Promote Your Content Using Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a great website for making money in your spare time. However, not many people know that Mechanical Turk makes it easy and fun to cheaply promote your website or blog content. Even better, you can use it to promote your articles, videos, and other content published here at Associated Content, provided you are careful not to violate AC's Terms of Use.

According to Amazon.com, Mechanical Turk allows you to "Ask workers to complete HITs - 'Human Intelligence Tasks'..." or tasks that require human logic to complete instead of computer input. For example, you just published a video tutorial here at Associated Content. You want to promote your video, so you create a HIT on Mechanical Turk that asks workers to write an honest review of your video, and post their review and a link to your video on their blog or website.

Why Mechanical Turk?

In the aforementioned situation of wanting a review of your latest video tutorial, there are at least three important benefits to using Mechanical Turk. 1) You get more web exposure. Exposure is an important part of web content promotion. 2) You get a web link, which should benefit your search engine placement. 3) You get someone else's honest opinion of your work.

However, be warned: if you ask your Mechanical Turk workers to give you an honest review, in most cases that's exactly what you will get. If they don't like your video or find your narrator's voice annoying, they WILL say so. After all, that's what you are paying them to do.

This article will show you how to get started promoting your content at Amazon Mechanical Turk. We will be using the video tutorial example to create our sample HIT. Of course, you will want to replace my title and description, etc. with your own.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do is point your browser to mturk.com. Next, click the "Get Started" button under the "Get Results from Mechanical Turk Workers" heading. This takes you to the Requester section of the site.

In the top right corner of your browser window, you will see a Sign In link. Click on it to go to the Amazon.com Sign In page. If you have an Amazon account already, simply sign in.

If you don't already have an Amazon account, enter your email address and indicate that you are a new user, then click the "Sign in" button to begin creating your account. Follow the instructions to create your Amazon account.

In the same way Mechanical Turk uses your Amazon account to keep track of your account information, it also uses Amazon Payments to keep track of payments made.

To set up your Amazon Payments account, sign in to Mechanical Turk if you haven't already. After you are signed in, click on the "Your Account" tab at the top of the browser window, then click the Account Settings link. Once on the Account Settings page, click the "Manage Your Amazon Payments Account" link. This will open a new Amazon sign in window. Sign in (again). Decide how you want to pay for your HITs, and enter either your credit card info or your bank account info. Note: You may be required to verify your bank account before you can use that account to pay for HITs.

Tip: I use my Mechanical Turk worker reward balance in Amazon Payments to pay for my HITs. This way it really doesn't cost me anything but a bit of time to create HITs. Besides, being a Mechanical Turk worker is fun!

Paying Up

Mechanical Turk requires that you prepay for HITs using your Amazon Payments account, so you need to deposit some money into your Mechanical Turk account. But how much?

Each HIT costs you the worker reward plus the Mechanical Turk fee, which is the higher of $.005(USD) or 10% of the reward times the number of workers. So if you want 10 reviews, at $.20 apiece, you will need $2.20 in your Mechanical Turk account to create the HIT. The rewards and fees are debited from your account as you approve each worker's submission. This means that if you do not approve a submission, the worker does not get paid, and you don't get charged for poorly completed work.

Tip: Personally, I find it easier to just deposit the total amount I have budgeted to spend on Mechanical Turk promotions, and then divide the budget by the number of HITs I want to create to find out how much I can spend per HIT.

Creating Your First HIT

Return to the requester.mturk.com page. Click on the "Create HITs" tab, then click on the "Create an Advanced HIT" link, and follow these steps to create your first Mechanical Turk HIT.

1) Enter the title of your HIT, and short description of what you want done. For example, if you want reviews of your new Photoshop tutorial video, you might enter "Review My Photoshop Tutorial" for the title, and for the description: "Watch my video and post a review and link on your blog." Next, you will enter the keywords (tags) for your HIT, such as "review" and "blog".

2) Next, you need to decide how long you want the HIT to be available to workers. The longer you have it up, the more likely you are to get the full number of workers to complete it, so set this for at least 14 days. You can add more time later if you need to.

3) Now you need to write out your instructions for the HIT. Be clear, and concise as to exactly how you want the HIT completed. For example, you might enter, "Go to my_associated_content_photoshop_tutorial_url and watch the entire 3 minute video. After you have watched the video, write a review of at least 50 words. I am especially interested what you liked (or not) about the production quality, and whether you felt it would be useful to a photoshop novice. Post your review and a link to the video on your blog or website. Type or paste the URL of your blog post or webpage in the box below to get credit for this HIT."

Tip: Don't forget to include the link to the content you want to promote in your instructions!

4) After you have hashed out the instructions, you need to decide how long to give workers to complete the task. A couple hours ought to do it.

5) For this HIT you don't need to add a picture or video, since your video is hosted elsewhere online, so we can skip to the next section.

6) Next, choose the answer format. Since you only need the URL of the worker's review posting, simply click on the "Free Text Answer" button under "Select Answer Format".

7) Now you need to decide how many workers you need and how much you are going to pay them. In my experience the easiest way to make this decision is to first decide how much I want to spend total, and then decide how much I want to pay the Mechanical Turk workers. Typical HIT rewards to workers for website and blog reviews range between $.20 and $1.00 (US Dollars). For your first HIT, start toward the low end of the scale, and increase your reward amounts on subsequent HITs if you have trouble getting workers.

You have decided that your budget for this project is $5.00, and you want to pay workers a $.20 reward for reviewing your video. Mechanical Turk charges a fee of 10% of the reward times the number of workers for each HIT reward you pay, so we need to figure that in too. Confusing? Fortunately, we can use the calculator to help us.

In the "Assignments" box under the "Pay for Your HIT heading", type 10, and type .20 in the next box. The calculator now shows that you will pay a total of $2.20 for this HIT. Change the Assignments box to 22, and the calculator should now show that $4.84 is the total you will need to pay for this HIT.

8) Click the "Preview" button to see how your HIT will look to your Mechanical Turk workers. If it looks alright, click "Continue". If not, click "Edit" to go back and make changes. Remember, once you click Continue you cannot edit your HIT, so make sure everything is correct before continuing.

Note: Unless you have put money in your Mechanical Turk account, you will get an error message when you click Continue that will direct you to deposit money in your Mechanical Turk account.

9) Once you are sure your HIT is ready to go, click the "Create Hit" button. Congratulations! You have created your first HIT!

10) Check your Manage HITs tab at requester.mturk.com periodically to see if anyone has completed your HIT. If so, there will be a link next to "Assignments Pending Review". Click the link, and copy the URL with which the user answered your HIT into the address bar of a new browser window or tab.

11) If the worker made a decent effort to complete the HIT, go back to mturk and click the checkbox next to "approve submission" on the pending review tab, and click the button to approve the work. If you are unhappy with the submission (keeping in mind that you were asking for an honest review), reject the submission instead.

12) Watch your Associated Content page views rise!

Warning!

One important thing to remember is that according to the Terms of Service at Amazon Mechanical Turk, "You may not ask workers to provide personally identifiable information, violate the terms of service of another site, or click on affiliate links or ads." Failing to abide by their Terms of Service can be a banning offense, and the worker community WILL report violators. Transgress at your own risk.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a great way to promote your content, head over to Amazon Mechanical Turk at mturk.com. You will find a great community and more importantly, you will find a community happy to help you promote your content.