Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A thousand bucks on MTurk!

I finally did it! I hit the one thousand dollar mark on MTurk, woohoo! I won't lie, it took a LONG time to do it, but it was worth it, yay for free money!

Crowdsourcing isn't for everyone, but I have tried to make the most of it. Sure, it doesn't pay that great. But there's no rushour traffic jam, no annoying co-workers, and no paying for a babysitter. Those are the things that keep me pushing on working on MTurk to earn extra money.

Lately, I've been averaging about $12 per day, and that's not too awful bad for my needs. I spend the latter part of the morning, and a couple hours late evening making money online. Those are the times that seem to work best for me. Plus, the work I really like on MTurk is usually posted in those times and gets taken rather quickly.

I have searched around online for other Crowdsourcing sites, and have not had much luck at all outside of MTurk. I registered and took several qualification tests at LiveWork.com, and applied for several jobs on there. I didn't hear squat. I was doing a little work for CrowdCloud, and only made a couple of dollars, plus they had SO many glitches it just wasn't worth it.

I'm still always keeping an eye out for more work, but for now am happy to stick with MTurk. It's definitely not a get rich quick thing, but it does add up here and there for some spending money.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Getting back in the swing of things

I took a little break from everything for a few weeks to clear my head, but I'm back in the saddle and hoping to head in a good direction this year. It's still sometimes a little rough making the transition to SAHM, but now that the holidays are over I'm ready to focus on moving forward.

I've still been plugging along with MTurk, and at just shy of $1,000 earned so far. I've been trying to make $10 per day on there, sometimes it's easy to make double that, and other days I can only squeeze out enough time for a couple bucks. When I get enough routines down pretty well, I want to up my daily goal to $15 per day. 

I've been trying out a couple different strategies for working on MTurk, and they seem to be paying off. I spend two hours each  morning working on MTurk, another in the afternoon when time allows, and another around midnight. The mornings seem to be when I'm making the bulk of my money, the other times I've found it hard to focus well enough to really make a lot. 

Another thing I've been doing is to request any and all qualifications I come across that look even remotely useful. I've noticed the HITs available seem much more this way. The Retail Data HITs are usually pretty plentiful, so I've requested and received most of their qualifications. They may be penny work, but they're easy and they pay in a reasonable amount of time. Plus, when nothing better is going on there, you can almost always find Retail Data HITs. 

eHow's earnings are still doing okay for me, I wrote a few articles in Nov and Dec, and they seem to be holding their own. I consider my eHow earnings my bread and butter, they may not always be consistent, but I know they are there waiting for me once a month. I just need to up that residual income a little more and I'll be doing just fine.

So all in all, I'm really thankful the holidays are over! I'm getting over the winter slump and working hard to up that WAHM income. It hasn't been easy, but I'm learning new tips and tricks every day.