Getting Back at 95% Approved with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Making money online is hard enough without being judged. And on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) the judgement can be harsh. With each HIT you take on, you are placing yourself out there to be rejected. Now, some people may say, “Hey, it’s only a $.02 cent job. I can take a rejection on that, no big deal.”

Well, as I said in an earlier post, going below the 95% approved threshold can have a dramatic effect on ability to access HITs. So, it’s not the monetary quality of the HITs that matter - a $.02 cent rejection carries the weight of a $2.00 rejection. It’s the cumulative effect that can kill you. Once you drop below 95%, your already difficult job becomes even harder.

In my earlier post, I discussed my own tragedy with dipping below 95%. I took on a long series of low earning HITs and all the while I was doing them this little buzzer was going off in the back my head. The HIT was poorly constructed and while I did the best I could, I got hit with around 30 rejections, dropping my acceptance rate down to around 91%.

Because I don’t use a strategy of taking on a slew of low earnings HITs, it took forever for me to get my approved rate back above 95%. At the point of my downfall, I had done in the order of 600-700 HITs. So, to get myself back meant taking on a boatload of HITs to off-set the negative impact of those 30 rejections.

Well, that day finally came. I decided to use the percentages in my favor and found a one cent HIT that I could produce in a relatively quick fashion and an hour and 121 HITs later, I had my approval rating back at 95%.

Woo-woo. Now, did it really change Mturking for me? Not by much, really. Since my work on Mturk doesn’t involve the low paying/high volume strategy that I discussed in an earlier article, I was able to get by on an approval rating of less than 95%, but I have noticed quite a few more available HITs since making back to 95%.

So, if you find your approval rate trashed by a bunch of rejections, bide your time and find some low earning HITs you can plow your way through and you’ll back at 95% in no time.

300

No, it’s not the movie with all those Spartan warriors. It’s my first month working for Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) in which I have eclipsed the $300 mark in earnings. Woo-woo, for me.

In the past, I was a pure hobbyist when it came to Mturk. I dabbled around taking HITs enthusiastically for a couple days, then lost enthusiasm, going through periods of waxing and waning with productivity with Mturk. It was only recently that I decided on a more systematic and professional approach to Mturk.

I set a goal of earning $10 a day and averaged that throughout the month even though I had a couple days in which I made very little. To offset those low earning days, I put in a couple long weekend days in which I pushed my total earnings to over $20 per day.

Now, if you’re envisioning me sitting hunkered down over my computer from sun-up to sundown, then you’d be wrong. I have a fruitful and busy day job. I do Mturk to make a few extra bucks in my spare time. Yes, on the high earning days, I did spend between three and fours a day working on Mturk HITs, but most days have me working 90 minutes to two hours. I tend to get up early before my family is awake and work for one hour on Mturk. Then I do some HITs over lunch. If I meet my quota, I may stop for the day, but if I have a few extra minutes in the evening, I might fit in one or two HITs before I go to bed.

I’ll be writing an article soon that discusses my strategy in more detail. For now, I just hope the attractive and well paying HITs just keep coming and I can maintain my new found discipline.