Micro Project Outsourcing

Micro Project Outsourcing
Micro Project Outsourcing:
How To Hire Thousands Of Outsourcers For As Little As 4 Cents Per Micro Project, With Amazon Mechanical Turk
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .................................................................6
1 WHERE HAS THIS BEEN MY WHOLE LIFE?! ........... 9

THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK ............................................................................10 THE HISTORY OF THE MECHANICAL TURK .......................12 LESSONS FROM THE MECHANICAL TURK..........................14 THE TERMINOLOGY OF AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK .......15
2 SETTING UP YOUR MECHANICAL TURK ACCOUNT18

REGISTERING WITH MECHANICAL TURK .........................18 IF YOU ARE STARTING FROM SCRATCH ...........................19 IF YOU ARE ALREADY AN AMAZON.COM ACCOUNT MEMBER .......................................................................22 HEY, YOU SAID I NEEDED BANK ACCOUNT DATA .............23 CONGRATULATIONS, YOURE A REQUESTER! ...................24
3 WHAT PROJECTS MAKE GOOD HITS? .................. 25

MENTALLY LETTING YOUR PROJECTS GO .........................26 COMMON USES FOR AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK ............27 CLASSIFICATION TASKS ..................................................27 VERIFICATION TASKS......................................................28 ACTIVITY TASKS ..............................................................28 TRANSCRIPTION TASKS...................................................29
RESEARCH TASKS ............................................................30 OPINION SURVEY TASKS .................................................31 TAGGING TASKS ..............................................................32 WRITING TASKS ..............................................................32 CASE STUDY: CASTING WORDS .......................................34 SURPRISING USES OF AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK ........36 HUNT FOR MISSING PEOPLE ............................................36 PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH ............................................37 CREATING ART .................................................................38 TAKE-AWAY THOUGHTS ...................................................39
4 WRITING PROJECT LISTINGS THAT GET RESULTS40

DIVIDING UP THE WORK .................................................41 KEEPING THINGS AT THE RIGHT LEVEL FOR TURKER MINDSETS ....................................................................42 CREATING CLEAR AND CONCISE INSTRUCTIONS .............43 CHECKING FOR POTENTIAL ERRORS ................................48
5 POSTING PROJECTS PERFECTLY ......................... 49

PROPERTIES OF A HIT .....................................................49 SETTING UP YOUR FIRST HITS ........................................50 DESIGNING YOUR HITS ...................................................51 PUBLISHING YOUR HITS .................................................64
6 EVALUATE, APPROVE, PAY.................................. 71

EVALUATE ........................................................................71 APPROVE .........................................................................76 PAY ..................................................................................76
7 MAINTAINING MTURK PROJECT LISTINGS ......... 80

ADDING TURKERS TO AN EXISTING PROJECT ..................80
CANCELING HIT BATCHES IN PROGRESS .........................81 EDITING AN EXISTING PROJECT .....................................83 ADDING TIME TO AN EXPIRED HIT LISTING ....................84
8 CLOSING UP SHOP ON FINISHED PROJECTS ...... 87

WRAPPING UP YOUR END OF THE HIT .............................88 REMOVING FINISHED HITS .............................................89
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ...................................... 91
INTRODUCTION
Lets face it. There are a ton of small, repetitive tasks that make up the business of running a business. This is especially true if you are running an Internet based business. Neglecting these little mundane tasks is a bad idea that ultimately detracts from your ability to be successful as a business owner. You know it and I know it. Yet when you wake up in the morning, the last thing you feel like doing is tackling all of the 100s of simple tasks that have been piling up. After all, one simple task is fine, but 100s of simple tasks that need doing makes you want to run away from your business once and for all. You know you need images tagged. You need links posted on Twitter and other social media sites. You need items descriptions written. You need reports on keyword traffic. You need comments on postings. You need short SEO articles. You need a list of competitor price points. You need a million things, done yesterday. You need more hours in the day. I can help you find them. In fact, I can help you find a way to outsource all of the mind-numbingly boring work you hate doing to someone else who will be happy to do it for pennies on the dollar. Youll be able to post up a project, go do something else to grow your business and come back to a finished job just waiting for your approval. Now, this isnt like a traditional outsourcing thing. Instead of hunting down a service provider, sending them a proposal, negotiating back and forth, sending over more information, and so on and so on while the precious hours tick away. You can be matched with a good quality service provider in minutes rather than having to beg them for their time, these service
Micro Project Outsourcing providers are actively looking for the kinds of short, simple micro projects that you have for them right now. I know, this sounds too good to be true. When I first heard about it I thought the same thing No Way! Yet this isnt any kind of a scam or a gimmick. Instead, its an insiders secret thats managed to stay out of the mainstream press and away from the limelight for years. The system works wonderfully you just have to take the plunge to get your problems solved starting now. All you need to know to take the plunge into micro project outsourcing is contained within the pages of this manual. Im going to take you from start to finish through the process so that you will have complete confidence in your ability to successfully outsource your least favorite business tasks, repetitive projects, and administrative tedium. Inside the pages of this manual, you will learn: Where to find this secret micro project outsourcing service How to get signed up for your own micro project outsourcing account How to determine what projects you should outsource so that you get the most out of the service What to do to write a project listing that tells all of your potential micro project service providers exactly how to do your work perfectly to standard How to post your micro projects with all of the right options selected for each project to get the best results Where to go to evaluate and approve the work that was done by each worker so that payments can be made How to maintain your project listings
Micro Project Outsourcing How to close down finished projects
In each section, Ill walk you through exactly what you need to know and what you need to do. I know youve got plenty on your plate, so I wont waste your time with fluff or filler. All youre going to get is a way to get your life back out from under the zillions of little things crying out for a sliver of your time. Ill make sure you know all the specialized bits of vocabulary associated with micro project outsourcing. Youll see screen shots of important screens so that you know just where to click. Im going to make this really easy for you, so that you can start saving both time AND money immediately. Why wait? Lets get started now.
1 WHERE HAS THIS BEEN MY WHOLE LIFE?

Okay, so Ive made a lot of promises so far. Ive told you that youll be able to save money and successfully outsource hundreds of tasks. Yet you are probably a bit skeptical. After all, if this system was so great, wouldnt you know about it already? Probably not. Im continually amazed at the number of truly web savvy people who have never even heard of this system. When it first was introduced in late 2005, it got a bit of coverage in the press, but it was mainly technology related publications. Bloggers tackled it lightly, and a few specialty forums sprang up. Yet because the system was about a very boring and unglamorous thing getting actual work done instead of something more entertaining, like flash animation or kitties doing funny things, it dropped off the radar. This under the radar lifestyle means an exceptional opportunity for overburdened business people needing a hand. You can go out and access thousands of quality workers without facing hordes of attention and hype from other industry players or the mass media. It helps that the service is located in one of the last places you would think to look . . . right under your nose. You know Amazon, of course. Who hasnt heard of the gigantic web retailer? They revolutionized online shopping and have become one of the most iconic players on the web.
Micro Project Outsourcing They do a lot more than just sell things. Behind the regular storefront on Amazon.com, there are a number of other industries and projects going fullsteam. Most never make it out of the shadows to catch the public eye. One of these divisions is Amazon Web Services. Within the web services division, Amazon provides a number of successful cloud computing applications. Many of these tools were things that Amazon had originally developed for their own internal use that were later shared out with the general public. The service you care about is known as Amazon Mechanical Turk.
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a cloud computing platform that pairs people who need work done with people looking for a bit of work. Thats the whole premise of the system in a nutshell. Theres no extra gimmick or shtick here. It just brings people with extra time on their hand in contact with people like you those who need at least 25 hours in a day and solves problems for both of you through the exchange of small bits of money (and Im talking really small bits of money here!) You dont get to Amazon Mechanical Turk by heading to the main Amazon web page. Instead, you will want to proceed directly to www.mturk.com. Home Page For Amazon Mechanical Turk
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(Sourced from: www.mturk.com) As you can see, the page is branded independently. Millions of regular Amazon.com devotees arent tripping over this page accidentally. If you are on the Mechanical Turk page, you have to have gone there intentionally. The language on the page (and as youll find within the site) also doesnt bring in the usual SEO traffic related to outsourcing. Some of this has to do with the unique vocabulary associated with the system, and the rest has to do with the fact that this is not your typical outsourcing platform. While you may have worked with Elance, Odesk, or vWorker which was previously named RentACoder, in the past as a source for outsourcers, you will find that working through Amazon Mechanical Turk is a very different experience. A further reason that Amazons Mechanical Turk platform hasnt become globally renowned is that it is limited to U.S. based participants. Workers can only earn Amazon.com credit or have money transferred to their U.S. bank accounts. People like you who are looking for helpers also have to be based out of the US to make the system work for them.
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Micro Project Outsourcing THE HISTORY OF THE MECHANICAL TURK Another part of the difference in the experience comes from the history of the concept of a Mechanical Turk. Though Amazon didnt adopt it until 2005, the original concept behind Mechanical Turk dates back to a unique venture into artificial intelligence that was born in 1770. Back in those days, there werent computers, though binary calculation systems were being used. The machines didnt typically serve any practical purpose, but were used as novelty items, particularly among the noble classes. Bored, rich, and always up for something a bit out of the ordinary, these nobles pushed the envelope when it came to adopting new inventions as toys. Into this environment came Wolfgang von Kempelen, an engraver, engineer, and to be truthful, kind of a scammer. He built the Mechanical Turk, a chess playing machine that promised to be able to beat the top players at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Image of the Original Mechanical Turk
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(Sourced from: www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk) So what does a toy originally built for the Austrian royal family have to do with the success of your web business? Trust me, Im getting there! You see, the chess playing machine wasnt a working machine at all. Though Wolfgang von Kempelen insisted that the machine was engineered to be smart enough to play chess on its own he even matched it up against Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin while the thing was on tour the turning gears just didnt have the smarts to make the right decisions. Instead, hidden behind the elaborate front of the machine was an anonymous human a highly skilled chess player from the Ottoman Empire. The Mechanical Turk operated in Europe and throughout America for 84 years, even after it was revealed to a fraud in 1820. No one much cared who was inside the machine, as long as the exhibition matches went forward.
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Micro Project Outsourcing With fresh players inside to keep the skill level up, there was no burnout, and the machine was used until it was destroyed in a fire in 1854.
LESSONS FROM THE MECHANICAL TURK So what was learned from the worlds experience with the Mechanical Turk, and how did that influence Amazon to start a program you can use to reclaim a balanced work-life arrangement? 1. Machines and automation cant do everything Technology was supposed to fix all our problems. Instead, business owners spend hours sorting out the problems generated by our computers and online web hosting systems. It seems as though years of your life go up in flames every time you install an update and all your precious free time is eaten up tagging and fixing quirks caused by your helpful systems. 2. There is no substitute for human intelligence Even though the Mechanical Turk toured with the promise of a smart machine, there only reason it worked was the human brain behind it. As Amazon built its business, there were thousands of repetitive tasks that computer systems had done that just needed a human eye to ensure they werent utter nonsense. For example, a machine could say that a code had been loaded correctly, but only a real brain could say whether the loaded code made sense. 3. Fresh brains keep things moving smoothly With the original Mechanical Turk, there was no way the same outsourcer could have kept up with the workload. The same principle applies to any outsourced working relationship. You get the best work and the most consistent enthusiasm for your tasks even the repetitive ones when you have a crew of fresh brains looking at the problem. Thus, Amazon built a system that functioned like a well-oiled machine but was really
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Micro Project Outsourcing powered by actual human beings thousands of them bringing their energy to the tasks at hand that Amazon staff wanted outsourced.
Amazon found just as you will find that attaching a small financial reward to a task attracted thousands of people with free time eager to do mundane, repetitive work for the opportunity to have a few extra bucks in their pockets. They could then review the work that had been submitted to ensure it met their requirements and standards for quality. At the end of the day, it took managers just a few hours to review all of the thousands of projects that had been completed, rewarding correct work and rejecting subpar efforts. In the meantime, those same managers were free to focus on other important business tasks to move the organization forward. The effect that leveraging this same time-saving system has had on my own business time management has been incredible. The sheer number of people out there looking for a bit of extra pocket change has kept the price per task low while keeping the quality of work extremely high. Ive saved hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on business tasks, and Im sure youre eager to do the same.
THE TERMINOLOGY OF AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK

