Taking care of business

In my switch to stay at home mom, I've been so focused on trying to make money I've lost sight of the primary job I have: taking care of the houe and family! I feel that the time I've put in this week toward earning money hasn't really brought enough reward to justify a messy house. So, today I'm cracking down on housework!

First on my agenda is the ginormous mound of laundry on the bed. I sure would like to sleep in my bed this evening, so the laundry must be folded and put away ASAP. Catching up the rest of the laundry won't be much of a problem, I've kept up with washing it this week for the most part. It's the folding and putting away that's got me stuck!

Next job: tackling the kitchen. Ick, I've fallen behind a little too much on that! The dishes are piled halfway to the ceiling, it seems. I'm almost positive I heard them mocking me this morning as I walked by. Time to dig in!

I think I need to go back to my old way of housework, which was making a list every day of things I wanted finished pronto. No smoke breaks or phone calls until certain points on the list. Kind of silly, but it worked. Sooo, I'll be making a list, and checking it twice...

Break time is over, time to get down and dirty with housework!

Bargain Shopping

It's getting close to the holidays, and time to start Christmas shopping. It's no secret that I use a lot of my MTurk earnings to buy things right off Amazon.com, and I have found some really good deals there over the years. Whether you use your own cash, or money you've earned from MTurk, shopping there couldn't be easier. Check out the Gold Box deals every day to get the best specials for your Christmas presents!

eHow update!

I figured it's probably a good time to throw in an eHow update, too. Earnings for October have been calculated, and I made $119.91 on 158 articles. Around 76 cents each! It keeps going up, last month it was around 74 cents, and the month before 67. 

I finally wrote another eHow article, finally! It had been six months since I actually wrote anything there! I've got to put some time and effort into eHow, the residual income can't be beat. 

I enjoy writing eHow articles, and really they don't take long to do well. A half hour to an hour, depending on how familiar I am with the subject matter is about all it takes.

One word of advice. eHow's site is often buggy. I strongly suggest writing articles first in a Word Processor document, then cutting and pasting into the site submission form. This way you have a back-up should it not go through, or if an article is deleted. 

I have been writing for eHow since July 08, and in that time I have made almost $900. If you divide that by the time I have spent writing there, it comes out to about $11.32 per hour. Not bad! Even if I never write there again, that hourly wage will just go up as the residual income trickles in. 

This is one of my favorite ways to make money being a stay at home mom! Now if I could just buckle down and write a bunch more....

Another MTurk update

Now that I'm a full time stay at home mom, I'm focusing a lot more time on working with MTurk. I'm up about $510 earned through MTurk! The work has seemed to dry up a tad bit, but there's still plenty of stuff for stay at home moms to piddle around on and make a little cash.

I haven't done much more work with CastingWords transcription through MTurk yet, but my first two assignments I did with them got good reviews and I liked the work. I need just a little more quiet time around here to do that. My plan is once a week or so to take Gracie to her aunt's house and spend the day on those jobs. The rest I can do when she's here, as they're shorter and don't require as much hands-on work. It would be easier, sure, but I can still definitely find enough time and attention to do the work on MTurk with Gracie here.

My goal is to make $80 per week with MTurk, and that is definitely reachable. I have to focus my time on this for now, as I'm still getting the hang of being a stay at home mom! One of my biggest time drainers if my favorite Mom message board. Now that I have the time, it's hard to peel myself away from there and get to work! 

I'm hoping to find a perfect balance between stay at home work, housework, and a little bit of me time. I'm sure that will come in time. But for the time being, MTurk is where much of my focus is going to be. 

CloudCrowd, is it worth it?

So I finally had a not so good experience with CloudCrowd. I got a rejection on work I am confident was done correctly. Actually, I would go so far as to say I'm positive it was done correctly. The part of that I'm upset about is that because I haven't found a lot of work on there, it put a serious ding in my credibility rating, which put me on probation. If I had done a lot of work, the ding wouldn't have been so bad. 

The approval system needs some serious work. There are reports on a few forums about CrowdCloud of similar complaints. A LOT of them. This is the way the work is reviewed: The work is open to several workers, so say a few people are zipping through and not paying enough attention and one person was. Majority rules. So, there ARE people who are getting their work rejected on CloudCrowd that didn't deserve to be. 

Being on probation means I can keep on working, and the approved work will raise my credibility score. BUT if I get another false rejection I'll be permanently suspended. There is at this time no way to appeal or fix this. I wouldn't mind so much if it could be looked at and someone with CloudCrowd could say "Why yes, you are correct. Let me fix this for you!" But that system is not in place.

I think for the time being I'm just going to sit back and wait it out. They say they're still working out the bugs in the system. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll be back when they do. Maybe. The probation thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. There's too many other work at home sites I could focus my time on in the meantime. For now, this stay at home mom is taking a break from CC.