words down quickly. Don’t spend a lot of time looking for the right word. Remember you’re not being paid enough to win an award, just to get the facts down in a logical and readable fashion.
Plagiarism Protection
Do not plagiarize material. Do not cut and paste from your source. Most requesters run the writing assignments through plagiarism checkers and your work will be rejected. Even worse, you will run the risk of being banned from taking anymore HITs from that requester. Take a few moments to run what you’ve done through a plagiarism checker before you even submit it.
I’ve used a plagiarism checker in the past and have caught some of my original writing that was too close to an already existing source. When this happens I have had to just do some small re-writes to make sure my work doesn’t seem too much like something else that is already out there.
My favorite plagiarism checker right now can be found at dustball.com.
Final Proof
If the article is short, I recommend that you give it one last proofing before you hit the submit button on the HIT. I’ve caught more than fair share of mistakes in my writing that just needed small tweaks.
Writing my not be your thing, but it works for me and I think that if you compare it with the low-reward/high volume strategy, writing will be pay better dividends.
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