The source of active income I've been using so far - and in fact, what got me started on this whole "trying to earn money over the internet" thing - is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Yes, that Amazon. I'd never heard of it up until about 3 weeks ago, when I stumbled across this article about making money on the side (or in my case, without a real job). Since it's free to sign up and run by everyone's favorite online retailer, I figured I had nothing to lose.Mechanical Turk (or Mturk, for short) is touted as a 24-hour, on-demand workforce - which is pretty accurate. It works sort of as a freelance employment service. You do as much work as you want - at a non-negotiable, bid-free rate - whenever you want. Most of the tasks are very quick to do, but there are some more complicated things available. You also have the opportunity to view the details about any given job before you decide to do it - letting you know if the money involved will be worth your time.
Mturk's unusual name is based on a chess-playing robot from the 18th century, who went around winning against notables of the day such as Benjamin Franklin. What they didn't know at the time is that the machine wasn't winning at all - there was a chess player hidden in a box beneath the chessboard, controlling the robot's movements. The idea is that there are still some tasks that man can perform more accurately than machine, and most of the jobs available on Mturk are based on this idea. Things like matching the most similar or different faces out of a set of images, proofreading classified ads to make sure they're correctly categorized, or updating contact information for businesses are all common jobs to be done on Mechanical Turk. The job listings are referred to as HITs - short for Human Intelligence Tasks.
The work doesn't pay very much, usually anywhere from a single penny to a few dollars. There are some items I've seen that have offered up to $30, but these were obviously scams since they asked for your email and contact information - which is prohibited (and reportable) on Mturk. The most I've earned so far for a single item was 3 dollars, to transcribe 5 minutes of an audio interview. Other things I've done include participating in university research studies, categorizing a set of sounds by emotion, and matching a photo of a product with the correct description. Very simple tasks that just about anyone could do, and the time given to do each task is usually quite generous - so it's easy to do a little work on the site while browsing the web, watching television, or doing anything else that allows you to multitask. I'd estimate my total time spent working at between 8 and 10 hours so far - which is a very generous estimate considering how much of that time I was surfing the web or doing other things. While payment for accepted work is guaranteed, the jobs come from a variety of employers (referred to on the site as Requesters) so there is varying lag between when you complete a job and when you get paid for it. As of this writing, I have several items awaiting approval and once I've been paid for all of them (as I assume I will be) I'll have earned about $130 in those 10 hours worked.
It benefits you to read the instructions carefully and make sure you can do the job as specified before accepting. Requesters can reject your work if it's not done to their specifications, which reflects negatively on your approval ratings. Some jobs have restrictions on them, and approval rating restrictions are the most common - usually requiring you to have 85% or more approval on the HITs you submit. Other restrictions may require you to take a test ensuring you're qualified to do what that Requester is asking before you'll be permitted to accept their tasks. These are generally pretty simple, but worth doing to increase the number of workable HITs you can see at any given time. If Requesters really like your work, they can also give you a bonus at their discretion. I don't know how common receiving a bonus is since I've only earned 31 cents in bonuses so far, but I'll gladly take any extra money someone wants to throw at me.
While Mturk is available around the world, only workers from the United States and India are able to be paid in cash - deposited straight to your bank account rather than via PayPal like many other online workplaces. You also have the option to be paid in credit/gift certificates to Amazon.com if you so choose, or if you're from a country other than the US or India. The presence of worldwide competition for the jobs listed on the site may also be what drives the price paid per job so low, since the living wage is so much lower in some parts of the world. I don't think it would be possible for an American to make a full-time living from Mturk alone, but for the time being it's proved to be a nice and easy source of income. If you're not interested in making actual money from it, it could also be a nice way to earn enough money to buy a high-ticket (and potentially frivolous) item from Amazon that you wouldn't purchase otherwise - like a video gaming console,
or a piece of fitness equipment.
Or, if you're more practical, you can buy diapers, food, deodorant, shoes and whatever else you and your family might need with your Amazon credit since they sell just about everything.
The thing about Mechanical Turk that got me interested in seeking out other ways of making money online was a HIT that asked for a short article to be written. I submitted one - about hard-boiled eggs - and made 2 dollars for the effort. That got me thinking about where else I could sell writing without being a professional, which eventually led me to eHow and started this whole crazy idea. While I don't know if it'll be worth keeping up with in the long term - since there aren't always worthwhile jobs listed when I go on there looking to work, it's a key part of my earning strategy for now. I'd recommend it to anyone trying to make an income over the internet, it's definitely something to do while you're waiting for all those passive/residual income streams to flow in.
Image provided under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/people/plutor/
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