Make a quick dime

I don’t know how many people are aware of this but Amazon has a service called Mechanical Turk which is basically a web service that pays people to perform tasks. These tasks can vary from anything like writing essays or short reviews to finding stuff for other people. The amount you get paid could be anything from 1 cent to hundreds of dollars. You as a person can either ask for a task to be done and offer money to whoever completes the task OR you can flip through what tasks are available and do them and get paid.

For example, last week I posted about this cool Amazon app on the iPhone where you can take a picture of an item, send it to Amazon and they will find the same product for you on their website. Well Amazon lists these pictures as tasks on Mechanical Turk and offers 10 cents to anyone who finds the link to the same product on Amazon.com.

Since I already spend a lot of time on Amazon I’ve actually been accepting a lot of tasks. So far I’ve found a Motorola phone for someone, an LG plasma, Xbox games, Sushi rice, mugs, books, oven and a ton of other stuff for people I don’t know in return for just 10 cents a find. So far I think I’ve made like $3. There are tens of thousands of tasks available on Mechanical Turk but I only work on ones called “Find the product for sale on Amazon.com”. They are EXTREMELY hard to find and work on since they are very popular easy tasks and usually by the time it gets listed someone else already agreed to work on it. I’ve found a way to get these jobs easily but I won’t be sharing it so other people don’t use my technique.

Its pretty silly, the money is very little but honestly when you’re bored online and it can be really fun since you never know what you will have to find next. Here is the link to the Mechanical Turk website. [Link]

Jan 19, 2009