MTurk and Blog Strategy

Mturk was originally developed to assist Amazon in categorizing products.  It relies on humans to do tasks that computers have a hard time with.   The odd name fits really well if you read the Mechanical Turk story on Wikipedia.

You will not get rich working on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but working as a provider can earn you a few bucks a day.  Anyone with an Amazon Account can work on the site (or get an Amazon Account free).

Playing around with MTurk.com has lead to several interesting strategies.

#1:  Get Paid to Comment on Blogs

You know you need to comment on blogs to network and build backlinks right?  Well a few users post HITs on MTurk asking for blog comments.  Just search for “blog” or “comment”  to identify these types of HITs and earn a few cents per comment for something you should be doing anyway.

#2:  Get Paid, Twice, to Bookmark

Search for HITs that request social bookmarking.  Use SheToldMe or  COMMO to do the HIT and earn on any traffic you generate for years to come.

#3:  Advertise and Drive Traffic (sort of)

You can go and buy pay-per-click ads for at least 5 cents a click (or far more) and hope to attract some eyeballs and maybe some blog comments, votes and links to social networking.  Or you could put up HITs for a few cents asking for comments/votes/links etc and get actual humans to your site who will actually do exactly what you want.  Some Turkers will even be interested enough to read more and might even convert.   Sometimes the perception of activity on a blog is needed to get other visitors to interact.  I’ve not tried this, but there are others using MTurk this way.

#4:  Check Links and Improve Databases

This kind of work is what MTurk was originally designed for.  You can really get a lot of work done with a 24/7 on demand global work force attacking the work in bit sized pieces.   Read the ideas and guides here on the requester side.

#5:  Buying Article Content

I see writing jobs advertised at silly low prices, so someone must be providing the articles.  I’d want to check any work against CopyScape, but it might be worth a try to get some content produced.  There are also Q&A sites getting humans to generate questions and answers to build up content on various sites.

I’d encourage anyone serious about creating passive income to check out the idea of outsourcing some of the mundane tasks to a global workplace like MTurk.com  There is no money to be made on referrals – this is just a good deal if you use MTurk right.

If you want to earn money freelancing – more than working on Mturk – consider oDesk.com

Other Posts Worth Checking Out

Xomba Changes

Amazon Associates Case Study

Covered Calls for Passive Income

Tagged as: linking strategy