Written by Russell Brunson, Overnight Success Maker
This is another service that I wasn’t sure how to exploit when I first saw it, but within a few minutes we were using its power to drive traffic to our websites! But before I show you how to use this site, I want to tell you the background story on why it’s called the “mechanical turk”.
The mechanical turk was a fake chess playing machine someone made in the 18th century. The box was supposed to be like a computer that could beat humans at chess. The box toured around and beat some of the best chess players of the time. Years later they found out that it was just a hoax and actually had a small Turk inside of the box who was really good at chess.
Recently, Amazon launched a new service (called the mechanical turk) that allows you to hire people from around the world for micro-projects and pay anywhere from $.01 to a few bucks each. I’ve heard stories of people who have used this service for a lot of different things. I heard that one person wanted to show his wife how much he loved her, so he put an offer of $.10 to text his wife that he loved her, and within a few hours she was receiving hundreds of text messages from around the world.
So, how do you think you could use a service like this to make more money…? We’re currently using it in a lot of ways in our company. I don’t want to spoil the creative ideas that you may be having (because there are an unlimited number of ways to use this service), but here are a few ideas that might get your creative juices flowing:
- Backlinking: We all know that backlinking is one of the most tedious tasks in the world, but if you are only paying $.05 to each person who gives you a link, and you can get 2,000 people to do that quickly for you – just image the diversity and quantity of links you can get in record time.
- Get unique content written: Take your articles and instead of using a spinner (which rarely turns out good articles) break them down into paragraphs. Then have 30 people re-write each paragraph. So, if you have an article with 10 paragraphs, you would create one project with 300 HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). In theory you’d have 300 people each re-write one paragraph. Now, you have 30 variations of paragraph one, 30 of paragraph two, and so on. You can now mix and match that article and make hundreds of variations of new articles all from one article!
- Researching or pulling data for you: If you have a list of people – or the type of people you’d like to contact – you can setup a project and get people to find the data for you. For example, if you’d like the contact information for all of the people on the first five pages of Google for the keyword “make money online” (or the first five pages for 10, 20 or 100 different keywords) you could easily get others to get that information for you and it would cost you less than a nice dinner for two.
The possibilities are literally endless. I’ve seen people using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to build their Twitter and Facebook followings. I’ve seen people use it to get backlinks, create social media pages, research data and more. It gives you the ability to tap into a virtual workforce of thousands of people where you only pay them pennies for a micro-project.
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