Amazon Mechanical Turk: The source for crowdsourcing jobs

A few years back, Amazon launched a crowdsourcing platform that has taken off. Crowdsourcing is when you get a bunch of people together (usually through the net) to break a job down into small parts to work on, or when you're trying to get answers to a question, survey, or experiment quickly.

This platform is called Mechanical Turk.

There are a bunch of different jobs on MTURK. Some of them involve transcribing audio, others relate to letting websites test features. By far the most consistent (and trustworthy entrance point to Mechanical Turk jobs) is the constant stream of University studies. These MTURK college studies are usually from professors doing research in economics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and other experiments in the social sciences, market research, and business areas. Such studies usually pay anywhere from 10 cents to 2 or 3 bucks a pop.

Because of the open nature of the platform, there's almost a "fend for yourself" mentality regarding scammers and shady jobs. However, you can combat this by joining a community forum and downloading a tool or two.

One useful tool is Turkopticon, which allows users to rate job requesters on various dimensions (fairness, prompt payment, etc.) and leave comments, helping to build a reputation based system you van use to decide if you want to go for a job.

Some forums I follow for leads on good jobs make it much easier. They tend to have a threshold of about 10 cents per minute of work for an experienced hand, so they tend to sniff out the best jobs. Turkernation is worth checking out. If you're a Reddit.com user, it's worth checking out /r/mturk and /r/HITsWorthTurkingFor.

A lot of these forums function on the principle that the people sharing "good HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks - Amazon's term for little jobs) is that they will use one of those ad-based URL shorteners. Like Adfocus or Adfly. They get paid $5 every  10k hits, so they earn by sharing. You should be prepared to pass through these ad-gateways, and all the risks to your browser they entail. If you get good at finding HITs of your own, you can make spare money sharing them on these forums yourself using such gateway sites.

They pay out via the Amazon Payments system. You do have to give them actual tax info, such as your SSID if you're a US American, and payouts are easiest accomplished via direct transfers to your bank account ($10 minimum at first) or Amazon Giftcard balance ($1 minimum.)

Disclosure: There's no monetary incentive for me telling you this. MTURK has no referral program. It is a site I visit regularly, usually with the assistance of some of the forums I mention. You can make a fairly good amount of  money on it if you're willing to put in the effort.

Bing Rewards: Microsoft will pay you to use its search engine

Everyone knows Google is the king of the search websites on the web. Every day, you might use it for dozens of searches, but what do you get out of it? Nothing but what Google chooses to show you. However, the science of search engine algorithms is pretty well straightforward, and they're earning millions of dollars from your eyeballs looking at what they want you to see. Personally, I love Google, but the gap between the quality of their results and their primary competitors has narrowed in recent years as those competitors have stepped it up.

Microsoft has chosen to fight back against Google's dominant market share by cutting you off a small piece of the pie. Their Bing Rewards search engine works well enough that I've replaced my built in browser search engine with. You can earn up to 15 points a day, with 2 searches per point. They offer a daily bonus point on your account dashboard that's worth snagging.

They offer different rewards levels, with basic, silver, and gold. Getting to gold involves doing a certain amount of searches, and maintaining 150 searches per month, which is a piece of cake if you follow my tip of using it as your browser's primary search engine. Once you reach gold, you get a discount on prizes. They offer contests, XBox Live points, and Amazon (or other) Gift Cards to cash out with as the most attractive offers.

Part of attaining gold is to cash out at least once. I highly suggest using one of their 5-10 point contest entries for this if you want to knock this requirement out of the way quickly. Gift cards take about 500 points, or around 475 with the gold discount.

You can earn an easy 50 bonus points by linking your Microsoft account with your Facebook, if that's something you're comfortable with. You can earn 10 points per referral to the program, up to 100 points total.

As a side note: It's worth pointing out Bing's image search engine hasn't been nerfed like Google's has. They treat you like an actual adult, not feeling the need to censor you if safe search is off.

Pollbuzzer: An easy way to earn from your inbox

Pollbuzzer is a fairly straightforward program. You give them your e-mail address, fill out some demographic info, and they e-mail you one-question surveys that pay a dollar a pop. If you've ever done online surveys for pay, you know how generous this is. On other sites, you get paid maybe 50 cents for 5-10 minutes of your time. Pollbuzzer is straightforward, because they don't have to waste time filtering out participants who don't qualify. Because they send you the survey, you're not going to spend 10 minutes filling out demographic info only to get disqualified.

The downside to this is that Pollbuzzer "quizzes" will be infrequent (but welcome) appearances in your inbox. They also come with a time limit. If you wait more than a day, you will not get paid for your response. So you will definitely want to sign up with an e-mail account you check daily. Some questions will require a brief paragraph of writing. Others will result in followup questions dependent on your responses, but each of those will be worth an additional dollar, so it's all gravy.

The advantage for companies doing market research is they get high quality, highly targeted responses from a preexisting population of users, without having to filter out a bunch of people.

Cashing out with Pollbuzzer is easy enough, if you have a Paypal account. They will automatically transfer each dollar to your Paypal account on a weekly basis.

There is a referral bonus. (Full disclosure: This is why I am sharing this info with you.)

For each new user you refer, you earn an extra dollar once they complete 4 quizzes on-time.

TL;DR: Pollbuzzer is an easy way to get paid a buck for answering a question that gets e-mailed to you. Just be quick about it.