Another part of understanding why Amazon Mechanical Turk doesnt make the front pages is learning the language that governs it. To an outsider, it wont make that much sense if you dont know the historical inspiration of the whole Mechanical Turk project. Put off by a new vocabulary to learn, many would be users simply turn away in favor of something done up in plain English. Yet if you want to reclaim your business development time from mind-numbing business administration chores, you cant let a touch of vocabulary stand in your way. Accept that it
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Micro Project Outsourcing keeps the lazy away from this excellent system this just means more quality workers available for your tasks! To save you time now and later when you are using the system, here are the key terms you need to know to navigate Amazons Mechanical Turk system without any problems. Requester This is you, the person or business ordering the task. Worker/Turker This is the person completing the task. Though worker is the official name, most workers prefer to call themselves Turkers. Hence Turker Nation, a forum just for Turkers, and the work turking to describe working on tasks. Mturk The commonly accepted internal shorthand for Amazons Mechanical Turk. HIT This is the task itself. HIT is an acronym for Human Intelligence Task which describes your micro project. You post HITs that need done, and Turkers search for HITs to do. To use the term properly, keep it in capital letters but dont use periods, as these will indicate outsider status. Batch / Bundle of HITs This phrase is used to represent a group of HITs that are related to one another, such as a series of photos to be tagged or a bundle of evaluation activities for catalogue entries. Qualifications These are the required abilities to complete a task. Some tasks can be set to only be available to those who have successful completed a
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Micro Project Outsourcing short qualification test. Once the test has been passed, the qualification is assigned. RUI This stands for Requester User Interface. This is the system that you use to design your HITs on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. It is also the interface system that serves up the HITs to the workers.
Knowing these terms will ensure that you blend in with the existing Mturk community. No reason to advertise newbie status . . . and youll be a pro at the system soon enough!
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2 SETTING UP YOUR MECHANICAL TURK ACCOUNT

You know where it came from, and you get the big picture of what Amazons Mechanical Turk system is going to be able to do for you. The next step is to go ahead and set up an account as a Requester on the Mturk site. The process is not complicated, and the whole set up process can be completed in one sitting. In fact, by following the step by step instructions contained in this chapter as I explain them, you can be completely set up as an Mturk Requester by the time we get to the end of the section.
REGISTERING WITH MECHANICAL TURK

Successfully registering for Mechanical Turk requires you to have the following items: 1. A U.S. billing address (this will be the first thing you need) 2. A U.S. bank account, credit card, debit card, or Amazon Payments account number (this is entered later) 3. If you are submitting tasks to Mturk as an individual (as opposed to a business entity) then you will need to provide a drivers license number.
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Micro Project Outsourcing This may seem a bit restrictive, and its true that it does have limitations, especially for internationally based businesses. In the past it was more restrictive, as Amazon Requesters were required to have a U.S. ACH Enabled bank account to process their payments. Thus, while the current model isnt wide open, it is an improvement over previous versions of the payment platform. As a corollary, this restriction about a U.S. billing address ensures that the majority of your service providers are native English speakers from America. This can be a major outsourcing bonus in terms of quality control for your micro projects. Once youve verified that you have the above three items and their associated details handy, youre ready to get started. Ill walk you through the account set up if you already have an Amazon.com account and the account set up if youre starting from scratch with Amazon.coms services.
IF YOU ARE STARTING FROM SCRATCH If you dont have an account with Amazon.com, you will need to complete the basic account registration with Amazon as well as the steps for Mechanical Turk. The first thing to do is make sure you click on the right link from the home page. Home Page For Amazon Mechanical Turk
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(Sourced from: www.mturk.com) While Amazon helpfully points you toward their Get Started with its prominent placement at the bottom of the page, you actually dont want to click this button. The Get Started link puts you on the Resources page for Mechanical Turk. While this is a great page with a lot of good tools, its not what youre after if you want to get started now. Instead, youll want to click on the Register Now link in the first paragraph. This will take you to the signup page.
Mechanical Turk Sign Up Page
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(Sourced from: Mturk Sign In Page) After entering an email on this sign in page and clicking the button, the next page will ask you to give your name, select a user name, and designate a password for the account. Following this basic page, you will hit a screen asking you for the physical address of your company (or a personal physical address) and an agreement with the Mturk Terms of Service. User Registration Screen Part 1
Notice again that the United States is the default country and that you will need to have a US billing address associated with the account or you will be unable to complete the registration process.
User Registration Screen Part 2
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Micro Project Outsourcing (Sourced from: Screenshot of Internal Amazon Page) Once you have filled in all of the information and ticked the I agree box, the next page you will be taken to is the resources page. When you are on the resources page, you will see at the top right of the page that you are logged into your account. Dont expect to receive a welcome email in your registered account. The resource page serves as all the welcome you will get. Remember, Mechanical Turk is about just one thing getting the work done so all of the typical bells and fancy whistles you may be accustomed to from other sites registration services arent in use here.
IF YOU ARE ALREADY AN AMAZON.COM ACCOUNT MEMBER If you already have an account with Amazon.com, you will be able to strip a lot of time out of the sign up process. In fact, when youre already in the Amazon accounts family, signing up for Mturk becomes almost a one step process. From the Amazon Mechanical Turk home page, youll be looking over on the right hand side for the Register Now link in the first paragraph. Click on that link, and youll get a screen most Amazon users are very, very familiar with the only difference between this and signing into your regular Amazon.com account is the header at the top of the page.
Mechanical Turk Sign Up Page
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(Sourced from: Mturk Sign In Page) Once youve entered your email address and password, you will be taken to a screen that asks you to verify your current address information, which has been pulled over for you from your standard Amazon account file. When you verify your information or enter a new address, you will be taken to the resources page for the Mechanical Turk platform. There wont be a welcome email for you. Instead, you will simply find that your Mturk account registration is active and something that you will be able to access on an ongoing basis using your regular Amazon account information.
HEY, YOU SAID I NEEDED BANK ACCOUNT DATA Yes, I did and you do. However, you dont enter it at this stage of the game. Instead, you enter it later when you are uploading the funds for your first micro projects on the Mturk platform. Yet since you wont be able to functionally use Mturk without a U.S. bank account, credit card, debit card, or Amazon Payments account number, theres no point in letting you sign up for an account you wont be able to use, is there? This book is about saving you time, not wasting your time! Just keep that information handy so that it is ready to enter at the appropriate moment.
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Micro Project Outsourcing CONGRATULATIONS, YOURE A REQUESTER! With this registration completed, you are now a functional Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester. The next steps will be determining what projects will make good tasks for your virtual workforce, and determining what you need to pay to get that work done to your personal exacting standards. In the chapters ahead, you will see how to division your work, how to write up the jobs, and how to post everything up like a professional. While it will be a little more complex than this initial registration, none of it even begins to approach rocket science levels of difficulty. As a result, now that you are registered, you are that much closer to leaving traditional outsourcing behind once and for all to reclaim your sanity and free time through a new life as an Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester.
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3 WHAT PROJECTS MAKE GOOD HITS?

After registration, the next thing that you need to consider as a Mechanical Turk Requester is what projects are going to make good hits within the constraints of the system. You want to consider everything that you have on your plate at the moment to do for your business as a viable candidate for outsourcing. Im really not kidding when I tell you that you can outsource almost anything that you can think of to a Turker on this system. My business related tasks and work are all getting done while I sleep for pennies on the dollar. I wake up in the morning and can log in to see that serious progress is being made on all of my projects and goals. All I really needed to do was make the decision to let someone else get it done for me. Thus, take a good, honest look at each of the tasks you have on your to-do list and start marking the projects you would like to see handled by someone else. In this section, you will learn what kinds of projects are usually seen on Mechanical Turk as well as a few that are a bit out of the ordinary but still worked on the system. Ill give you examples of HITs and projects, as well as some guidance about what you can expect to pay for the work. By the time we reach the end of the section, you will be able to look at the projects you marked on your to-do list as something youd like someone else to do and know exactly which ones are going to be done by Turkers.
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MENTALLY LETTING YOUR PROJECTS GO

At any given time on the Mechanical Turk platform, there are more than 60,000 micro projects waiting for users to complete. Clearly, there is plenty of work out there that needs done. All you have to decide is which parts of your business workload are going to become a part of that 60,000. It can be intimidating at first, because if you are anything like me then you are a real stickler for quality. If you want something done right, well, the only real option is for you to get moving and get it done yourself, right? Wrong! This mindset is precisely why you are feeling overwhelmed and burnt out by your business. Youre doing all the repetitive and boring work and its sucking the life right out of you. I was in exactly the same boat before I embraced Amazons Mechanical Turk platform. The thing to remember is that you really do have final quality control over all of the work that you accept from a Turker. You can get people to make revisions if it is something deeply complex, just as you do in the offline world, but it is much easier to simply go out and post the HIT again to attract someone else who is going to do it right within a few minutes or a few hours at most. Quality is really not an issue you just have to take a deep breath and accept that it will all end up okay even if you dont do every single thing in your business yourself. Once you have mentally let go of doing all of your projects yourself, it is time to earnestly start the process of figuring out what you can give to someone else to do for you. Pull out your list and add on all the things that you may be hesitating about outsourcing chances are you will see them featured in the section below!
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COMMON USES FOR AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK

