Amazon Mechanical Turk For Fun & Profit

A little known gem in the world of outsourcing is the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Using the Amazon Turk, you can post what is known as a “HIT” (Human Intelligence Tasks) - or a specific task you need accomplished. You can choose to have only 1 person working on the HIT, or hundreds of people.

You specify how much you want to pay per completed “HIT”. If you look on the HIT page, you will see hundreds of HITS ranging from 0.01 cent to $1.00+. Most HIT’s are 0.05 cents or below.

So you are probably thinking, who in their right mind would actually work for this price? Well, according to the Amazon Mechnical Turk Wiki, “In March 2007 there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries.”

I imagine many of these people are really bored, or are living in 3rd world countries..

So how can you as an affiliate marketer use the mechanical turk?

There are plenty of ways:

  • Have 100 people review a website you are building and provide you with feedback.
  • Ask people to complete a survey about your affiliate site.
  • You can ask for product reviews.
  • Posting in forums.
  • Generating links.
  • Identifying competitors in a niche.

Although, the system works best when you are posting simple, repetitive tasks.

There is also an API available for bulk posting :)

Related Posts

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 6:03 pm and is filed under affiliate marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Amazon Mechanical Turk For Fun & Profit”

  1. Wade Says:
    October 16th, 2007 at 12:42 am

    Great tip - I had almost forgotten about this.

    Jonathan at Forge was making some use of this when I was working for him to do reviews of potential publisher sites by having Turk workers aswer some questions about sites that were potential fits for our advertisers.

    Great stuff,

    God Bless,

    Wade

  2. andrew wee Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 3:23 am

    Hi Josh,
    The video is no longer available.

  3. Your Outsourcing Dream Answered: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Service at Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation | Internet Marketing Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 4:03 am

    [...] Wexelbaum over at ScrappyBusiness Idea Blog mentioned this new service in a recent post “Amazon Mechanical Turk for Fun and Profit” and Internet Marketers can rejoice as some of their outsourcing woes are [...]

  4. jwexelbaum Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 9:30 am

    Hi Andrew,

    Seems to be available to me. I just played it.. Hmm..

  5. andrew wee Says:
    October 26th, 2007 at 3:43 am

    Weird…

    Btw, my post got syndicated at webpronews, along with a backlink to you.
    So you should get some traffic.

    The link is at:
    http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/10/25/amazons-mechanical-turk-service

  6. jim@yosemitereservations Says:
    October 28th, 2007 at 11:26 am

    Have used this slightly and there seems to be a great number of people who will do this outsourced work for you for pennies,nickels, or dimes.
    Very cool

Leave a Reply