What’s an unemployed graduate student to do over the summer?
With temporarily limited transportation options and a strong drive to limit the amount of contact with the sticky Southern heat, the most obvious choice is work done from the comfort of my own (air-conditioned) abode. Enter freelance work.
First, I want to address the word “freelance.” I think when a lot of people use this f-word they are often talking about the freelance work of a more simple time; writing articles for small newspapers and magazines and hoping to move up along the ranks towards a more stable professional writing career. While that sounds groovy, I’m mostly aiming for something more temporary and fleeting. I will be throwing “freelance” around to cover, basically, any kind of writing/clerical/survey/etc. task that I can get paid to do on the internet. Sadly, for my wallet that is, this will generally exclude anything involving webcams, chat rooms, and/or genitalia. (Incidentally, an “Adult” Freelance blog sounds like it would be fascinating; I would imagine there are so many more types of work out there than we would even imagine and they would all provide entertaining blog fodder. If you’re so inclined for that sort of work, I say go for it; if you feel you can take advantage of routes that allow you to make some coin while enacting your own sexual agency, more power to you. As for me, however, I’m sticking with a more vanilla route. At least until the grad school bills start rolling in…)
Thanks, you’re too sweet!
So, where to start? I have been reading up about different freelancing opportunities for writers online for about six months. Over the spring, however, I was keeping a blog for one class and reading 100+ student blogs for grading every month, so that didn’t leave much time for experimentation. I did start an Examiner.com account and post a few articles on there. It’s definitely good practice for writing for a wider (read: non-academic) audience, but the $.45 I’ve earned so far is a little underwhelming. Of course Examiner pays on a per post, per views, per subscriber, etc. pyramid so, to really make money at it, you need to be writing one or more articles per day. This is probably why my rate of 1/month is proving less than fruitful.
While I haven’t completely written off Examiner, I need something more immediate, more customizable, and more productive at the moment. Along with this blog, which is a joint project and product in and of itself, I’m starting out with one of the most direct routes to getting some freelance coin (literally coins, often times): Amazon Mechanical Turk – Artificial Artificial Intelligence.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a crowdsource platform for the tasks that our future computer overlords have not yet been able to master. There are a wide variety of tasks and potential payouts available through the site. I say it is one of the most direct routes you can take because after you are signed up, you can start immediately doing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITS). The HITS start out at $.01 for tasks like identifying products on receipts. Some of these smaller hits, like the ones typing words from receipts, will pay you bonuses depending on your accuracy. Other tasks will pay you anywhere from a $1 to $20+, but the price generally reflects the level of time you are going to have to put into the tasks.
So far, I’ve been plucking away as a Turker (that’s the lingo the kids are using, of course) for about two days. My earnings are at around $30. I’ve tried to do a variety of tasks with a variety of pay scales to start to get an idea of what is worth pursuing and what is just too much effort. For the next few days I am going to continue trying different HITS and then I’ll begin sharing some of my thoughts with you all on what is working for me and what is more of a flop. Speaking of flops, why are there so many $0.00 HITS? Is this some kind of secret I’m as of yet unaware of? If you know the answer to this mystery or you have Turk experience and want to share some advice, leave a comment below!
Cheers,
KHM
This will be me in a few days, y’all, writing to tell you about all the money I’m bringing in with these $.01 HITS!
Felicitous Freelancing 