Amazon Mechanical Turk was originally set up by Amazon to help with internal micro projects that needed to be finished. This included matching UPC codes to items, writing short descriptions, or determining whether a given description really did match the photo it was being pair within the display array. However, the micro project management platform was able to be scaled out to handle almost any project that can be divided into small piece for a horde of eager workers to take care of promptly. While users experimented with the types of projects that were successful in the crowd source platform, Amazon noticed that there were several practices that emerged as common uses for Amazons Mechanical Turk platform.
CLASSIFICATION TASKS Classification tasks essentially require a Turker to look at a given set of information and classify it as the right item or not. Some of the common classification tasks include: Sorting items into a provided list of categories, i.e., Is the item in this picture animal, vegetable or mineral? Identifying features for items, as in Does the product above contain a buckle, yes or no?
Classification tasks are some of the cheapest tasks on Mechanical Turk, with many tasks going for .01/per task.
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Micro Project Outsourcing VERIFICATION TASKS Verification tasks require the human Turkers to verify something that the computer system has generated. It can also describe the category of tasks that Turkers do to verify information not readily available online. Some of the commonly seen verification tasks include: Answering whether one item in a list is like others or different from others Verifying online information about locations, such as the opening hours for a given bar or restaurant for the summer months
For verification tasks, the typical pay scale for a micro project is .01 - .05 cents for tasks which can be completed exclusively online. Tasks which require offline research, such as making a phone call to a business during regular business hours, pay a higher rate, often .25 or above.
ACTIVITY TASKS Activity tasks require Turkers to perform a specific action in exchange for their reward. This action may be an online or an offline task, though most of the activity tasks on Mturk take place online. Some of the common activity tasks that appear on the Mturk platform include: Subscribing to a blog, website feed, or Twitter feed Signing up for various items Visit a web site and click a link or perform a search {though click fraud for Adsense and other platforms is prohibited}
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For activity tasks, the pay scale may be anything from .01 - .50, depending on what you want the Turker to do for you and the value you attach to the task. Some tasks may cost you a couple of dollars, depending on the extent of the activity. Do note that collecting personally identifiable information on Turkers is not permitted.
TRANSCRIPTION TASKS Transcription tasks require Turkers to convert audio or written text to the online written word format. Audio transcription tasks are generally divided into segments of 30 seconds to not longer than five or six minutes. Written transcription projects are often divided by paragraph or page. Some of the most common transcription tasks are: Transcribing recorded interviews for research or business purposes in short segments Transcribing live events such as radio shows, conference speeches, or concerts
Transcription tasks are some of the higher paying tasks for Turkers, though you will find that you still dont have to pay very much to get a reasonable quality of work done. In fact, for just a few dollars, you can have truly top quality transcription projects completed in days rather than weeks on the Mturk system. Most audio transcription tasks cost around .50/per minute of transcription by the time bonuses and other factors have been accounted for with the project. The turnaround time for the tasks varies, and can influence the cost to be higher, but you will still rarely have to pay more than a dollar or two per minute for this kind of work. Warn Turkers if the audio quality is poor, as this
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Micro Project Outsourcing will help sharper ears take on the task over less committed Turkers. Notes about language quality or dialect are also helpful, such as if the speaker is a native or non-native English speaker and where they are from. This helps to pique the interest of good matches. For written transcription, the rates are somewhat lower, though you will find that if the material is very hard to read you will need to offer a bit more to get it completed. Expect to budget $1/page or less for easy typing transcription work, and $2/page or less for more difficult tasks. Turkers will grouse at you for poorly rendered scans of pages needing transcribed and turn away from the task, so do aim for clear scans here.
RESEARCH TASKS For research tasks, Turkers need to look up a piece of information. This can be the answer to a query, a mini report for a key word, the email address for a given client list, or the addresses for specific commercial locations. Some examples of research tasks include: Find the contact telephone number for the following fitness centers in Miami Pull up a report using Word Tracker for the following search terms and save your report as a screen shot to be submitted to the Requester
For research tasks, the fees vary widely based on the level of effort involved. Research which may be done entirely online costs much less than research which will require the Turker to talk on the phone or go to a physical location. Calling a restaurant to ask about their specials might cost .25/task, while finding contact information for blog owners might only cost .10/task to have done.
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Micro Project Outsourcing As a sample of a research task that you might post, heres one asking Turkers to get contact information for city council members: Sample Research Hit
(Sourced from: Mturk HITs Database)
OPINION SURVEY TASKS For opinion survey tasks, Turkers need to respond to a basic question which may be for a serious opinion poll or for something lighter or humorous. Demographic data is not generally collected, although it can be a part of the task. Some typical opinion survey tasks include: The company ask500people.com uses Turkers as their sample population for daily surveys During election months, political surveys frequently appear for Turkers to complete
For opinion survey tasks, expect to pay .01 to .05 per answer. A onequestion opinion survey would be .01 while a multiple questions survey with demographic data needed might cost you .05 per respondent.
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Micro Project Outsourcing TAGGING TASKS For tagging tasks, Turkers need to correctly tag a given image or a part of a given image. Typical tasks involve either creating an a original tag or selecting a tag from a provided list of options. Some examples of tagging tasks include: Identifying drain pipes, gutters, or light post in pictures of public places Identifying whether or not given people appear in a series of images
For tagging tasks, the cost has actually been driven down recently to less than .01/tag. As a result, many tagging tasks are bundled into groups of five or 10 photos or scans for the Turkers. You may pay .02 - .10 for the bundles, depending on the complexity of the tagging needed and the clarity of the photos.
WRITING TASKS Writing tasks call for Turkers to create pieces of original content for a specified purpose. Most writing tasks are either capped by a given word count, or are limited by character. Some examples of commonly seen writing tasks include: Creating product description for items with multiple or missing descriptions Writing comments on blogs, or posting up specified content onto a Facebook page or Twitter feed Writing SEO driven content for web sites, blogs, and the Internet article marketing databases
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Micro Project Outsourcing Sharing stories online along specified themes.
Writing tasks vary in cost depending on the level of quality needed. For sharing personal stories, the rate of pay is .10 - .25 per task. For product descriptions, a two or three sentence description might pay .05 - .10. For short pieces of SEO content, expect to have to pay .50 up to $2 to get the quality you need. As a sample of what you may receive, here is a writing task response. The keyword was Direct Marketing Solution, the desired length 300 words, and the rate of pay $1. It was received within two hours of having been posted.
Direct marketing solution In todays tough economic environment, many businesses are looking for additional ways to attract new clients. One method overlooked by many is a direct marketing solution. This method has many advantages over traditional marketing, not least of which is a quantifiable way to track results and new customer conversions. The ability to easily track customer conversions is one of the key features of any successful direct marketing solution. When you design a promotion, you give it a code or number. Then, when you mail to your customer list, you can track your clickthrough or conversion rate based on that number. An average conversion rate might be 1-2%, with a really successful direct marketing solution earning a conversion rate of 4 5%. While these numbers may not seem high, remember to keep in mind the size of your list and the price of your product. An average mailing list broker will sell you names by the thousand, and if you get 20 -30 new customers per thousand names, then you will be able to budget your marketing campaign spending more appropriately. In many traditional marketing campaigns, the goal is to build brand awareness. A direct mail solution has the express goal of generating new customers. The goal of any direct marketer is an increased conversion rate, which means more customers and more profits for your business. Thus, whenever you are considering making a marketing investment, be sure to pick the method that will generate customers and sales most efficiently. While traditional marketing campaigns may have more
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glamour and glitz, all that glitters in not gold. Choose the solution that will have the most impact on your bottom line, even if it seems less flashy at first. A direct marketing solution could be the difference maker for your business as you fight to gain and retain customers during the tough year ahead.
Not too shabby for $1! It would have taken me a lot longer to do this kind of piece myself rather than to simply post out for a Turker to pick up. I was able to go do something else and come back to an article that was just what I needed at the time for SEO food. Do note that for many SEO tasks and writing projects, you will need to specify the location of your Turkers as America. This will help you get native English speakers working on your projects, as opposed to workers from other countries. I will show you how to choose this in the next section.
CASE STUDY: CASTING WORDS

Looking back on that list of the common uses of Mechanical Turk, youve probably thought of several areas of your business that would benefit from having a Turker workforce handling them on a regular basis. However, are you confident enough in the skills of total strangers to build an entire business model around Turkers? Maybe not? Dont worry someone else has already built an entire business around the Mturk model. The Casting Words Home Page
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(Sourced from: http://castingwords.com/) Nathan McFarland, one of the co-founders of Casting Words, credits Mturk with being able to help he and his partner grow their business from something they had as a side gig in addition to their day jobs to a fullfledged independent business operation with five employees. They posted up their first tasks for Turkers in the last few weeks of 2005, just after the platform went public. Initially, they simple outsourced the transcription of their podcasts to make them more searchable for the web. Over time, they were so impressed with the quality of the work available from Turkers that they expanded their services and launched Casting Words. Gradually, they made more and more tasks that they had been doing in house the responsibility of Turkers. They had a workforce that was loyal to them but was fully elastic. They didnt have to deal with overhead costs if business was a little slow. With Turkers handling the time consuming transcription work, McFarland and his associates could focus on landing more clients and doing more business development. By the present day, they are fully dependent on the Mturk model. They are also independent from their day jobs and free to focus on the parts of their business that they love doing instead of drowning in administrative nonsense and fact checking. Wouldnt you love the same thing?
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Micro Project Outsourcing You can read a more in depth business study at http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/castingwords-interview/, but I wanted to provide you with an example of business other than mine who is doing extremely well with the Mturk model. Its not just me making money and saving time on this system it could be you, too.
SURPRISING USES OF AMAZON MECHANICAL TURK

