This was over the course of 2.5 years using it sporadically for supplemental income.

Sometimes I would get into a pickle and work really hard with 2 monitors and all the add ons at full speed and make $80 a day. Other times I would get on a few times in the week and make a few bucks. (like this month) and other times completely ignoring it altogether for many months.

But there's no doubt that amazon mechanical turk combined with some other at-home internet-based incomes has saved my ass a few times and even paid my rent.

Here is my dashboard that shows my earnings.

So I, like everyone else, logged onto mturk with no clue did a few hits making only pennies and then signed up on http://www.mturkgrind.com/ and started reading over the help section of their forum as well as asking some newb questions. Eventually I got the hang of it and was working my way up the mturk ladder. One weird survey or batch of mindless data entry at a time. I did everything from categorizing porn, to recording my voice over and over for voice recognition apps, to tracing objects in images, and many things in-between and I got paid for it! Sometimes I even got paid well. Other times not so much, but I just had a window open with some add ons while I did my normal dicking-around-on-the-internet.

That is the next thing I want to talk to you about. The add-ons that helped me immensely in earning money without wasting time.

The first mturk addon I got that changed everything was page monitor. It made a "ding" any time a page I watched (ie - a certain requester's name in the search can be added so you are notified any time they post work) changed it would alert me. That add-on seems to be completely changed and obsolete now but now there is Turk Master.

Oh, by the way, you need to install tamper monkey or grease monkey to install these scripts. I was a die-hard FF user for many years but the past few I have been on chrome. It was faster for my turking and I ended up just sticking with it FT.

The next super important script is hitscraper.

This script allows you to search for hits and create a block list of requesters you don't want to see and change different parameters.

Another valuable thing to learn is PANDA and Auto refresh. This combo is absolutely essential to earning big bucks on mturk. Once all of a certain hit or batch is gone you will be told there are no more hits in that group but by altering the link and adding the words "andaccept" to a certain bit, you can put it on a timer, and refresh it every second or two and if someone elses timer runs out or if they decide to throw it back, you can get it! I have caught hits up to $50 this way using PANDA. Essential.

Here is a tutorial on that:
http://www.mturkgrind.com/threads/the-panda-trick-more.26816/

Then something awesome that happened.

After several years of doing hit after hit and dreaming of being awarded with the elusive "Mater's" qualification I woke up and checked my mail and there it was. I actually cried a little. Not even kidding. Because it really helps getting the masters. (You can do well without it if you learn to get closed qualifications) I had actually had dreams about getting it. I was pretty obsessed with turking for awhile. Simply because it fascinated me.

Qualifications

These are super important. You can search for them and should do so regularly. During slow times just request as many as you can. Some require tests, do them. This can be the key to big bucks. You can end up with access to hits that only a small group of people hold. This is called a "closed" qualification.

Turkopticon

Turkers are a pretty clever bunch (if I do say so myself) and they created turkopticon which is a way for us to rate requesters on generosity, fairness, promptness, and communicativity. You can rate requesters this way and also get the script and see bad requesters before accepting hits. If you don't pay attention to those you could get massive rejects and have a very horrible approval rate. Out of my 37k (And change) hits only 52 were rejected. That puts me at 99.9% accuracy. If your accuracy is too low you can really screw yourself.

You won't instantly make the mad money.

You have to build up your hits to open more hits. A lot of requesters only want people with 5k, 10k, etc. So you have to find a safe numbers batch. (Mturkgrind has a blog all about getting numbers up)

Another place to check out is: https://www.reddit.com/r/hitsworthturkingfor

And another handy script is "Projected Earnings" This will tell you how much you have made.

In fact, here is a link to Greasy fork with a list of user scripts for mturk.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/by-site/mturk.com

So, if you want to try out mturk, realize it's going to take time and dedication.

Get yourself a second monitor, read up on forums, and start figuring out which requesters you like and adding them to turk master. Eventually you will find yourself making some decent pocket change.

And if you want to surpass me learn autohotkey and also learn to make your own scripts. I am probably going to look into that once I get back into it. I never did before out of pure laziness but that'll give you a real leg up.

You may have noticed my recent earning are tiny, that is because I burnt myself out on mturk and am taking one of my breaks. I have a lot of different ways I make money and I am currently focusing on some of the other ones but I will definitely be back to mturk in the future.