BoxTofu

Use Mechanical Turk for your business. USE IT NOW. You can never spend too much money on Mechanical Turk. It’s too cheap to do that. I don’t want to waste your time, because you need to get started. Here are ten jobs you should run right now.

1. Test your homepage

What do people think of your site when they hit your webpage? What do they think your webpage is about in ten seconds or less? You can get some really good gut reactions, and if people think your website is something that it’s not, then you know what to change. You can also figure out things you should stress more on the page. You’d be surprised at how detailed some of the feedback is! Estimated Price: $0.03 /job

2. Testing your sign-up flow

If you have a sign-up flow on your site, have people go through it and test it out (and give their opinions). You can figure out if it’s too difficult, if there is anything quirky, etc. Plus, you get a bunch of people signing up for your service or website, and have a decent chance to convert them into actual users! Remember to have all kinds of e-mail marketing ready for them after they sign up Estimated Price: $0.03-$0.05 /job

3. What would it take to get you to buy this?

If you have a product that you are selling, you can gather a lot of information about what your product is missing by asking people what it would take to get them to buy it. Most people on Mechanical Turk are probably pretty cheap, because they are doing your 3 cent job, but good insight nonetheless. Estimated Price: $0.05 /job

4. Have people write a blog post about you

Yep, you can pay people to write a blog post about you. This is nice from an SEO perspective, and potentially from a “people will find you through this blog post” perspective. Don’t hope for much, though. People working on Turk probably don’t have great blogs. Estimated Price: $1.00 /job

5. Have people contribute

Depending on what you have on your website, you can get people to leave comments, upload content, post on the forum, and more. It’s a good way to help jump-start a new community with some life (though be it artificial life). Estimated Price: $0.05 /job

6. Test for errors

Have you put up a new page recently? Don’t forget to test it out. Getting “real” people in to test a page can be expensive and time consuming. Testing it yourself even more so. Let people on Turk do it for you. I usually have people visit, look around and make sure nothing looks weird, write down their browser, then click on three random links to make sure they work. Great way to find all your errors and make your page public ready (especially with all those pesky Internet Explorer issues you’ll find)! Estimated Price: $0.05 /job

7. Translating your website, other content

Did you know that Turk is a decent way to translate things? Well, this depends on the quality you want. Turk is a decent way to get an initial translation on some copy, and get it for cheap. Though it’s possible to translate things via Turk, I’d recommend you take it somewhere else if you’re really serious about accuracy. Estimated Price: $0.01 /word

8. Researching your competition

Why not take some of these jobs and have them done on your competition? Learning from your competitor’s shortcomings (and good points!) can be a great way to figure out what you need to work on to compete better. Crowdsourcing on Turk is a great way to do this, and you can get a wide range of opinions and results. If you haven’t Turked your competitors, I highly recommend it. It’s eye opening! Estimated Price: varies

9. Coming up with a tag-line, keywords

Maybe you want to come up with a tag-line for your website? Why not crowdsource it? It’s a great way to get ideas, and also a great way to see if people know what your website is about. Another thing to do is have people gather keywords about specific pages. It gives you an idea of what people see in your page, and then you can use those keywords and add them into your HTML to boost your SEO. Turk is an amazing way to gather ideas and keywords. Estimated Price: $0.05-$0.10 /job

10. Pay-per-click ad substitute

Be careful of this one… I’m pretty sure it can get you into trouble. I think it’s technically okay with Turk, but if someone catches you doing this you might have some problems. To get someone to click on an adwords ad can be expensive (20-30 cents a click?). On Turk it’s cheap, and pretty much guaranteed (though not as targeted, of course) – it’s a way to inflate your numbers. $10 to get 1000 people to go to your website? That’s not bad when you need to look bigger than you really are. Estimated Price: $0.01 /job

And beyond!

This will just get Mechanical Turk newbies started. There is so much more potential to be found in Turk, and depending on what you’re doing there are probably a hundred more things that you can get from it. Luckily, if anything you do is a failure, it was probably a very very cheap failure. What kinds of things have you seen done? What kinds of creative things have you done with Turk for your business or website?

Tags: Mechanical Turk, testing