Casting Words is just one example of a company really making the Turker Nation work for them. Yet not every use of Amazon Mechanical Turk fits into a traditional business model, or even a traditional business operation. In fact, there are several uses of the Mturk platform that may surprise you. Ill cover a few of them here so that you can get even more ideas about the potential of the system.
HUNT FOR MISSING PEOPLE Amazon Mechanical Turk has been used to help find missing persons. The Turker Nation participates in search efforts by looking at digital scans of the area where the person has gone missing, verifying whether or not certain items or people are in the pictures. The most famous case of Amazon Mechanical Turk being used to find a missing person was the case of aviator Steve Fossett. When Fossett went missing on September 3rd, 2007, a massive search for him was launched. However, because he went missing in the Nevada dessert, it was difficult country for physical searchers. On September 8th, images of the dessert areas where Fossett was believed to have gone missing were loaded into the Mturk system. In an all-volunteer effort sponsored by Amazon itself and DigitalGlobe who provided the images, Turker Nation went to town on the search zones. Within 3 days, more than
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Micro Project Outsourcing 50,000 people had looked at the images to verify that Fossetts wreckage did not appear in the pictures. Fossetts Plane Scan On Take Off
(Sourced from: http://techcrunch.com/2007/09/08/search-for-steve-fossettexpands-to-amazons-mechanical-turk/) The effort went on for several weeks, stopping when the general search was called off. Though Fossetts remains were ultimately found by hikers on the ground in October of 2008, having the fresh eyes of Turkers on the scanned provided additional data points and set a precedent for taking such searches online.
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH Several researchers offline looking for study participants have turned to Mechanical Turk as a way to collect the information they need. It should be noted that researchers are not allowed to collect personally identifiable pieces of information from Turkers, such as name, email address, telephone number, and so on. Demographic data in aggregate, such as age, gender, race, political party, church affiliation and the like can be collected.
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Micro Project Outsourcing Psychological research tasks often involve a survey format, or reading a document and leaving an opinion. Many required Turkers to follow a link to a survey located elsewhere and enter a completion code as a way of verifying the survey was done to ensure payment. Payment for psychological research tasks ranges widely, from a few pennies to a couple of dollars depending on what is being asked of the participant in terms of a time commitment.
CREATING ART In addition to using Mechanical Turk for serious projects, it can also be used for fun or creative projects. One example of this was The Sheep Market project. The Sheep Market Home Page
(Sourced from: www.thesheepmarket.com)
Sponsored by Aaron Koblin, an artist specializing in data visualization, The Sheep Market went on to be a touring exhibit as well as an online art project. The original creation of the body of work took 40 days, with an average of 11 sheep created per hour. Turkers were asked to draw a sheep facing left and offered a .02 incentive for the task.
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Micro Project Outsourcing As workers drew, the HIT recorded their patterns, so that if you visit the site you can watch as each sheep was created. For $200, it generated Koblin a large amount of publicity as well as earning him museum space in Europe, Australia, Japan, and the United States. He was able to do talks and write publications about the work enhancing his own reputation as an artist, despite the fact that it was all Turkers doing the work.
TAKE-AWAY THOUGHTS
Looking back on that list of the common uses of Mechanical Turk, seeing the case study, and considering the creative ways the system can be used, youre probably ready for the next step. From here, the challenge is to be able to communicate to your Turkers what you need them to do. You can see that almost anything is possible through Amazons Mechanical Turk platform, so lets get moving with saving you time, money, and stress by learning how to write effective project descriptions to pull in workers and get things moving.
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4 WRITING PROJECT LISTINGS THAT GET RESULTS

From the previous chapter, you know that there are an almost endless number of things that you can outsource to Amazons Mechanical Turk program. The challenge is to make sure you can explain to Turkers exactly what you need them to do so that you get the outstanding results you need to be comfortable and successful with the system. It can take a bit of experimentation. I know when I first started with Mechanical Turk, I made a bunch of mistakes. Unlike working with traditional outsourcers, however, I was able to discover my mistakes and get them fixed for a couple of bucks, tops. It was a much faster learning curve and I practically got my responses in real time for what I was doing. You can learn from my mistakes and the best practices for writing HIT descriptions that have developed over the years. While various tools for automatically building HITs have been born and died in the market, there is no other long-term substitute for being able to write your own micro project listings that get results. In this section, youll see how to: Divide your project up into manageable chunks Keep things at the right level for Turker mindsets Create clear and concise instructions Check for potential errors
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By the end of this section, you will be able to create your own HITs for the Mturk platform so that your micro projects run smoothly and you can have your life back.
DIVIDING UP THE WORK

As you prepare to write your HITs, you first need to divide up the work that needs to be done into bite size portions suitable for being micro projects. For example, say you have a blog that you have been keeping for your business about pet care and pet products for a couple of years. You want to drive more traffic to the blog, upgrade the tags on the postings, make the blog seem more active by getting more comments on each post, and get more subscribers for the blog. Each one of these tasks represents a to-do list for you that isnt necessarily hard, but you just dont have time to do it. Yet you cant ask a worker to touch all the parts of the things that you need done. You need to think of the things that need to happen in terms of activities that take five minutes or less. Thus, potential HIT project bundles might be: Writing Task Post a Tweet, Facebook comment, or Myspace update about my blog Tagging Task Identify which tags need to go along with the blog post for this day Verification Task Do the following tags really apply to this picture? Writing Task Make a comment on my blog posting that is relevant to the subject material
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Micro Project Outsourcing Activity Task Subscribe to my blog as a follower using the platform that I designate
These HIT bundles all provide plenty of room for you to get things done while still being small enough projects for the Turker platform. You can get Turkers on board who just like to do the thing you are asking for and you will be amazed at how quickly the work that you have been putting off doing yourself gets done by a fresh outsourcer eager for the work.
KEEPING THINGS AT THE RIGHT LEVEL FOR TURKER MINDSETS

Within your HIT bundles, you want to keep things at the right level for the Turker mindset. This isnt to apply that the Turkers out there are anything less that fully intelligent. It is merely that Turkers like to work on just one kind of task at a time. Focusing in on one kind of task at a time also helps with quality control. Rather than looking for workers with multiple skill sets to complete a micro project for you, if you focus on workers who do a single thing and can do it well you will have better results overall. Amazons own best practices lists recommend that you divide things up so that workers only do one kind of task at a time. They recommend this as it keeps the Turker focused on doing one type of thing, giving you higher levels of accuracy overall. This will make your life easier on the back end of things as you look to approve final work and make your payments.
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CREATING CLEAR AND CONCISE INSTRUCTIONS

The work that you get from the Turkers that accept your HITs is dictated by the instructions that you give to them. Thus, you need to be very clear about EXACTLY what you want them to do. Without real standards about what is or is not acceptable as a finished product, you are liable to get all kinds of things coming in as completed tasks. This doesnt save you any time at the end of the day, so it really pays to invest a little time up front making sure that any monkey with a pair of eyes could understand what theyre supposed to do. Remember, Turkers have no background with you or your project. While using Amazon Mechanical Turk over time can help make your body of work familiar to the Turker Nation a la Casting Words, in the beginning you will both be starting from scratch. Thus, you cant assume anything about the knowledge base of your Turker beyond a basic proficiency in English. The more specific you are, the better the results you will get. For example, requesting that someone leave a comment on your blog might get you a one word post Good and they would be within their rights to expect to be paid for that. However, if what you really want is a couple of on-topic sentences as a comment, you would want to reword your request, Leave a two sentence comment on my blog that references the cat breed mentioned in the post. At the same time, you dont want to write a project description that runs on for a couple of pages. Turkers who have to scroll through pages of instructions just for the opportunity to earn a few pennies are just not going to be interested. They will be too worried that theyll miss some element of your instructions and wont be paid for the effort they expend. Rather than take the risk, theyll just look for a task with a shorter description that seems easier for them to do. This is a missed opportunity for both you and them.
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Micro Project Outsourcing So the challenge becomes writing a project task description that is detailed enough to get your message across while still being short enough that it doesnt scare potential micro project outsourcing partners away. To do this (and be prepared to work up a couple of versions when you are first getting started) remember the following tips: Be as specific as possible with things like number of sentences, words per tag, or definitions of completeness for tasks. Make your instructions as easier to read as you can. Use small words and short sentences. Avoid all-inclusive words like All, Every, or None in your project descriptions. If there are specific search engines, blog tools, other software systems or web techniques you want used, it is best to specify that in your instructions. Bulleted lists and step by step instructions are preferred to long paragraphs. Be clear about any types of work that will be unacceptable to you as a Requester Examples are extremely valuable, as they both clear up potential gray areas and let Turkers see exactly what level of work will pass the final inspection.
These tips will keep you from wasting time by writing up too many HIT descriptions that you just cant use later. Most people getting started with Amazon Mechanical Turk will either overwrite or underwrite their descriptions. I did the same thing, and you can
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Micro Project Outsourcing find plenty of examples that tilt one way or the other among the HITs on the Mturk site. For example, this is a set of instructions that is decidedly overwritten:
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Micro Project Outsourcing 10 Cent Task Part 1
10 Cent Task Part 2
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Micro Project Outsourcing 10 Cent Task Part 3
(Sourced from: Mturk Hits) Id continue to show you more, but as you can see from the bottom, the instructions continue on for another 10 pages. For a task that pays 10 cents. How many Turkers do you really think are going to be excited about the effort / reward ratio going on here? Its simply too long to be anything but intimidating to the Turkers coming across it as a possible option. This is a better example of what HIT instructions should be short and to the point, with little room for mystery. Classification Task HIT Page
(Sourced from: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=1PBKAA4ZR6JNEW8ENE2M OTUI05B38J)
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Micro Project Outsourcing It does take a few tries to learn how to hit the sweet spot for descriptions right off the bat, which is why the next step in the process is so important for having your HIT description get you the results that you need.
CHECKING FOR POTENTIAL ERRORS

Once youve taken a couple of stabs at writing up your HIT project descriptions, it is time for you to ensure that what you have written doesnt present any questions or errors that you arent catching on your own. Sometimes it is possible to be too close to the trees to have a good view of the forest, so you will need a friend who isnt familiar with your work to take a look at the description. Simply copy your HIT task description into an email and send it off to your friend and ask them, Does this make sense to you? The feedback you get from this experience will help you make the necessary tweaks to your HIT posting so that you get what you want when you do go ahead and post the project up on the Mechanical Turk platform. Again, a little time invested on the front end with the project descriptions will be invaluable to you later when you have to approve work. Youll be saving yourself from having to reject work for not meeting standards if you put the time into working over and perfecting your HIT descriptions. You will also save yourself the need to cancel and redo your project listing to correct errors that are left in the text or with the task itself. Better safe than sorry!
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5 POSTING PROJECTS PERFECTLY

