Also check out our original blog:

Workamping World Tour 2011



Showing posts with label income. Show all posts
Showing posts with label income. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Mechanical Turk

Are you ready for that next source of seconday income? We'll share that with you in just a moment. The objective is to get together many reliable sources that can each produce a small amount of money. Once you do that, you will find how easy it is to generate some additional income.

Have you ever heard of Mechanical Turk? This is a website operated by Amazon.com that lets you perform various tasks for money. These tasks are known as "HITS" (Human Intelligence Tasks). There are many HITS that you can perform. The HITS may include doing research, URL verification, search engine tests, writing an essay, or completing a survey. These HITS will pay you anywhere from one penny up to thirty dollars. But, be careful....and be selective. We'll explain why as we go.

Here is the process of how Mechanical Turk works. Sign up for an account at
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Next, you choose a HIT that you would like to complete. Once approved, the amount that the HIT was worth is deposited into your Amazon.com account. You can then purchase Amazon.com items directly from that account, or have it deposited into your personal bank account. It's that simple. But here are a few tips before you begin.

We personally stick with HITS in the .25 to $1.00 range. We are very careful at completing any HITS that are worth more than $1.00. Some are legitimate, and others are questionable. Some will offer you $25, but you (in our opinion) have to give way too much personal information, like cell phone numbers, addresses, etc. There are many college research labs that place various surveys on this site. Those are our favorites. Five or ten minutes spent to make .50 to $1.00. Each hour spent on the site usually earns about $2.50. Yes, way below minimum wage. But, we look at it this way. We perform HITS for 1 hour, about 3 times a week. That's 3 hours a week times $2.50, which equals $7.50 a week, or $30 per month. Wait, there's two of us, so we've generated $60 a month. Not bad.

Remember, take the small amounts that we can generate each month through various methods, and add them up. Hey, we will even keep a running tally for you as we share our secondary income methods. Mechanical Turk generates $60 a month for us. The other surveys that we spoke about in our last blog, between cash, dinner gift cards and other items, produce about $30 a month for us. So we are at $90 of secondary monthly income so far, for (honestly) doing very little. 

We have many other ways to generate income. We have some "big hitters" coming soon. We tried to start with the smaller income providers and work our way up. Stay posted...there's more coming soon! 

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Making Money

Due to the overwhelming response to our travel blog, we have decided to start a separate blog. This blog will share the various ways that we make money while we travel. Yes, we have proven that you can "Live and Travel on Minimum Wage". While our primary income is from the jobs that we work at, we do have many other methods that provide us with some nice secondary income.

Our first recommendation is to take a look at a book. Yes....you may need to invest a little, but it is well worth it. Let us tell you why this book would be a good buy. We will share with you the various ways to "think outside of the box" to make money. If we tried to explain each and every avenue at this very moment, then it would take many hours of typing. If you want a shortcut instead of waiting for us to write each week, then look at this e-book.
Jason and Kelly Odom wrote a book:

Vanabode™ - how to happily camp, travel and live forever on $20 a day

This book has so much information. It helped us set up a plan to truly live and travel on minimum wage.

But if you want to pass on the book, then here is our first way to make a little extra income. Surveys.

Yes, you can sign up and perform surveys through your email. Some will pay you a few dollars per survey. Some offer gift cards, free hotel stays, entries into sweepstakes and more. We have earned money doing these surveys, a couple of restaurant and store gift cards, and some free hotel stays. If you follow our other blog, the hotel in Atlantic City was free with the coupons that we earned through completing surveys. Nice!

Here are the ones that we use:

Again, you will not get rich doing surveys. The trick to this lifestyle is to have primary work that you occasionally perform as you travel. Then put together many smaller projects that can generate a small amount of cash. When you have built up a nice portfolio of these "smaller" ways to make cash, then they really start to add up! How many do we have? Well, at this moment we have over twenty projects that all produce a small amount of cash. But when we add them up....well, now you should get the picture. It may not be too long before those smaller projects become our primary source of income!