Mturk is a way to outsource many tasks and IMO, is the next big thing in IM and SEO, and as Bombers we are expected to be trailblazers and not followers...

Here's a quick mturk.com review from Isobel:

The stunning part about it are the rates; the figures next to the examples above are the amounts being paid in US$ for each job. Amazon adds a 2.5% fee and you have to have sufficient funds deposited in your Amazon Payments account to cover your work and fee liabilities.

A warrior used it to have sentences rewritten for $0.05 each; each sentence went to 25 people (you set the rate and you can use as many or as few people as you wish) and he ended up with enough content for 700 articles. He didn't say how many sentences he put out but on the assumption that a small article has about 60 sentences, 60 sentences * 25 people * 0.05 = $75 for what turned into 700 spun articles. He said the quality of work was extremely high.

The main disadvantage for me is that at the moment only US residents (in effect, owners of a US credit card or bank account) can deposit funds in an Amazon Payments account and consequently request work. To get around that, if you have way too much time on your hands you can become a Worker and use the amounts you earn to fund your Amazon Payments account. I did 6 very small jobs today just to see how the system works; they are all still pending approval by the Requesters.

It is against Amazon's TOS to use this service to get people to click on your ads, or to ask any Worker for personally identifiable information.

There is of course nothing to stop a US resident creating an account and taking prepaid "orders" from other people; a site called http://www.hit-builder.com/ does exactly that but it requires a wire transfer from non-US citizens.

This could be a great BombSquad group project if someone is prepared to act as the main Requester for the group and the rest prepay their orders to him/her via Paypal for example. Output could be exclusive or shared.

There is enormous scope here to have all kinds of tasks performed for very low rates, not just content production .. take a look at the HITS up there now and you'll see the variety of things people are using it for http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false

Not a goer for me on my own unfortunately, but I'd be very interested in a group project.

Isobel

Hey Kurt,

If you do get a project together, count me in please. If you guys would like, I'm from the US, and would be willing to be the representative to put up the requests.

Mary

Ok Mary, you're the "rep" for this exploration project. AFter we figure out the benefits, strategy and logistics of exploiting mturk, we'll break into smaller teams, so you don't have to manage every one forever.

For example, an non-US member may bring some content to the table and their US teammate will use mturk to rewrite the content.

Here's some possibilities, and try to come up with more ideas:

- Rewrite content. This can be on the sentence or paragraph level. Having a few PLR articles rewriten a few times could result in a lot of content.

- Make posts/comments on forums or blogs

- Bookmark/digg/stumble our sites. We need to test this on third party pages, as it may backfire. Digg and StumbleUpon may monitor mturk looking for sites that are paying for bookmarks.

- We can even do some blackhat...For example, get the mturks to visit our pages, then use THEIR IP to submit bookmarks, using various IP addresses. This is done with a script that loads when a page is visited and iframes.

- Enter captchas.

Any other suggestions?

Who is in?

(that happened in the offline world already long time ago - e.g. shops /travel agencies etc. started a kind of buying union to competete against much bigger competition)

In the future only the webmaster might have a chance who is part of a bigger network or a kind of fraternity!

just my 2 cents!

Isobel

One of the disadvantages about mturk is that it can be very easy for anyone to see what sites you're working on. When you check out a HIT and before you've accepted it, you're given the information about it including the URL if that's relevant.

However, there must be ways around it because one job I looked at was to have an Amazon review written. Before I accepted the HIT, I was given an example of what was required but when I accepted it the actual item was different. It may be that if you are posting the same type of job over and over, that you can use one example for all of them.

Of course, anyone who does accept your job to bookmark or make a comment will need to know your URL (duh!) so I think we need to be aware of how much we expose.

The yearblook one was interesting however. The job was to "find an interesting blog post", submit it to yearblook (a Digg type site where you can vote on stories) and to write a comment on the blog page that you had done so. Yearblook get lots of new entries plus their name/URL on lots of comment pages.

>- We can even do some blackhat...For example, get the mturks
>to visit our pages, then use THEIR IP to submit bookmarks,
>using various IP addresses. This is done with a script that
>loads when a page is visited and iframes.