Once you have worked out a project description that meets your needs and doesnt raise any red flags for length, clarity, or content from your task evaluator, you are ready to proceed to the next step. You are ready to dive into the Requester User Interface (RUI) and prepare your HITs for a perfect posting experience. In this section, you will learn about the different features of HITs that you will need to designate properly in order to make your HIT work flawlessly and attract the right kind of worker to your project. You'll learn about the properties of the HIT, shortcuts for setting up new HITs, the place where you can test HITs without making them live to workers to ensure that they work properly, and how to launch your HITs on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform in small or large batches. By the end of this section, you should feel confident in your ability to take your HIT description from either the last section or your own project and make it into a functional HIT that you can put to work on your behalf while you work on other business tasks.
PROPERTIES OF A HIT
First things first understanding the properties of your HIT. Once you understand what all of the different properties are and what they represent in the task, it will be easier for you to make the right choices about your HIT as you prepare it for posting.
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Micro Project Outsourcing Each HIT contains the same properties. HITs are made up of properties that indicate: How long the HIT will be live before it expires (sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days) How long each Turker has to work on the HIT before the task closes (this promotes speed and also keeps Turkers from opening a task, wandering off, and forgetting about it while preventing another Turker from working on it) Whether or not the HIT will be automatically approved as soon as it is submitted or after a designated period of time has elapsed (this is a feature that can save you a ton of time for certain tasks, like posting surveys)
These HIT properties are your basic operating parameters. With these parameters in mind, you will be able to move onto the next stage, which is setting up your first HITs on the Mturk platform. This is not a difficult task, although there are a number of steps that you will need to move through to make your HITs look the way that you want. However, even with all of the different step by step process points, you should still be able to post up a HIT with 5 10 minutes when you are in practice.
SETTING UP YOUR FIRST HITS

As you prepare to set up your first HITs, you will need to head to your Requester account. You'll be taken to the Resources Page, which has a lot of tools that can distract you from what you're actually in your Requester account to do. Though many of these resources promise to be helpful, going back and looking at these from the view point of someone who knows how to post in the system I think you will be better served by skipping the cute
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Micro Project Outsourcing tutorials and just diving right in. Later, when you are trying to figure out an add-on or a specialized feature, the tutorials will be more helpful. I don't mean this as any disparagement on what Amazon is providing. It's just that in many ways, you don't know what you need to know until you have gotten into the process a bit, and why have you watch a bunch of videos or click to read pages of text that don't apply to your personal situation? Thus, rather than browsing through the materials on the Resources Page, you need to look right up to the top of your account page. You'll see the folder tabs there labeled Your Hits. Go ahead and click on the Design tab to be take into the first stage of building your Mturk HITs.
DESIGNING YOUR HITS Once you get into the Design tab, you will see that you have two choices for how to proceed with designing your HITs. You have the option to either build your HITs from a blank template, or you can use one of the sample templates that Amazon provides to you.
The Design Tab Within Your Requester Account
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(Sourced from: https://requester.mturk.com/bulk/hit_templates)
As you can see, Amazon provides you with templates for what they consider to be the most common types of projects that are posted up on their site. Some of them may be just what you are thinking about doing, while others of you may have something completely different in mind. One aside here: In years past, there was a system for going outside of Amazon to have the HITs built on a platform known as HITBuilder. Though you may see it mentioned in other web guides relating to Amazon Mechanical Turk, HITBuilder is no longer open for business. Therefore, you need to learn how to work inside the Amazon framework in order to post your HITs up the right way using a pre-set template or designing your own. Both options have their advantages. I'll walk you through setting up a basic HIT using one of Amazon's templates and then the changes that you will need to be aware of if you want to set up a HIT using the blank template model. Setting Up A HIT Using An Amazon Template Setting up a HIT using one of the Amazon templates is straightforward all the way through. Let's start with the first template HIT that you see on the page,
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Micro Project Outsourcing the HIT template Basic Open-End Question, and set up a simple question for Turkers to answer. Our goal is to set up a single question for the example, so slide across to the right and click on the Start With This Template button. You'll be taken to the first in a three tab series of screens that will walk you through what you need to do to set up your HIT. Let's walk through the screens together, section by section. It may be a little bit of overkill for those of you who like to figure things out on your own and have a bit of technical savvy, but I don't want anyone reading this guide to feel like there is any part of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform that is a mystery to you. Part 1: Describe Your HIT
(Sourced from: Template Screenshot) The Start With This Template button takes you to the Enter Properties part of the HIT template. Here I've just added in a title sentence, Answer A Question About The Power Of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and left the rest of this section as it was pre-populated for me. You have the option to expand the description if you like, or to add in multiple keywords for the task. The keywords help Turkers searching for different kinds of tasks find your work, but it won't make your project a web public item if you are worried about confidentiality. Part 2: Set HIT Properties And Worker Criteria
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(Sourced from: Template Screenshot) Moving down the page, the next step is setting up the HIT properties. This is the way the screen looks just as a blank set up. You need to set values for each box with a drop tab next to it. Values for time allotted per assignment can be minutes, hours or days. The same time values can be applied for the amount of time you want for the HIT to have before it expires. These values control how long the HIT is open. Some Turkers use this time criteria as a way to see how long a HIT might take them, while others avoid HITs that seem a bit tight on time, such as a transcription task that is only open for 30 minutes. It's better to err on the side of being generous with the amount of time allotted for working on the HIT. The time at which the HIT expires can be linked to your deadline for getting the work done. For example, if you wanted all the work done in five days, set the HIT expiry for four days so you have time to review everything and still meet your deadline. Here, having one day to answer the question and seven days to get someone to answer it (the default settings) should be more than enough time. The next section defines the criteria for workers to participate on the HIT. As a new member of the Amazon Mechanical Turk community, you have to be wondering what on earth these criteria really mean. Essentially, they help you to screen your workforce so that you can either get better quality work out of them or at least exercise some control over the Turkers who can take
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Micro Project Outsourcing on your HIT. Under the HIT approval rate tab, the drop down tab has four choices, which are: Location Currently, the demographics for Mturk are about 50 50 for Turkers coming from the United States versus coming from other countries. In the past, it was very rare for a Turker to be from a country outside the U.S., because Turkers needed an Amazon Payments account or their own U.S. ACH Enabled bank account in order to be paid. However, in the last year, Amazon added rupees as a cash out choice, bringing many Indian providers into the Turker family who had formally been excluded or uninterested. Thus, the ability to specify location for Turkers is here. HIT approval rate This is a worker statistic that shows how many of the HITs they've completed have been deemed acceptable by the final owner of the task. Turkers with higher HIT approval rates are preferable to Turkers with lower rates. A HIT approval rate above 95% is considered good by Amazon's standards. No outsourcer is perfect, but 95% means a fairly talented workforce approaching your tasks. Selecting values in the 70's or 80's for HIT approval rates puts your tasks in the hands of Turkers who aren't very careful about how they complete their work. Adult Content Qualification This is a qualification to work on tasks that have nudity or other adult content. While it doesn't apply to our task, if you are doing image filtering or run an adult site you would need it. This qualification ensures that Turkers are old enough to be working on adult content tasks, and that you can present mature content to an audience who will understand it in the appropriate context. Number of HITs approved This qualification is related to the HIT approval rate. Depending on your task, this may be more relevant, as workers with more than 100
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Micro Project Outsourcing HITs approved will be more experienced than workers who have only had 10 HITs approved.
For our task, we will go with the standard setting, which is a HIT Approval Rating level. The next tab allows you to set a value parameter, such as greater than or equal to, less than, or exists. followed by the numerical value. We'll select greater than or equal to and 95 to work with a good population of Turkers. In this section, there is also the possibility of adding additional criteria. These additional criteria that are layered on can represent the choices not taken in the first selection. For example, you could add Location and an Adult Content Qualification to our HIT if you wanted to do so. The final little tick box asks, Required for Preview? What this means is that by ticking the box, your HITs will only appear visible to workers who meet your criteria. For workers who do not posses your criteria, the HIT will appear as a darkened tab, and they will not be able to click into the HIT to see any details about the task. We'll leave it unticked for now, because restricting viewing of our task isn't important right now. Part 3: Set Pay Rates
(Sourced from: Template Screenshot) The next part of setting up the HIT involves setting the cash value for the task, the number of tasks available in each HIT batch, and the auto approval time frame. For us, the number is easy. We have one question to ask one person, so our number of assignments per HIT is one. If you wanted to ask 100 people, you would put 100 into that box. It's also fine to leave 7 days as
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Micro Project Outsourcing the automatically approved cutoff date, although we could also select a timeframe build on minutes or hours. The bigger issue, of course, is what to pay for the work. Back in section 3, when I was talking about the kinds of tasks that you could outsource to worker on Mechanical Turk, I also included some price guidance for you. Amazon does a bit of the same here, pointing out that .05 for a 30 second task means a real wage of $6 per hour. Now, what they're implying is mainly that you should consider the total amount of time that it takes to do the task and the total value of the work as you set your prices for a given task. I would also add that you should consider the current going rates for similar tasks and how quickly you want the task to be done. The faster you want something to be finished, the higher rate of pay you should offer for the task. That's an easy enough conclusion and a rule of thumb that works offline as well as on the Mechanical Turk platform. However, what can you do about determining the current going rate for tasks, other than referencing my statements from Section 3? The answer lies with the keywords that we associated with our task. Your task will also be based around keywords, such as tagging, writing, verification, and so on. Our keyword was question, so to get an idea about the going rate for questions on the Mechanical Turk platform, you need to open up a new window or browsing tab. Go to the Mturk.com home page, and click on the tab at the top that simply says HITs. Don't worry about whether or not it registers you as being signed into your Requester account or not, as it doesn't matter for this bit of the research process. On the HITs page, you'll notice a search bar asking if you want to search for HITs containing XYZ phrase. For this exercise, enter Question in the search box. Results For Question Query
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(Sourced from: Results Screenshot) There were more than 800 matching HITs, but looking at these, they seem a bit more in-depth than the simple single question that we are proposing here. So .04 or .05 cents is probably a bit more than we really would have to pay. It's not rocket science research, but it does put us in the ballpark for estimates, and looking at these results, I'd say that we could get away with paying only .01 or .02 cents for the answer to our question. In fact, since it's going to be such a simple task and only take a second or two in order to answer, I'm going to place the value of our task at .01 and enter that in the box. This is the last thing needed for this page. There are two buttons at the bottom, giving you the option to save your screen or move on to the next screen. If you hit save it doesn't advance you, but instead just keeps you on this page with the settings saved. Keep that as a good to know fact about the power of the save button and go ahead and click forward to the Design Layout tab, using either the button on the bottom of the page or the tab at the top of the page. Design Layout Tab Screenshot
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(Sourced from: Design Layout Tab) On this screen, you have a what you see is what you get situation with the text editor. The What is . . . ? serves as a prompt text that you can type over. With the formatting drop down box, you can select various font sizes and styles to make the HIT look the way you would like. For now, just keep things simple. Delete the What is . . . ? and type the question for this task in its place, Does Amazon Mechanical Turk have the power to save you money? When you're done typing, that's it. Amazon has some additional notes about the scrolling and size of your frame, which is more of a concern for longer tasks. Essentially, the team at Amazon is just pointing out what we went through before in the section about writing HIT descriptions if you make your HIT description overly long and workers have to scroll down multiple times to read everything, it takes time, reduces efficiency, and makes some workers turn away from your task. It is also worth noting here that even though we simply did a typing task here, you can also insert pictures or bits of HTML code to reference comma delineated databases or other necessary elements of other sites, such as links to a blog page or news article. Amazon's editing platform is very fluid, so you can really make Mechanical Turk be everything that you want it to be for you and your business. At the bottom of the page, again you have the option to hit save or proceed on to the next stage. Go ahead and advance to the Preview screen.
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Preview Screen View
(Sourced from: Mechanical Turk Preview Screen) The Preview screen is pretty straightforward. Either you like what you see here, or you click back and do some fixing of the formatting, wording, or picture insertion. Clicking back even if you didn't hit save before advancing to the Preview screen is fine as Amazon automatically saves your work as you move forward. From here, if everything looks as it should, then go ahead and click the Finish button located at the bottom right corner of your screen. This will take you to the Publish page of the web site, and a screen that should look like this: Publish Tab
(Sourced from: Mechanical Turk Publish Tab) From here, let's step back and look at how to set up a task using the blank template before returning to the logistics of active publication.
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Micro Project Outsourcing Setting Up A HIT Using A Blank Template Having taken a fairly detailed step by step journey through the process of setting up a HIT using one of Amazon's templates, you will find that the process of setting up a HIT using a blank template no longer seems so daunting. As a result, I'll handle this section with a bit more speed so that we can get back to the next stage, publishing the HIT, which I'm sure you are eager to learn. To get started with designing a HIT based on a blank template, you need to head back to the Design tab on your Requester account.
The Design Tab Within Your Requester Account
(Sourced from: https://requester.mturk.com/bulk/hit_templates) This time, select the second choice, the blank template. You'll be taken to a screen that is the same Enter Properties tab that you saw when you were working through the exercise with the pre-set template from Amazon. To move through this screen, you should simply work from top to bottom through the blanks. Select a title for your template (i.e., Test Question) and
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Micro Project Outsourcing then continue on to put in your public title, the description, and the keywords associated with the task. You'll proceed down to the parameters for working on the HIT, as well as the part where you set pay rates and results approval metrics, just as in the previous exercise. When you click through to take a look at the Design Layout tab (and do note that you can click through to the Design Layout tab without filling in diddly squat on the Enter Properties tab here) you will notice that it does look quite different from the nearly blank screen of before. Now, the Design Layout tab is full of suggestions for you:
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Micro Project Outsourcing Design Layout Tab Within The Blank Template Framework
(Sourced from: Blank Template Screenshot) Amazon is being helpful here by providing more suggestions, which can help you if you went for a Blank Template style with only a vague framework around what you wanted the final product to look like as a HIT. On the other hand, if you don't want to have any of this stuff (and you can see the bar on the right where you can scroll down for even more options) then you simply delete them out and enter exactly what you wish. For a shortcut in creating templates for tasks that run into the thousands, you will want to check the page at https://requester.mturk.com/bulk/help/getting_started.html#TemplateVariab les. It is updated regularly to be current with all of the coding changes that get made behind the scenes with the Requester User Interface. Inside this step by step guide you will find the latest systems for variable feeds for HIT content and tips about content management for large projects. Once you have settled your task for a single HIT or for thousands of HITs, then you are ready to move on to the next step. As before, go to the Preview and Finish tab. If you like what you see, then you are all set to proceed on to publishing your HIT and harnessing the live power of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.
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Micro Project Outsourcing PUBLISHING YOUR HITS Since you've now gotten yourself familiarized with the process of designing hits inside the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, it is now time for you to learn the process of publishing your HITs. The first thing you will need to do is go to the Publish tab on the top of the screen in your Requester account. This tab will take you to a screen that will show you all of your current HIT templates. To proceed, you need to select the HIT template that you want to move forward with for publication. For this exercise, select the template with the name Basic Open-ended Question to access the HIT from the first exercise in HIT design that we did together. Once you've selected your HIT, you will be taken to a preview screen that will show you what your HITs will look like to the Turker Nation. This preview should contain no surprises for you, since it should be exactly what you saw in the preview screen when you were designing the HIT in the first place. Thus, you just click Next in the lower right corner of the screen. This will take you to a page where you need to confirm the information relating to the financial side of the HIT. Your View Of The Confirm And Publish Screen
(Sourced from: Screenshot Of Confirm And Publish Page)
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Micro Project Outsourcing Now, there's quite a bit of information here that you need to understand before moving forward with the HIT. Some of it is just an aggregation of information that we have talked about before, but some of it is new material you won't want to miss out on since it makes it vividly clear just how little getting all of this work done is going to really cost you. The Batch Properties segment is very straightforward. You see the title of the HIT, the description and the expiration information as well as the automatic approval information for the HIT. The HITs section is also quite clear. You have the number of HITs and the number of assignments (respondents) set for each HIT. This is multiplied together to give you a total number of tasks to be completed. Basically, the only thing that you are looking for here is a raging red flag that you have done some math wrong or juxtaposed some numbers. Otherwise, this is set to proceed as planned. From here you move on to the costs of outsourcing your micro projects on the Mturk system. It's basic math that follows until you get to the line about the Estimated Fees, which hasn't been covered yet in this guide to the Mechanical Turk platform. The fees associated with the Mechanical Turk program are very low. Amazon charges a 10% fee on top of what you are paying the workers for the task, with a minimum charge of .005, which is what the task here is being charged. Fees are automatically assessed rather than being billed separately, and you need to arrange funds to pay both the fee and the cost for the work when you are getting ready to publish your HITs. Just below the information about the Estimated Total Cost, you can see a statement about my available and projected balance. This data appears because I already have an Amazon Payments account associated with this test project. If you do not already have an Amazon Payments account set up with Amazon.com, then you will need to set up that account now.
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Micro Project Outsourcing If you have no idea, Amazon Payments is another one of Amazon.com's house suite of web services. It seems to me like a weird blend of a shopping cart, a bank account, and an online shopping wallet. Amazon Payments
(Sourced from: Amazon Payments Home Page) Naturally, it is tied in with your overall Amazon.com account, so if you have one, you will find that you can log in to the system using your existing user name and password. You will simply have to fill out some additional information for the Payments portion of your Amazon.com account to be activated. For those who are new to Amazon Payments, you will find that the banking information, account numbers, and driver's license information that I asked you to keep handy from the beginning of the book will come quite in handy
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Micro Project Outsourcing now. You will want to have it with you as you follow the steps to register with Amazon Payments. Once you have gotten yourself all set up with the Amazon Payments (not a lengthy process for most) you will be set to return to the HIT you have waiting to publish. With your pennies behind it funding the energy of the Turkers out there looking to make a few extra dollars, you are ready to go. Thus, returning to the Confirm and Publish Batch page, now that you understand where the fees are coming from and how to have money in your account as a Requester with Mechanical Turk, you are ready for the next stage. Down in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you either chicken out at this point and hit Back or you take the plunge and press the Publish HITs button. Once you have hit the Publish HITs button, you are officially live with your Mturk posting. Congratulations! You've been progressed to the Manage tab for your HITs, and you are ready to enjoy the freedom that you have while the busy little Turkers are out there doing all of your work. The only note to really remember when you are doing this for yourself and not as a part of a testing exercise for this book is to keep your initial HITs small. While you may be completely ready to put 1,000s of tasks up for micro project outsourcing professionals to take care of on your behalf, start with a small batch of 10. I'd recommend that you do a couple of these smaller batches before you progress to bigger batches of HITs. This will increase your comfort level with the systems, and it will also help you catch on to the idiosyncrasies of the Turker Nation. I've said it before and I will say it again now. Micro project outsourcing is not anything like traditional outsourcing. It is a very different experience both in the set up of tasks and the communication that happens around those tasks.
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Micro Project Outsourcing With regular outsourcing, once a project goes live, you often have an ongoing dialogue with the outsourcer. This can be time consuming pain in the rear, but it does also let you clarify your points and your intentions with the outsourcer you've hired. When it comes to Mechanical Turk, you don't get this ready conversational back and forth. Instead, Turkers know you through your project descriptions and they respond accordingly. You get to hear them speak in the feedback they leave for the task. Whether they complete your test rounds properly and any quirks in the manner in which the work is completed form the entirety of their dialogue to you. Since these kinds of conversations are so invaluable, you want to be sure that you are having them as early as possible in Turker-speak mediums like test projects before you do a full launch of your system. It is both costly and time consuming to try and stop HITs that have gone wrong and to appease the Turkers who may not understand what is going on with you and your jobs. Don't let the Turker Nation forum call you out for being inept or harangue you for not setting things up properly. Do your test runs diligently and you will find that your projects run smoothly into the next phases of project management. On additional place that you can use as a testing ground is the Amazon Mechanical Turk sandbox. A View Of The Sandbox
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(Sourced from: http://sandbox.mturk.com/) (Sourced from: Sandbox Home Page) The Sandbox was built to be explored and played with by end users who were a bit skittish about the regular Amazon.com platform going live. While you have the tools you need to launch on your own without a Sandbox trip, it is still a good place for new users to spend some time on their own, testing and learning how to get more out of the system. My favorite feature of the Sandbox is the simulated environment where I can run tasks and see how they look. It's been particularly valuable for some of my customized blank template projects where I've needed to insert code to link back to a database and wanted to be sure it served up properly. All testing aside, in this section, you have learned about the basic properties of HITs, the terminology and process for setting up new HITs as both blank templates and Amazon.com templates, testing ideas for your HITs, and how to get a preview ready for publication with the Turker Nation.
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Micro Project Outsourcing You should feel confident moving forward. You've created test HITs and seen them through to their publication. You are now ready to start being the judge of the work that is coming in on your behalf.
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6 EVALUATE, APPROVE, PAY

