BoxTofu

Chances are, if you run some kind of business you use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to do a variety of things. If you don’t, it’s really time to get started. Mechanical Turk is so cheap to use, and you get so much benefit from it. Testing, opinions, translations, image labeling, etc., are all things you can do for very, very little money. I’m talking two to three cents a job. Thank goodness it’s all voluntary, otherwise it would be the biggest, cheapest, scariest sweat shop in the world.

There is one “problem,” though. When you put up a job for people to do, if they take too long to do it you get a very low “hourly rate.” When this number is too low, more people don’t do the job, and you can’t get it finished. Let’s say you want 100 people to visit your homepage and tell you what they think it’s about. If you are paying 3 cents a job, and that first person takes a long time to complete the task, people scanning through Turk will think your job sucks because you aren’t paying out enough. Here are some tips to avoid that, get the same quality work done, and get your jobs finished faster.

1. Specify how long you want people to spend, how much to write.

If you don’t want people to take a long time, tell them how long they should spend. For the example written above, I would tell them to:

1. Look at the webpage for 5 seconds
2. Tell me in 3 sentences or less what the website is about

In Mechanical Turk, it’s really important to break up jobs into tiny pieces. All I want to know is what people think my website is about in 5 seconds or less. First impressions. For a job like this I would pay around 3 cents a job. 3 cents for a quick first impression that gives you a ton of insight is invaluable. A hundred of these only costs $3 plus Amazon’s $0.50 fee.

2. Write “Quick” in the Title, Description.

I like to add the word “Quick” into my title. When people see this, even if the “hourly rate” is pretty low, you’ll get a lot more people doing your jobs. 3 cents for something that doesn’t take very long? Sign me up! Here are some sample titles that have worked well for me:

• “Quick first impressions of our homepage”
• “Test our one-minute sign-up flow”
• “What would your Google search be” (using something that people already know as being fast)

Be careful not to do something that would lower the quality of your responses, though. Although you want to raise your hourly rate, you want to make sure the jobs are actually small enough to complete in a quick amount of time. Once again, it’s important to break up your jobs into tiny chunks.

3. Raise the Price

Sometimes you just gotta pay people more. If Mechanical Turk is a sweatshop, it’s a democratic one. If your price is too low and you can’t speed up people’s work, then you just have to raise your price. One problem I’ve noticed when I do this, though, is that when you raise the price people start spending more time on your jobs! This is good, but you are still getting fewer results this way. Make sure you tell people exactly what you want and don’t let them dilly dally.

I’ve been using Turk more and more lately, so I’m sure I’ll have more tips about it in the near future. Mechanical Turk is an absolutely amazing tool when it comes to getting things done, testing things out, and more, so don’t miss out on it. The possibilities are only limited to your own creativity!

P.S. How many of you thought you were reading about how to make more money while performing jobs on Mechanical Turk? Take that!

Tags: Mechanical Turk

blog comments powered by Disqus