Would that not be the case anyway Kurt? When I bookmarked a site, I had to go to the site first, then use my own bookmarking account and I assume my own IP address. I was expected to write my own description and tags. I agree that keeping the URL off mturk is important though.

>
>- Enter captchas.
>
>Any other suggestions?
>
Find content, for example videos or images on specific topics

Summarise information, e.g. from gov sites

Create bookmarking accounts - this takes me a huge amount of time. I've found a few new sites that make it easier to do the bookmarking but setting up all those accounts with different IDs takes forever.

Write "reviews" if you have that kind of site (there's a huge site called savvy.com that is full of reviews of every kind and they use mturkers to write a lot of them)

Isobel

I'm not from US. Can provide content for members

~Mou

Okay, sounds good to me then.

About the IPs, I think we can get around that one too.

Mary

I have used mturk before and it works quite well. I had reviews written and even articles made for really cheap.

Here are my initial thoughts:

1. I may have missed it in the posts but this project would assume that we are all working in the same niche. So we would have to agree on what niche we are working on.

2. Someone has to supply the articles. All of us have a million PLR that can be used. Depending on the niche, then we would all scan our harddrives and the one with the articles wins this one!

3. The needs to be 2 - 3 (maybe more) who are making the mturk submissions, reviews approvals. They would send out the completed sentences to everyone.

4. Superlistz would need to be created again (like the travel project we had attempted long ago) for more mixing. Perhaps this can be done ala mturk again.

5. Someone has to handle the money from bombers so that those with mturk accounts get paid. Obviously the money people are trusted by us all. Kurt obviously comes to mind!

Just some thoughts.

By the way, I don't know if I am "IN" at this point. My life is too insane right now with a second child not sleeping through the night yet and too many others things!

Blessings,

Ed

A few comments. The first project is nothing but educational. We just want to learn what we can do and how creative we can be. I don't want to put any long term BS on Mary.

Once some of us determine that it's worth going forward, we try to figure out how to include our non-US Bombers. Can we legally get them prepaid US credit cards, for example.

Isobel posted in response to me:
>- We can even do some blackhat...For example, get the mturks
>to visit our pages, then use THEIR IP to submit bookmarks,
>using various IP addresses. This is done with a script that
>loads when a page is visited and iframes.

Would that not be the case anyway Kurt? When I bookmarked a site, I had to go to the site first, then use my own bookmarking account and I assume my own IP address. I was expected to write my own description and tags. I agree that keeping the URL off mturk is important though.

The point of the blackhat is to keep our "privacy"...There are already scripts out here that do the same thing...Here's the basic concept:

We set up a mturk for folks to take a survey and choose whether they like dogs or cats better. Once they arrive on the page, a hidden script logs into a service like Onlywire, and submits all the needed info, using the IPs of those taking the survey.

Again, this is already being done and can be done with any web page getting traffic.

Another option would be to create the bookmarking accounts (using mturk), then have them visit a page where all the info is already filled out (using a "pre-stocked" database, similar to the blackhole) and they just have to click the "submit" button. They don't even need access to the info they are submitting and just need to click the button.

Hey Ed...

We don't need to worry about all of that right now...We're just seeing what we can do using mturk. No one has an ebook out yet, and the blackhatters won't be telling until what they do isn't as useful.

Here's another idea...Remember the 100 chunks of info? Whatif you had 100 chunks of PLR content and wanted two mover versions of each chunk.

Here's the math: If the going rate of 5 cents per sentence is correct, it would cost about $15-20 US for each rewrite, or about $40US (plus PLR). Now, you have 100x3 chunks that could be spun into tons and tons of content.

Another option: As Isobel said, creating bookmarking accounts is a real pain. Have mturk do it. Have them create accounts using a gmail email address you give them. There's a program out that will automatically "click" links in gmail for verification.

Top Hat Bob would outsource this, but the problem was, it was so boring and time consumeing that he had to constantly get new free lancers. It seems that there are so many mturks that you may be able to get better results...