Your HIT is now live out in the Turker Nation. This means that very, very shortly you will be getting work back from the Turkers who have completed your tasks. Thus, you need to stand ready to evaluate the work they have completed on your behalf to determine whether or not it meets your standards. From there, you will either approve or reject the submitted project. This approval or rejection governs the release of payments from your Amazon Payments account and finalizes the interaction that you have with your micro project outsourcer. In this section, you will learn how to evaluate results, make approvals or rejections, and do the final payments. We will also touch on bonuses in this section just in case you want to reward a Turker for a truly exceptional job. By the end of this section, you should comfortable with all of the back end evaluations and approvals that you need to do to keep your projects moving along at a brisk clip.
EVALUATE
To start the evaluation process, you will want to return to the Your Hits set up of your Requester account. You will click on the third tab, Manage, to pull up all of your HITs that are currently live in the system. The Manage Tab View
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(Sourced from: Amazon's Manage Tab Screenshot) We've got two HITs here, one from this project and one from another project I had in the system. Although you can clear out HITs that are no longer active, I like the two reference points for you here. You can see how Amazon keeps you updated on the progress on a task, as well as providing you with useful data about how long it took your Turkers to complete you HIT. This really does help with future planning in terms of estimating times for work to be completed, whether or not your pay rates are working out, and whether your time estimates for how long it might take to complete a task are correct. So quite a bit of good information here, and a good departure from regular outsourcing data, where providers rarely reveal how long they spent on a task. You have much more control over the whole process with Mechanical Turk. Once you are done checking out the statistics, you need to click on the Results button located on the right in the blue bar on the top of the HIT you want. This takes you into the Review Results page. Review Results
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(Sourced from: HIT Results Screenshot) The Review Results page provides you with several different options for things to do. I'll touch on them briefly as explanation before we take any actions here. Across the top, you can see that there are buttons which can allow you to change how the results look to you or to filter the results. While we just have one response to deal with here, for other tasks and larger projects you have the option to look at tasks that are completed, in progress, abandoned, and so on as data points. You can also see the results of your HITs displayed with the data points in a different order under the Configure Result View button.
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Micro Project Outsourcing Configuration Choices In Mechanical Turk
(Sourced from: Review Results Screenshot) Changing these configurations will help you sort results, but it won't impact the evaluation in any way other than helping your eye to scan the results of your projects. Over on the right, you also have the option to view the results offline or export the results if you don't like working inside the Amazon screen. There's also the Approve All button, which I'll confess is very handy. I don't think I need to explain to you how it saves you time! Dropping down from the top bar, you've got information about the internal task number for the HIT (if you click this link, it will show pop up a window
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Micro Project Outsourcing with the original question or task inside), who did the HIT, their answer, and the option to select their response for action. You will notice under the Worker ID section that there is the option to either block the worker or give them a bonus. The Block feature I haven't used very often on my own, but I know that others who work with the Amazon Mechanical Turk system who use the Block button as a way to prevent workers who do a poor job or who clearly have no grasp of the English language from ever being able to work on their tasks again. The Bonus link is a way to give a bit extra to workers who do an outstanding job, or who complete the task to a specified quality. Casting Words, for example, offers bonus payments to Turkers who achieve certain quality scores on the transcriptions they complete. It is a way to build loyalty, motivate hard work, and ensure that workers come looking for your tasks in the future, but it certainly isn't a required gesture for every job. On the far right, you can see that we've got the option to reject or approve the work that was submitted. Taking a look at our answer, you can see that the worker answered the question from their own perspective. In this case, that's fine. All we were doing was asking a simple open-ended question, so almost any answer that appeared here was fine. Now, from our perspective as Requesters, the question has a different answer, doesn't it? This is worth remembering as you design HITs you have to keep the worker perspective in mind, since they won't be seeing things from the same angle that you do! You have to evaluate HITs with this in mind ~ how did the worker interpret what you asked them to do? This is why you test and test to be sure things are being interpreted as you want them to be in your HIT postings. Within the micro project outsourcing system, you don't get to go back and discuss what went wrong with the service provider to get them to do revisions. The work stands for itself, and you evaluate it to either approve it or reject it based on the HIT task description, and not the outcome you were hoping to see but didn't write an appropriate description.
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APPROVE
After the Evaluation part of the process has been completed, it is time to either approve or reject the work that came in based on your evaluation of the answer. Since we've already evaluated that the Turker answered the question fairly, we're going to approve the work. Before taking the action, consider what happens when you don't approve the work. Rejected HITs represent work that you don't pay for under the arrangements made in the Amazon Mechanical Turk rules. In most cases, you simply determine that the HIT didn't meet your quality standards and hit the Reject key. In a few cases, you might have a Turker respond to the rejection to contest it, particularly on complex tasks. This is another reason to keep your HIT project descriptions short and focused on one particular thing that needs to be accomplished. Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that here. Instead, we are going to approve the task, which is as difficult as ticking the box to select the task and pushing the Approve button.
PAY
Pushing the Approve button here results in a screen refresh that empties out our Review Results page since there are no more results to be viewed. Where this is a one person task, that's it. On HITs that have a thousand different actions, on the other hand, you can select the HITs to approve and clear those, leaving behind HITs that are in progress or that need a different action. Along with pushing the Approve button, you have also released payment to the Turker who was completed the task. The transfer here is instantaneous, crediting the funds from your Amazon Payments account balance directly to the Turker.
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Micro Project Outsourcing If you want to go back after you have approved the results and take another look at your HIT, you simply click on the Manage tab. This will pop you back to the original screen with all of your active HIT appearing. If you click into our test HIT, you will see that the display has updated to show all of the payments that have been made, as well as the total cost for having the job done including the workers fees and the fees collected by Amazon.com. Updated Status Page
(Sourced from: Requester Account Screenshot) Reviewing this information periodically is a good way to keep tabs on your overall account balances and the progress of the work. After all, since you control the speed at which the jobs are paid for you can pace yourself as you to ensure that your operating cash flow is keeping up with all of the HITs that you have active. It is also a good way to remind yourself if you need to top up the amount of money in your Amazon Payments account. For the sake of example, go ahead and click on the Results button. It will pull you back into the Review Results page, which will look blank. This is because the Filter Results default setting is for tasks that have been submitted but not yet approved. Go ahead and reset the filter to show our approved HIT we're going to give our Turker a bonus. When the HIT shows up again, you will want to look for the Bonus link under the Worker ID number. Go ahead and click the link to get the pop up window for awarding bonuses.
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Bonus Pop Up Window (Sourced from: Bonus Link in Mturk) The pop up window allows you to customize a bonus amount for each worker that you want to award a bonus to and to provide a reason for the bonus you are awarding. You can see what I've populated in the field, with the option to pay the bonus or cancel. This bonus could also have been paid at the time that we were evaluating and approving tasks, but I wanted you to be aware of the option to go back later and reward workers who do an outstanding job for you. In this section, you learned about the evaluation, approval, and payments system for the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. On the evaluation front, you saw how to click into your active projects and see what the status was for getting the work done. From there you learned how to click into your individual results, with all of the information waiting there for you in terms of answers to the tasks you proposed. The process of evaluating results in terms of what was asked and the Turker mental
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Micro Project Outsourcing perspective was also discussed, so that you can be confident that you are making the right evaluations of the quality of the work that you received. On the approvals front, you saw how simple it was to approve a single job or to approve all of the jobs that you had completed in that batch. You were reminded that you don't have to pay for the work that isn't up to quality a big shift from offline outsourcing where you often have to pay partial amounts for work that you'll never be able to use. I know I've saved a bunch of money on my tasks with just that feature alone, all while ensuring that I work with nothing less than the best for my business. Finally, you learned the payment system. It's pretty much one click and done, so much easier than all of the bank transfers, checks, and running around with PayPal that you have to do in traditional outsourcing. I also showed you how to pay bonuses to workers who do outstanding work. All in all, here at the end of this section, you should feel confident that you could post a HIT on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform and efficiently evaluate the result, do your HIT approvals, and make all of your payments with bonuses if desired. From here, the next stage is learning how to maintain your HIT listings and eventually sunset the HITs that you are finished with in the Amazon Mechanical Turk system.
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7 MAINTAINING MTURK PROJECT LISTINGS

