I have been and will be pretty scarce for a while. School is back in session and with it, as most graduate students can attest, also comes employment. So, I’m currently double booked. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for freelancing, unfortunately. But, before I go, I do have a few things to share with you.
Climbing the CrowdSource Ladder
I leveled up!
I made it to the Level 2 Writer on CrowdSource! I was envisioning an expansion of opportunities with each level, but it doesn’t seem that’s the case. Currently I am making more per question answered, but I don’t see anything available other than the same 100- and 200-word questions. That means I am a little confused as to how you get access to additional tasks beyond the questions. Perhaps you have to level up further, or perhaps you have to apply separately like you do for an editor? I’m not sure, but I’ll try to look into it.
Transcribe the Vibes
So, quite a while ago I applied for Rev.com. Rev has freelance transcription jobs and, like CrowdSource, has a level system. After applying I got a positive email letting me know that my application was worthy. However, I also got several emails over the last few months letting me know that they were not currently adding new transcribers. These emails generally encouraged me to be patient and informed that I would eventually get a full invite. Well, that time has finally come. Today I got an email saying that I could make a full account and would have access to the lower level jobs. In the next month or so I am going to try to do at least a few of these transcription jobs and report back to you all on how they went.
Transcription, as I’ve learned from my experience on MTurk, is nothing to fuck with. For someone who types fast and has good listening/reading comprehension I thought transcription would be a breeze to pick up, but it’s not. It is by no mean impossible, but it is more difficult than it might seem at first. If you can work with an effective interface or software and get skilled at it, however, you can make around $10.00 or more/hour so I do want to give it a fair review for those who might already be doing transcription and for those who might be interested in giving it the old college try.
That’s it for now. In the next little while you can expect to hear an update on Rev and any new info I find out about CrowdSource. I hope everyone else is having a good start to the school year, whether that means your kids heading back to class, yourself hitting the books again, or even just a sign that cooler weather is coming! Let me know if you hear of any other great freelance opportunities or sites that you want me to check out!
First, I apologize for the delayed timing of this continued review. I’ve had some kind of lingering illness and malaise for the past week or so. I will generously and unfairly blame my writing partner here at this blog, since I started getting sick after a night of booze and heated intellectual discussion with him. I am back to feeling mostly normal again and I’ve finally worked up a video to further discuss my experience at Crowdsource and share some of the do’s and don’ts I’ve learned the hard way so far.
*WARNING* The video above is a bit long and a bit rambling, but there are several different aspects of the Crowdsource experience I thought you all would like to hear about and I did a bit of improvising as far as the structure. I’ll go over the main points here in a somewhat more logical way, if you prefer some silly logic over off-the-cuff rambling.
Check Out the Forum
You’ll find the forums for current and prospective workers at http://forum.crowdsource.com . You can find a lot of helpful information on the forums pertaining to specific tasks or specific issues that people are commonly encountering. You can also find a bit of off-putting discussion about the many issues workers have with the current tiered system. I have to admit that if I had viewed the forums before joining the site, I might not have bothered with it. What you need to keep in mind, however, is that the forum is mostly composed of the most serious workers who take their writer level and their tasks very seriously. These writers are not only venting, but also trying to offer constructive criticisms for what is, apparently, quite a new system of leveling and tiered work. But, as I said, in addition to all of this meta discussion there is a lot of helpful info and advice about the specific tasks and AP style preferences and the like. Speaking of AP style and the tiered system takes us to the next section of discussion.
Pass/Fail Trials and Tribulations
So, if you remember in my first video I breezed right on through a large chunk of questions in a greedy grab for bonuses and payouts. Well, dear readers, don’t make this mistake. The site is pretty stringent when it comes to properly following AP style and the specific task Style Guides. Go ahead and do a few tasks at first, then wait for your feedback to see if there are any mistakes you are making throughout. You need to get used to the preferred style and tone of the answers before you go diving off the deep end, like I did. My numbers very nearly dropped to below the required 60% pass rate required to continue writing because of mostly small mistakes that I could have avoided by doing a few test runs first. The good news is that you still get paid for questions you fail!
You might be thinking, as I did, “What? They pay me for sucking?!” Well, yes. I think this is one of the more confusing aspects of the tiered system as it stands. Currently, if your work requires few edits then you pass and your passes count towards advancing through the levels. If you fail, you get paid but you fall down the ladder towards potentially not being able to write any further answers. Of course, this system is set up to weed out those who are doing shoddy work consistently and have no business writing for the site. In my opinion, however, I think there should be three levels instead. If you do horribly, plagiarize, write a bunch of nonsense, and the work is unusable without substantial edits then you should fail without pay. If your work can still be used but requires a fair number of edits and corrections, you should pass but should not advance towards higher level jobs. If you do very well, your answer requires little edits and follows the rules with precision and style then you should be advanced towards the higher levels. Now, as I mentioned above, this system is fairly new and they are still trying to work out the kinks and get it to a level that the good writers are satisfied with so we’ll just have to stay tuned on this issue. For now, keep in mind that to advance AND to keep writing at all, you need to be very cautious with your writing.
