Day 26: Buying Books Online Doesn't Necessarily Require Cash
by Edward Smith
31 Jul 2020
You Need to Invest in Yourself
If you listen to successful financial people, you'll often hear them tell you to invest. People usually assume investing means to invest in the stock market, but investments can come in many other forms. Not only should you invest in your relationships, you should also actively invest in yourself.
Personal education and self improvement are vital and should be pursued during your entire life span. Learning is how you gain new skills, and it's how you continue to successfully navigate complex issues that exist within our complex world.
So how do you do it? It can actually be pretty easy, and it doesn't always have to break your bank account. Books are cheap, they contain a wealth of knowledge, and if you read them, they can teach you a lot.
So that's how I found myself looking for books online, and how I first ran into a little thing called Mechanical Turk.
How I Afford to Pay For My Books
I buy many of my books online from Amazon. I've been doing it for over a decade. The only problem with this technique, is ordering things online can get expensive. You have to pay for the product itself, and you have to pay for shipping, since it costs money to send the thing from the seller to your doorstep.
I still do it though, because where I live, stores are spaced out, and you don't always find what you are looking for, when you want to get it. I hate settling for other things. I would rather just go online, find the thing I actually want, order it, and be done. I can see reviews, I can tell if the product is good or not, and once I order it, it comes to me. I don't have to do anything else after that point.
Needless to say, having ordered things online, I knew about Amazon, and I was pretty familiar with the Amazon business model.
What I didn't know, is the Amazon brand is much larger then what most people see. Amazon has quietly expanded into other business sectors, and one of those lesser known expansions includes a thing called Mechanical Turk.
What is Mturk?
Mechanical Turk (or Mturk for short) is an online job board hosted by Amazon. It get's it's name from a circus show that used to tour the world many years ago. In the show, a booth with a robotic dummy inside, would show up to your town, and you'd be given a chance to play chess against the robot for money. The robot never lost.
What you didn't know, was the game was rigged, and things weren't what they seemed. Hidden inside the machine lived a small human chess master who ran the booth from inside using a set of hidden controls. The trick worked because people believed they were playing against the robot, when in fact, the robot relied upon the hidden efforts of a small work force that completed all of the work behind the scenes.
Amazon's Mturk is not a trick, but it does rely upon the efforts of another tiny work force, much like the one that was used to run the robot back in the day. These modern workers complete small micro jobs behind the curtain. You'll never know who they are, but many companies find the work they do to be quite instrumental and useful.
How Does Mturk Work?
Many of the jobs on Mturk are funded by universities and schools. Workers sign onto the Mturk website using their personal worker id. Once logged on, they then peruse a board full of small online micro jobs. These micro jobs are intended to be done on your computer or electronic device (tablet or smart phone), and the worker gets paid by the employer for each successfully completed job.
Mturk, jobs vary both in size and pay. A job can last a minute, and pay as low as a penny, or the job can last an hour and pay out fifteen bucks (I tend to focus on work that pays at least twenty cents or higher).
The amount being promised can be random, because it all depends on who the employer is, who they represent, why they want the work done, and what they want to pay out. This information is not hidden from the worker, it just fluctuates from job to job, so the worker has to look around a little before they agree to work a job.
The workers see everything up front, and they get to browse jobs and choose what they want to do, and for how much.
That is one of the cool things about Mturk. It's very flexible. You're not locked into a work schedule, and you can sign in and out when you want. Each job includes a written description, and each job states it's promised payment amount at the beginning before anyone agrees to do anything.
It's kind of like a wanted poster in a Spaghetti Western movie. Out of work cowboys, find a poster hanging up in the middle of town. The poster tells them what the sheriff wants done, and what the sheriff is willing to pay to get the thing done. If the worker decides to complete the work, they get to go visit the sheriff, and the sheriff pays them the poster's stated reward.
Does Mturk Work?
Yep. It's not going to let you quit your day job, but Mturk really does work. It's a great way to save up for small things, or to buy presents for friends and family.
Since I've been working as a Mturk worker, I've set a modest goal for myself, in which I work to earn $1.50 a day. I could do more, but this is where I find things remain balanced. I don't want to ignore my kids all day, so I do this and stop.
Most of the work that I do on Mturk consists of opinion surveys. I find them to be really interesting. Most of them were created by teachers and educators. If you read them, you typically learn interesting things about our country.
The surveys often give you a hidden look into how the country is reacting to a current event or news article. Sometimes you also get to see where cutting research is heading. I've seen videos and surveys that give me rare glimpses into the fields of robotics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
When I do surveys, a researcher might ask me some quick questions about a current event, and I tell them what I think about it. Then the researcher pays me a little money, and I move onto the next job. It's easy, painless, and I often get entertained during the task. It's like watching a movie, but someone pays you while you do it.
To earn a $1.50 it usually takes me about an hour of my time. I then do that every day for a month. At the end of the month I make around $45.00 or $540 a year. When I do that consistently, it feels like I open my front door each day, and I find a $1.50 sitting on the ground. It's like I got visited by a grown up tooth fairy.
So yea. $1.50 might not look like much, but it's money I wasn't counting on. If you back that new money up with a plan, it can really do some cool stuff. For instance, if I earned $45.00 every month, and invested that money in a mutual fund earning 8%, and did that for ten years. I'd be sitting on $8,232. Thanks tooth fairy. Not too shabby, when you remember I filled out minute long surveys to get it.
How Does Mturk Pay You?
Mturk pays out in one of two ways. I typically go with an Amazon Gift card, because I find the cards pay out faster, they appear online quicker, and I can use them to buy Amazon products quickly. Payments release to you every couple days, weeks, or months (depending on how you set things up).
You can also get paid in cash. If you do that, the cash is deposited straight into your bank account, but it can take a little longer to get it. What I like about cash, is you can use cash for whatever your little heart desires. Invest it, pay down a house bill, buy lunch, do whatever you want. It doesn't matter. Everyone loves cash. You can't do that with a gift card.
Mturk feels really cool when it works. Nothing beats having your Amazon bill come across to you as a zero dollar amount. You rack up a bill, but then the Mturk gift cards hit, and your bill cancels out. You still receive the items, but your budget never feels any of it. When that happens, it feels like Amazon rewarded you with free swag or that you beat the system. You feel smarter then the other guy that paid actual money for the same thing.
Conclusion
So that's my experience with MTurk. Mturk is a great small scale way to earn extra cash in the comfort of your home. It's perfect for stay at home dads that can't leave the house.
Even when you find you're stuck at home with the kids, you might find a few moments, to bust out a quick job, and make an extra quarter. If you use Mturk money in a smart way, you can actually save or invest it for the long term. That small amount of money can really turn into something big later on, and to think all you were doing was answering questions, and entertaining yourself. Easy money. Go get some today!
No comments:
Post a Comment