...with 3173 HITs and a 99.7% approval rate. Today is my 47th day of Turking. I did surveys and hung out on the Great HITs thread for awhile in the beginning, but lately I mostly stick to writing and audio transcription. Obviously, I'm not high-volume. I Turk a little every day, but the last 2 weeks, I've averaged 27.5 HITs submitted and $27.05 posted earnings per day.
Congrats! Writing and transcription hits are almost definitely where the real money is on mturk. Unfortunately, such hits are also often grossly underpaid for the amount of effort required and maintaining motivation in the long term can be tough. I tend to turk for at least 8 hours per day and often struggle to get the $33 per day I know I need in order to earn $1000 per month, so I find it impressive that you have made so much by only working for a few hours each day.
Thanks, abraham! Hey, tonic---thank you. It has definitely been a learning process. In the beginning, I was Turking for 10 or 12 hours a day and making much less; certainly I wasn't making much more even on my best days. This was partly because when I was at under 1000 HITs, my options weren't great, but it was also partly because I was inexperienced and didn't have a good system yet for using my time wisely and picking HITs well. Fortunately, I'm all about making up systems. Once I had a workable one in place, my daily earnings went up and my time spent went way down. That's when I got to thinking that perhaps I should write a book, which is how my current project got started. I'm starting to wonder whether I should write a follow-up to it for beginning writers on MTurk, too.
Would love to figure out your system, I may have to get your book, Lol, I'm a newbie with only 300 hits so far, can't wait till I hit 1000, at this point is seems so far away, I only get to sit down an do this a little in the evenings and it seems like it's taking forever to get to 1000, but oh well, I will get there. But I was curious about what do you have to do to get into doing transcripts and writing? Right now I do surveys and I try to do batch HITS when I can, but would love to get into do that stuff. Thanks in advance.
Hi, Ramanda! Hee, actually, yes, it sure sounds like the book would be very helpful to you. But things definitely do open up more after 1K; it's a major threshold in a way that nothing else before 5K will be. There are several transcription companies on MTurk, some better and more worth the while than others. I would recommend that you search these forums on "transcri" (to pick up "transcription," "transcribing," "transcriber(s)" and so on). And/or you can wait for the book (coming later this month!)...and also, I will PM you about another fine online resource.