mindfield cookies #2

The second box of cookies arrived from MindField for product testing (they are really good). I need to wait until MindField sends me a link to the second survey and then I will report back on my compensation. So far I'm not complaining about free cookies!

mturk earnings to date

I haven't been able to set aside much time for Turking in the last two weeks, so rather than weekly earnings here are my Turking Statistics to date. In roughly eight weeks I've made $766.93. I'm looking forward to having more time to devote to the site once the holidays are over.

more gift cards earned

Things have been busy lately with the holidays and out of town guests, I haven't had much time for Turking. I've been able to keep up with surveys and cashed in for $10 gift cards from both Tellwut and OpinionSquare this week. My wife is enjoying CheckPoints and she redeemed another $10 Amazon card this week as well.  The Christmas budget is getting bigger!

Tellwut

OpinionSquare

Checkpoints

product testing for mindfield

MindField is a survey and product marketing web site that I joined last month. Today I received my first product for review via UPS. It's a new type of cookie made by a well-known brand. The letter included with the package explains that I will need to complete a survey about these cookies and then I will be sent a second type of cookie for review. Once I've completed the second survey I will be compensated $10. SWEET!

This is my first experience with MindField and I believe they are better known for paid surveys than for product testing. I have only logged into my account a few times and have completed one very short $3.00 survey, which led to testing the cookies. The surveys seem to pay well relative to other sites, here is one that was listed when I logged in today:

Unfortunately MindField is looking for respondents who are mothers so I don't qualify for this one. Mindfield has a series of panels that you can answer to help them match you to surveys, to date the panels include:

Housesehold Profile Panel
General Interests Panel
Occupation Panel
Homeowner Panel
Electronics and Entertainment Media Panel
Health and Wellness Panel
Health, Hygiene and Beauty Aids Panel
Travel and Leisure Panel
Mothers And Children Panel
Primary Grocery Shoppers Panel
Books and Magazine Readership Pane

I just filled out 5 more panels today, here's hoping I qualify for even more surveys. I have noticed that the surveys go quickly, and often when I've gotten to them the quota has been full. MindField also offers an app that I intend to download to my phone. The cookies are delicious and I will keep you updated as my product testing progresses.

You can sign up for MindField for free here.

review: chacha can dance on out of my life

What is ChaCha? It's a free cell phone service that answers any question texted by the user. Questions like, "What does an adult gorilla weigh?" or "Are ramen noodles healthy?" or even "What's your motherf****** problem motherf*****???" are not uncommon. ChaCha makes their money serving up ads in all of their response texts. I will not be doing any work for this company.

I signed on with ChaCha as a Vetter. A Vetter looks at all of the possible answers submitted by ChaCha Guides and chooses the most appropriate to text back to the client. If there is no acceptable answer the Vetter uses a search tool provided by ChaCha to find the correct response.

I spent nearly 30 minutes watching orientation videos at "ChaCha University" and then another 30 minutes taking a qualification test vetting answers. Unfortunately the test offered NO answers from Guides for me to vet on any of the 10 questions, I had to look up all of the answers myself. Searching and crafting an answer took from 1-3 minutes per question. And what is the pay rate? One half cent per question, that's right $00.005. Half of a freakin' penny. Even if one could answer a question every 30 seconds that's only 1 cent per minute, or 60 cents per hour. No thanks.

I wasted an hour of my life dancing around with ChaCha and I will never get those sixty minutes back. Don't make the same mistake I did, look for other options like MTurk, Tellwut, and Swagbucks to earn extra cash and gift cards online.

review: opinion square is just ok

I've been a member of Opinion Square for 35 days and in that time I've earned 2800 points - one $10.00 CVS gift card costs 2500 points but I haven't redeemed anything yet. In addition to merchandise, Opinion Square offers gift cards for Starbucks, Amazon, iTunes, Applebees, TGI Friday's, AMC Theatres, Bass Pro Shops, KMart, Cabela's, O'Charley's, and more.

I enjoy taking surveys but I'm on the fence about Opinion Square. They often send me email alerts that a study is available, and when I click the link I'm informed that I've already taken the survey (I would estimate that this happens 70% of the time). This drives me nuts, I wish they would stop.

The other thing that's irritating and a time sucker is that you must first qualify for many of the surveys. So you take a pre-survey only to find out you don't qualify for the real survey, and often the pre-survey questions ask for information that Opinion Square already has about you. When a member doesn't qualify for a survey they are given a consolation token - tokens are spent on a game that awards additional points, generally 25 points at a time. Personally, I'd rather they did away with the pre-qual surveys altogether.

Here is a screenshot of my account activity since I signed up on Oct. 11:

You can see that I've completed eight surveys (none more than 10 minutes long) and I have won points with the consolations tokens that I received.