When your HITs have gone live, you know that you have a bit of work to do as the completed HIT assignments come into your account statement. After all, if you simply ignore the HITs that you have posted up, the Turker responses will be approved automatically after your designated time period. However, this isn't the only kind of Mturk project maintenance that you need to do to keep your HITs functional. For example, you may want to change an element of your HIT, or you may want to go back and get more workers to put in time on the same task. In our case, we have one question that has already been answered, but what if we wanted to have more Turkers give their opinions on the subject? This section will walk you through the process for putting more Turkers on your side and the other HIT maintenance items that you will find come up as you use the Mturk Platform.
ADDING TURKERS TO AN EXISTING PROJECT

This is a common maintenance issue. After all, you've run a test job, so when it works why should you have to start all over with posting up your HIT? You just need to add more workers to the HIT template that you've already created to have a time-efficient solution. 1. Adding new Turkers begins by going back to the Design tab within your Mturk Requester account.
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Micro Project Outsourcing 2. You will see the HIT template that we created for the earlier exercises there, labeled as Basic Open-ended Question with the creation date. Select this HIT. 3. You'll be taken back into the editing screen. The key here for those looking to add new Turkers is to increase the number of assignments per HIT. Just type the additional number into the blank, replacing the original one that was there. For the purposes of illustration, I'm typing 5 to add 5 new Turkers to the survey pool. 4. Click through to the Confirm and Publish Batch tab. You'll notice that the HIT has updated itself to contain the new information that was entered. This includes the data about the new total cost of the job and the effect that it has on your Amazon Payments balance. 5. If you were to select the Publish Hits button, the project would then go live. It would have the same name as the original project we posted up, but it would appear as a second project to be managed separately.
While this is not the world's most perfect system, it is a way to get more workers on the same task without needing to go through all the data entry and pay selection points that you did the first time. As a result, you can go back into the system and add new workers to an existing HIT any time that you need to have more work done.
CANCELING HIT BATCHES IN PROGRESS

Another maintenance task that you may need to do is to cancel a HIT batch that is progress. Maybe you decided that the kinds of responses you were getting didn't meet your needs. Maybe an early respondent went above and beyond, inspiring you to tweak your project description so that more Turkers complete the task in the same way. Or maybe your business needs have shifted and you just don't need the work completed any longer. The reasons
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Micro Project Outsourcing themselves are unimportant, and Amazon won't ask you to provide a reason for canceling a project batch on the Mturk platform. The larger issue is that you need to move very quickly to cancel a set of HITs once they have gone live in the system. Although there are more than 60,000 live HITs available on average in the system on any given day, there are also several thousand Turkers who are looking for a job to do RIGHT NOW. This issue is especially prevalent if you are making your HIT go live during prime Turking hours. These are the times of day and days of the week when the traffic on the Mturk platform is the highest. Weekends are peak user times, as are the mid to late evening hours. Posting up a HIT during this time will get you responses within minutes, while posting up a HIT on a weekday afternoon might not garner any attention for a couple of hours. Thus, as soon as you have made the decision that you do not want to continue with a project, you want to cancel it without delay to avoid incurring unnecessary costs. To cancel a project that you have posted within Amazon's Mechanical Turk system, you need to go to your Manage tag in your Amazon Requestor account. You will see all of your active HITs. If your HIT batch is still in progress, you will see a button on the top blue and grey bar that provides you with the option to Cancel This Batch next to the Results tab. Option To Cancel
(Sourced from: Batch In Progress Screenshot)
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Micro Project Outsourcing It is important to note that if all of the HITs within a batch have been completed, you will not see the button to Cancel This Batch appear. Instead, you will only see the review results options. Once the work has been done, it has been done and you can't cancel on that in the system. You can only remove uncompleted HITs from live activity. When you have the need to cancel your uncompleted tasks for whatever reason, and you still have outstanding HITs, just click the button. You will pulled through to a data report screen that will let you know that the job has been canceled. This page will also let you know how many of the HITs in the task were completed, and you will still need to go through the evaluate, approve, and pay process for the HITs that have been completed on your behalf. Some have suggested that when you cancel a HIT, you should just reject all of the answers that you received. This is not necessarily a good idea. You will find that the Turkers are a very responsive and interconnected group through the Turker Nation forum. They can boycott your future HITs as a result of an unjustified work rejection. They can also complain to Amazon.com, who will remove Requesters who take advantage or misuse the work power of the Turkers.
EDITING AN EXISTING PROJECT

