Category: 
In the spirit of a New Year Resolution I decided to try some new (for me…) websites for additional income streams to our family budget. The ones I found and have started using are www.swagbucks.com and www.mturk.com, the later being part of Amazon. The goal was to find such “work”, that will provide some easy money and ways to kill time when at home.
In short – I have been able to add about $15 for a month of “work” from both websites combined.
Here is a short description on what I do:
After signing up at the website (valid email required) all you need to do to earn some swagbucks (valued at approx $0.10 ea) is to use the SwagBucks Search engine (powered by Ask and Google). That’s it!
You get paid at RANDOM intervals, after clicking the Search button.
How do they make their money?
By including Sponsored links in the search results together with the usual links to webpages you would see if you searched Google for example. The Sponsored Links are made to look similar to the search results. One can still clearly make the distinction and click on the real search hits.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk website is a bit of a strange concept. It is an “Artificial Artificial Intelligence” website, at which “employers” (called Requesters) post simple “jobs” (called HITs) which almost anyone can do. If a “worker” (called a Turker – that’s me/you, the human slave 
) Accepts a HIT, they have a limited time to finish it – from 5 minutes to 60 and more, depending on the task. If the time expires before you finish your task – you don’t get paid, even if you did some work on it. The Turker needs to Submit a HIT they finished working on (in the allotted time frame) if they want to get paid.
I use the Amazon Mechanical Turk website primarily to work on legitimate Surveys, that pay anywhere from $0.10 to $1.50. Most of these surveys are from Universities and other educational institutions and on a wide range of topics. Most of them are fun to do and the best part is – you can always “Return the HIT” before you finish it, if you find its boring or too long, etc. You don’t get paid of course in that case 
.
One thing I dislike about the Mechanical Turk is that there are a TON of “scammers” or requesters that are up to not good, which try to persuade you to subscribe to some junky new website, which will most likely sell out your email and real identity info (as such is “required” in these cases) and leave you wondering – “Did I just sell my soul to the devil for mere $0.30?”
It is harder to search for legitimate HITs than it should have been – the search capability is greatly lacking in my opinion, compared to a normal search engine. I end up following links to surveys primarily through Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey, which are 2 of the bigger survey engines used by legitimate requesters out there. If the “survey” link goes to something like http://bit.ly/8vQ5Ye3 or http://tinyurl.com/ydpybex2 – better stay away from it!
What do you use to make some additional pocket change for the month?