I should mention that Opinion Square offers software for download that they say increases the surveys that are offered. The software is not available for Mac so I can't use it. I'm reluctantly going to stick with Opinion Square for now, I'll continue to track my earnings and decide if I feel my membership is worth it over the next few months.

first tellwut gift card

My first Amazon gift card from Tellwut arrived today, I redeemed the points four days ago and we just had a postal holiday, pretty quick delivery. I was surprised that Tellwut ships the physical cards as opposed to simply emailing a code. I'd say the packaging and shipping were relatively expensive for a $10 reward - the blank gift card and plain envelope came in a large padded mailer.

This is great, I was planning to save these cards to purchase gifts for Christmas, but I may be giving them as gifts, cards and all. My wife says that these are not appropriate gifts for the holidays because the cards say "thank you". I don't care, who's going to complain?

mini review: my wife loves swagbucks

My wife has been an avid SwagBucks user for over a year now and she's earned more than $150 in Paypal gift cards in that time. Mainly she uses the search toolbar and earns points for everything she searches for, but she also watches videos for points, answers surveys, and prints coupons through the site (she's an extreme coupon user).

I must admit SwagBucks is not for me, I prefer the google search engine and haven't been very interested in poking around the SB site. To each their own - my better half can't stand Tellwut! There's no question that SwagBucks is one of the most trusted, popular, and well-known paid sites out there. If you'd like to give it a try you can sign up for free here.

postloop

I joined Postloop just yesterday, so not much to report yet. A friend of mine recommended this site, she is at home with her kids all day and uses Tellwut and Postloop to to pay for new DVD's, dinners out, and other non-essentials. Postloop rewards points for posting comments on forums and blogs. From what I can tell this will not be a big moneymaker, but should go nicely with my Tellwutting (what?) to pad the holiday spending budget.

Once I signed up I had to create 10 posts for review on the Postloop forum. I received an email today letting me know I had been approved with a score of 4.1 out of 5 and this feedback, "Good posts, but do some longer ones and start new discussion topics too. Welcome to Postloop." Today I joined a few of the promoted forums on topics I enjoy and made a few posts, we'll see what happens!

Joining Postloop is free and you can sign up here.

mturk weekly earnings 11/11/12

The following is a summary of activity for my Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Nov 10, 2012.

Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 1,120
- Number of HITs rejected: 3
- Bonus reward earned: $6.77
- HIT reward earned: $96.82
- Total Amount earned this week: $103.59

Are you new to Mechanical Turk?

mini review: thoughts on tellwut

I started using the survey site Tellwut on 10/11/12. The surveys are very quick (generally 1-5 questions) and reward points that can be redeemed for gift cards and merchandise. I signed up to help pay for Christmas presents this year and have decided to redeem my points in Amazon cards. I spend about 10 minutes a day completing the new surveys that are posted (I'm going to start timing myself and add that info to my spread sheet). Here are my stats so far:

10/11/12 joined site
11/4/12 redeemed $10 Amazon gift card
11/9/12 redeemed $10 Amazon gift card

Tellwut also offers gift cards for Home Depot, Walmart, Best Buy, and other brick and mortar stores, I'm hoping they will offer a Paypal option soon. Surveys reward between 5-10 points (business surveys will earn you 15). You can also create surveys to earn points. It takes 4000 points for a $10 gift card, which works out to 5 cents per 20 points. The surveys only take a few seconds each and so far I'm happy with what the rewards for what little work I've put in.

Tellwut gives you 100 free points just for signing up, click to join here.

mturk weekly earnings 11/04/12

The following is a summary of activity for my Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Nov 03, 2012.

Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 2,936
- Number of HITs rejected: 15
- Bonus reward earned: $7.20
- HIT reward earned: $142.24
- Total Amount earned this week: $149.44

Are you new to Mechanical Turk?


 

mturk weekly earnings 10/21/12

The following is a summary of activity of my Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Oct 20, 2012.

Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 1,452
- Number of HITs rejected: 1
- Bonus reward earned: $10.39
- HIT reward earned: $115.72
- Total Amount earned this week: $126.11

Are you new to Mechanical Turk?


 

mturk weekly earnings 10/14/12

The following is a summary of activity for my Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Oct 13, 2012.

Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 651
- Number of HITs rejected: 3
- Bonus reward earned: $7.00
- HIT reward earned: $156.56
- Total Amount earned this week: $163.56

Are you new to Mechanical Turk?
 

thoughts on mechanical turk

I joined Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) at the beginning of October after doing a lot of research online about the web site and the way it works. I have three MTurk forums listed in the sidebar to the right, they all are a wealth of information for anyone new to Mechanical Turk.

Basically, Mturk is a crowdsourcing platform that allows businesses (known as requesters) to post small tasks, surveys, transcription assignments, and other human intelligence tasks (HITs) for workers to complete for pay. The pay per task can range anywhere form 1 cent to 10 dollars and up. You can find detailed info on MTurk at the Wikipedia page.

I plan to post earnings from Mturk every week, as well as insights into some of the things I've learned along the way. 

If you decide to give MTurk a try you will need a verified Paypal account as well as an Amazon payments account, You can sign up for MTurk here.