By Staff

If you are a student who’s looking for a pretty easy way to make a little bit of extra cash, but don’t have the time to start up a full-blown business, Amazon Mechanical Turk might be something for you to look into. This is basically a workplace, run by Amazon.com, where businesses can post tasks known as Human Intelligent Tasks (HITs). HITs are tasks that a computer can’t easily do, but a human can without too much effort, like finding websites and contact information for certain companies or writing short reviews of articles, products, or websites. The process is pretty simple – you have to sign up and create an account with Amazon, find assignments that you would be interested in, complete them and submit them for review, and if they get approved you get paid. The payment can range depending of the difficulty or the amount of effort required. Most HITs offered typically pay only $.02 – $.10 per completed item, but they may have 1000 or so items to complete.

The nice thing about Amazon Mechanical Turk besides the simple concept is that it’s definitely legit – Amazon is America’s largest online retailer, so you can be sure you’re dealing with a reputable website and that you’ll get your payments in a timely fashion. After the completion and acceptance of a HIT, the payment will be deposited into your amazon account, and you can transfer it to the bank account of your choice from there.

Some reviews say that the amount of money you get from Amazon MT is not worth the amount of work you have to do, and that its harder than you might think to get a task approved. And I agree – It definitely won’t make you rich any time soon. But for students like you or others who are looking for a few bucks to put in your pocket – to help out with gas money, or a late night junk-food run, it can be an easy and even fun solution – especially if you like surfing the web – and if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you do!

There have also been some concerns about ethical issues with some of the jobs posted in this workplace. For example, there are some that will pay you to write positive reviews for whatever needs to be rated, instead of writing an opinion based on your own thoughts, good or bad. Some may not have a problem writing these, while others will. Bottom line, look for those HITs that you feel interested in and that you feel comfortable completing.

There are countless other websites out there offering to help you “make money from home”. Be careful – many of these sites require you to pay an upfront “membership” before you can start working, and can often wind up in very low payments. Aside from this, many ads claiming to help you make money without leaving your house can be scams. There are legitimate sites out there that allow you to make money by filling out surveys or inputting data into forms, but be cautious before signing up for anything. The book Undress for Success by Kate Lister and Tom Harnish provides great coverage of different work-from-home scams, and is a very informative read for anyone looking to avoid these scams and try to make some money from home.