This is one of the most common maintenance issues. Even when you have been careful and double checked and had a friend or business partner look at your HIT, it's only after you've made it live on the system that the glaring typo will jump out at you. Fortunately, this is very easy to fix. First, you will need to cancel your existing HIT batch. This will stop the typo from being seen by more Turkers. You can still use the answers that you received to date if the typo didn't generate wrong answers for you.
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Micro Project Outsourcing From there, you will go back to the Design tab of your Amazon Requester account. Within the Design tab, you will see the template that you set up for your HIT. There are three choices edit, copy, or delete. You just choose to edit your HIT. This will take you back into the HIT properties and the description that you typed up for your HIT. You will be able to change whatever you need to in order for your HIT to show up perfectly going forward. From there, you relaunch the HIT with the new, improved format. In the event that you already collected a number of responses, you will want to subtract the number of correct and approved responses that you received from your total number when you re-launch the HIT.
ADDING TIME TO AN EXPIRED HIT LISTING

Another issue that arises from time to time is a HIT expiring before all of the tasks are completed. Like an Ebay auction, your HIT has a limited lifespan. Most HITs are completed well within the time guideline, but sometimes a HIT outlasts the workforce. In this case, you will want to add more time to your HIT. The process is very easy, and shouldn't take you more than a moment or two. 1. Go to the Manage tab within your Mturk Requester account.
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Micro Project Outsourcing 2. You will see your HIT there, and you will need to select the HIT that has expired. A data screen will appear that shows you the status of your HIT,
along with a link inviting you to extend this batch of HITs. (Sourced from: Expired HIT Screenshot) 3. When you click on the link for extending the batch, you will get a pop up window that lets you know when the batch expired, and an option to extend it by a manually entered number of hours or days. The hours or days option is selected from the drop down menu. 4. Once you have entered the length of time that you would like to extend the project, simply select the Extend button and your project will be live to the Turker Nation once more.
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Micro Project Outsourcing In this section, you've seen how to perform some of the most common maintenance tasks that relate to managing your existing HITs on the Amazon Mechanical Turk system. You know how to add additional workers to your HITs, how to cancel a HIT that is not meeting expectations or is no longer wanted, how to edit a HIT that has a typo or other error in its construction, and how to add time to an expired HIT. With these tricks under your belt, you will be ready to respond to any snafu in your micro project outsourcing system. You will be able to quickly fix problems so that you can get back to your work while the Turkers get back to theirs.
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8 CLOSING UP SHOP ON FINISHED PROJECTS

Having been through all of your approvals and run down any changes to your HITs that needed to be made, your project has come to a successful close. So what do you do now? In the offline world, you might meet with your outsourcing team to do a debrief about how the project went for them, what things went well, and what things went less than perfectly. You could have a discussion about what to change for the next project and what part are going to stay the same. In short, you would have a real sit-down examination of the project and the relationship to determine if it was really going to work out in the long run. With Amazon's Mechanical Turk, there's no meeting like this at the end of a project. You don't know your Turkers, and each one of them probably only worked for you for a minute or two. Coming from a relationship driven business environment, this was a big change for me when I first started using the Mechanical Turk platform to get my work done. After the first few projects, however, I began to appreciate the time that I was saving. The money I was saving was even more incredible. It allowed me to step back and focus on the person in the outsourcing relationship that really mattered me! Well, more specifically, my business. While building relationships with non-Turk outsourcers was great, I had been burned in so many relationship it was hard to imagine getting into another one. I just wanted the work done and the confidence that I could get the work done again. With Mechanical Turk, I'd found my perfect solution. This meant that
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Micro Project Outsourcing at the end of my micro projects, I just needed to worry about wrapping up my own end and closing down the project listing.
WRAPPING UP YOUR END OF THE HIT

The first side of things when you are done with a HIT is to wrap up your own end of things. This means that you want to be sure that you have all of the information that you need pulled out of the Amazon Turk Platform, so that you are ready to roll with it in your business. Amazon makes this simple. 1. Within your Amazon Requester account, click on the Manage tab to refresh the screen. When you see the HIT you are ready to close up, click on the Results tab. 2. This will take you to the Review Results page. You will see on the far right a button labeled Export Results, which you should click. 3. Amazon.com will process your results, and provide you with a link to a download of your data. The data will be in .csv format.
Having the data for yourself, either for your files or for ready use, will ensure that you can walk away from the job in peace. As your results download, you should take a few minutes for yourself to jot down some notes about what went well and what went badly with the HIT. I've found that this is very helpful when I am getting ready to launch a new project. I also make notes about what I paid and how long it took people to complete the project on average.
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REMOVING FINISHED HITS

The next stage in closing up shop on a project is removing HITs that have finished. You do have the option with Amazon Mechanical Turk to completely remove the HITs, or to leave them as inactive HITs. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages. By leaving inactive HITs in the system, you add clutter to your account, which can make it hard to focus on current projects. One the other hand, by leaving in active HITs in the system, you have your templates ready and waiting for you to use again. Deleting removes extra items from your account, but it can also remove reference information that you would have liked to have on file for later projects or simply as a historical reference. This is part of why you export your results so that no matter which path you choose, you have the option to reference hard copy data about how the HIT went for you. If you choose to leave your HITs as inactive, then you don't have to do anything. The HITs are completed and they will expire naturally. Anytime that you want to reactive them, you simply follow the steps that you learning in the section about adding more time to expired HITs. If you choose to delete your HITs, you will need to return to the main Manage tab within your Amazon Requester account. You will see all of your active HIT batches, together with the buttons directing you to choose to see the results or delete the HIT. All you need to do is click the Delete button. Amazon will provide you with a prompt to double check that you really want to delete the HIT and its associated results information. Confirm, and you're done. The HIT is out of the system for good. This section has provided you with all of the information that you need to complete the final aspect of any outsourcing project micro project or full size. Within the Mechanical Turk framework, you now know how to export your results so that you have a hard copy reference outside of the Mturk
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Micro Project Outsourcing platform, and you also know how to delete HITs that you no longer want. From start to finish on micro project outsourcing, you're now familiar with each step of the process.
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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
At the beginning of this book, you had a business problem. In fact, in many ways, your business was your problem. All of your free time was being eaten up by the ton of small, repetitive tasks that make up the business of running a business, and it was burning you out. Yet you knew that if you didnt get these tasks taken care of it would hinder your ability to be successful with your business. As you opened the book, there I was, promising to find you more hours in the day to work on the important parts of your day. Was I seriously for real? Was I promoting a system that was nothing more than hype? Im sure these thoughts crossed your mind. Fortunately, throughout the pages of this book, Ive been able to show you that yes, I am not exaggerating and not hyping anything up when it comes to Amazon Mechanical Turk. I may not depend on the platform as much as a business like Casting Words, but I have certainly changed the way that I do business to be more cost and time effective by leveraging the power of the Turker Nation. By outsourcing some of my tasks for just pennies, I have the time and the money to focus on other areas of my business. These extra resources freed up by Mechanical Turk are invaluable to me, and they will be invaluable to you, too. In the pages of this book, you have learned exactly what you need to do to make this system work in your business. We started at the very beginning and covered: Where to find this secret micro project outsourcing service right under your nose from the same team that developed Amazon.com!
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Micro Project Outsourcing How to get signed up for your own micro project outsourcing account both as an existing member of the Amazon Web Services group and as a new account holder. How to determine what projects you should outsource so that you get the most out of the service which turns out to be almost any part of your business that you can imagine. From administrative tasks to creative endeavors, the Turker Nation can handle almost every task you need completed to get your business running at top speed. What to do to write a project listing that tells all of your potential micro project service providers exactly how to do your work perfectly to standard from keeping it short and concise to testing out your listing for potential problem spots, youre covered on that front, too! How to post your micro projects with all of the right options selected for each project to get the best results you can navigate the HIT building tools, evaluate qualification levels, and set up payments to get a good response. Where to go to evaluate and approve the work that was done by each worker so that payments can be made you know where to go and what to do to make this process efficient for you so you can get back to business as fast as possible. You also know how to make your payments and even set up bonuses where merited. How to maintain your project listings you know how to keep them current and keep things moving along. You can edit a project listing that has an error, add more workers to a project, add more time to a project, or even cancel a project in minutes. How to close down finished projects you know everything you need to do to tie up the loose ends and sunset a finished project properly. You know what to do on your end to preserve your data, and what to do in the Mturk system to delete HITs that are no longer needed.
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In each section, I walked you through exactly what you needed to know and exactly what you needed to do, complete with screen shots and examples that you could use as inspiration and guidance. In short, youre ready. All that remains at this point is for you to go out and get started reclaiming your life back from under the mountain of simple tasks that are holding you back from success. If you dont have a lot of spare time and you dont have a huge budget, you know its not a problem on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. With just a few minutes of your time and a few dollars total invested, you can set up Turkers from around the world with tasks that will let you accomplish weeks worth of projects while youre sleeping. At as little as .01 per micro project, you can be well on your way to getting dug out from under your mountain of work and caught up enough to pursue new and ever more profitable ventures. You have the tools. You know the system. Youre all set. What are you waiting for?
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Internet marketing resources

Private Label Resell Rights Products you can resell as your own http://www.JeremyBurns.com "How to write and publish your own OUTRAGEOUSLY Profitable eBook in as little as 7 days - even if you can't write, can't type and failed high school English class!" Go to http://www.jeremyburns.com/a/7dayebook to get started. Merchant Account Authorize / e-OnlineData www.e-onlinedata.com/accuratemarketing This is our 1st choice recommendation for merchant accounts, this is a very easy place to get approved and in the many systems we have tested are the easiest to work with! Super Low Rates!! Shopping Cart 1ShoppingCart.com http://www.webmarketingmagic.com: Instant merchant accounts and realtime payment gateway services. This is a private label of the 1sc system and provides great service! AutoResponder service You absolutely must have a good autoresponder service to build an email list, and follow up with your customers. We recommend http://www.Automatic-Responder.com
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