...But we won't know for sure until we try.

Taking that further for the 100 paragraphs for a black hole pheed or something is even better.

I also very much like the idea of using it/them to create SB accounts. It is booorrring to do so.

This discussion may get me to move trying mturk up my to-do list.

Maybe we could even use it some way to come up with lsi terms and more keywords or keyword variations for our niches.

And maybe getting a list of facts about a niche from one set of mturkers to be turned over to another set to write a paragraph for each fact could work.

It would be great to have plr content rewritten by a number of different people.

I am in the U.S. as well.

Jazzy

Tasari

Are you all still in the mturk project?

We need to discuss what topics we need the content for, and then choose a couple of them to start off with so everyone can benefit.

What we'll do is pick the topics that most people need if that is okay with everyone else.

So, please start listing topics on this thread...i.e...

Travel
Dogs
Cats
Pets
Cooking

The topics can be much narrower too if you want.

After we get this done this week, we can move.

Right now, I need to know a couple of other things so I know who has the means to do what.

Who can put content in once we get the topics situated?

How many are ready to post something and pay for it in the next week?

How many need something like pre paid CC's?

If you need something like this, you can send me an email thru the forum, and we can discuss me getting one for you or something. This is no problem.

I'd like to get some comments started soon if possible so we can see how things are going to work doing it this way.

Mary

I don't think we need to do a "joint project", per say...We just need to post the general details of what we did and a very short review of the quality.

We also need to find a way that non-US members can use mturk without being a burdon on the US members.

Kurt,

No, you are right. This doesn't have to be a group project at all. I can post several people's comments at a time.

My main concern is getting the people who wanted in on this project to know we can start anytime they are ready, and to give some basic direction to the project itself.

That's unless I misunderstood where you wanted to go with the porject.

The non US members would either have to send money via PayPal or other processor, or send money and get US members to buy them a CC.

I know PayPal offers a debit card if they have an account there.

Most of the other places like swift pay, or whatever it is called, does allow transfer of funds, but they charge either a monthly fee, or a transaction fee.

They can however use wallet365.com without any fees.

Plus get a prepaid cc thru graphcard.com

Hope this helps ...

Mary

I think the first step is for us in the US to post a few projects. If it doesn't work out, no point in going any further for the non-US Bombers.

Those of us that are interested should create an mturk project or two and post their tips and results here for the rest of us to use.

I'll try creating some type of project in the next 1-2 days. Everyone else interested, fire at will.

1. Research a topic using Instant Article Writer Pro and collect about 10 good paragraphs on a subject.

2. Submit the paragraphs to mturk and have them rewritten 1-3 times.
Goal: Get three different versions for $5.

3. Take each version of article and:
- A. Submit one version to squidoo/hubpages, etc.
- B. Submit one version to article directory
- C. Use one version as "chunks" to be spun with other stuff to create content for tin sites.

Cool! Look forward to your results.

Thanks, I needed that boot in the butt. I have to get a move on with this project too.

Mary

did you do the HITS job you mentioned above? How did it turn out?

anybody else tried this?

I was thinking since half the searches are 1 time and a lot of keyword searches miss actual terms people use how about for 1 cent ask people:

if you were going to buy (whatever) type in this field what you would in a search engine. Or have it do a search so they could re-type after they get whatever result.

If you were going to buy a flat screen tv what would you type in a search engine?

Regards
Warner Carter

Sorry, I haven't tried it, even though it's been on my "to do" list for 2 months. I think I'll blame Mary. j/k

I'm not sure about paying folks for their "keywords", as you get the exact info from all the keyword research. But, asking them stuff seems like a great idea for creating content.

For example, ask them "what questions do you have about buying a big screen tv?" The answers to their questions could make a great report or two.

Merry Christmas!

I just did an Mturk project.

I requested a rewrite of this sentence.

"Avoid Trans fats! Not only do they raise the lousy LDL cholesterol, they can also lower your HDL levels! (HDL is good)."

In three days I got 60 rewrites for the super expensive price of... $$$ 0.01

60 sentences for a total of $0.885

Go get 'em