Where the Money At?
I was actually pleasantly surprised with the payout structure of the site. The waiting game starts after you submit your answers and must wait for an editor to come along and review your work. The 100-word answers seem to take quite a long time to get reviewed most of the time. I still have several from the first few days that have not been reviewed yet. From what I understand, this stems from the fact that many of the new or inexperienced users are answering these questions and the editors hate having to go through and heavily edit these. Despite this fact, the large majority of my tasks have been approved in a pretty timely manner. Once your work is reviewed, you will see the amount earned in the “Owed” column. The day after your work is reviewed, Crowdsource will transfer the money right into your Paypal account. *(I assume this is the same if you are working through MTurk or another platform, but I can’t be positive since I’m hooked up only through my Paypal account.) This means that fairly regularly your work will be reviewed and your pay will be in your Paypal account within a few days, not bad! So far I’ve made over $100 which is about 1/3 of my total MTurk earnings over a much larger period of time.
Support Me
Another important aspect of the platform that I did not discuss in the first video if the Support system. If you have any questions or concerns you can go to http://support.crowdsource.com/support/home and file a new support ticket. Now, for both the support site and the forum site, you will have to create an account. Just use the same info you used to create your main account. I’m guessing it is set up this way because of the various platforms that can be used to access the actual work, necessitating separate accounts for CrowdSource specific services. Anyway, once you get set up filing a new ticket and checking on it is pretty intuitive. You’ll get an email whenever a CSR has responded so you don’t have to keep watching the site. You will get to see a friendly face and name with your response, so it feels quite personable and not like some kind of auto-generated response. If you encounter some fails you feel are unjustified for one reason or another, make sure to file a ticket to not only try to get it overturned, but also to make the employees aware of potentially unfair editors/the potential unfairness of the system as it currently stands.
I think that’s pretty much about it for now. If you have any other questions you want answered before diving in, make sure to leave a comment and let me know! Also, if you know of similar sites I would LOVE to know about them! I’m having a hard time going back to the MTurk grind after the higher pay and entertainment value of CrowdSource, so I would love to know about some other simple freelance writing sites that do not involve bidding on projects and the like. If you know of any other sites for earning a little extra cash, writing based or not, let me know and I’ll have a look and try to do a review of them!
So, I started my CrowdSource journey today and so far I am pretty pleased! I worked up a quick video discussing the site, their bonus system, and my initial impressions. Check it out below:
The reason I am a history major and why I toyed around with the idea of becoming a librarian is that I really enjoying researching things, being able to answer people’s questions, and to drop knowledge on y’all. In this way, CrowdSource is perfect for me! I first did a few questions that took me a while to research and try to find the perfect answer and then….I noticed all the Pokémon questions. Aw yis, here we go, something I already knew answers to and knew just where to go to find the sources to back up my knowledge.
I will now be making my livelihood telling people what Shiny Pokémon are.
I did a total of 15 jobs today, for a pending total of over $40 with the first bonus, and I’m going to wait and see what kind of feedback I get before I do some more. I’ll be keeping you all updated and let you know how the approval process goes, how stable the question pool is, and any other quirks of the site that I encounter along the way. As always, feel free to leave any comments or suggestions here or on the YouTube video! I’m always eager to try out some new sites too, so if you know of any places that I could check out and review then do leave those below!
So, yesterday I did a huge batch of the wonderful Project Endor HITs and I’m now a member of the 1K Turking club, y’all!
Now, each of these HITs only paid $.03 so I’m not rich after doing over 500, but I did have a pretty good day. This is a good example of finding a nice batch that will go quickly, help you get your numbers up, and pay fairly well. In these particular HITs they each took me about 10-25 seconds and simply involved recording a spoken phrase. Now, if you haven’t checked out Project Endor HITs before, you definitely need to. The rumor is that Project Endor is actually Google and judging by how much these HITs made me fear that Google Glass is going to take over the world (“OK Glass, start an experiment”…. ) that conjecture seems to fit. Either way, PE pays fairly, approves quickly, and is a low-risk requester.
In other news, I got approved for CrowdSource! This means that once I get my set up emails and get everything squared away on their online platform, known as WorkStation, I’ll start letting y’all know what the experience is like. Be sure to leave me a comment if you have any experience already with CrowdSource and have any tips or tricks for me before I dive in!
Felicitous Freelancing 