Making Money Online - A Discourse on Several Sites that Pay.

Lately, I have referred several people to some "make money online" opportunities. Today, someone else referred me to another one. I think it is likely to be useful if I write out the low-down on a few crowdsourcing and telecommuting sites.
The main downside to working online is that it takes a while to build up a good income. I started on Mechanical Turk, found at www.mturk.com. I transcribed business cards with a ten minute time limit and was paid a whopping $0.02 a piece. Then I started taking surveys and got as much as $2.00. but usually less than $1.00. There are transcription jobs on there that pay $50 or more, and have 12 hour time limits, and some have time limits lasting several days. You have to become "qualified" for those jobs, though.
Mechanical Turk jobs are called HITs, for Human Intelligence Tasks. There are many ways the employers, which are called requesters, determine your qualification for different HITs: taking tests, having certain number of similar jobs under your belt with a minimum rate of success, completing a minimum number of tasks on the site successfully and with a certain ratio of successful vs. unsuccessful task, and others.

Above, you will see that some of these jobs pay quite well, for a job on a crowdsourcing site. I am not considered qualified, though. For some qualifications, all you have to do is ask to be qualified, so it is still worth it to check out jobs you are not yet qualified for. Click "request qualification" or "take qualification test," and then see what happens.

If you check the box, "For which you are qualified" you will only see jobs the site knows you are qualified for - this does not guarantee you can do the job, and I will explain that later. You can limit how low the pay can be too, in the "that pay at least..." box. Here, I typed in $1.00. You can view details like who the requester is and what they want you to do by clicking the title. "View a HIT in this group,"over on the right, is where you go if you want to give it a shot.

More details are given here, usually. BE CAREFUL TO READ EVERYTHING. If there is anything key in making money online, it is that very statement. That is true for any site you go on. Sometimes you will get in here, and find the survey is only for a certain age group and you aren't in it, or other things that you need to know. You only need four rejected HITs out of 100 to be bared from a lot of opportunities.
Having at least 96% accepted work is important, and higher than that is better. With a lot of diligence and a 97% rating, and you can pay a small bill every month, or buy cat litter or do laundry something. Since your wages get deposited in amazon payments, you could buy some music or whatever you want. With a 98% rating, your prospects get much better. You can probably get most of one person's groceries "turking" with that rating, if you shop wisely. Most requesters do not want to work with you until you have completed 100 HITS, and having 1000 or more HITs completed successfully opens up much more. The more you do and the better you do it, the more opportunities open up, and more desirable ones too.
Another good thing is, returning HITs, or sending it back to let someone else do it instead, doesn't hurt your record. Your completion rate is recorded, but it does not seem to make much difference. I try to keep my completion rate high anyway.
You must have at least $1.00 to withdraw your earnings from Amazon payments to your bank, and it takes up to seven business days. There is no fee for withdrawing your money They will not release any funds to you at all until you have ten days with at least three HITs completed each day.
I humbly recommend avoiding the requester p9r. They have many easy HITs, but they do not always set them up well, and sometimes are inconsistent with what they consider good enough and what they do not consider good enough. You have to transcribe handwriting, which is surrounded by a pink box. The pink box is sometimes way out of alignment and the writing is sometimes illegible. You might think some squiggles surely mean some certain letter, the person who checks your work might disagree. I did 65 HITs for them one day, and 5 were rejected. My overall rating suffered severely, as it only takes one bad HIT out of 100 to drop you down by 1%, and that can make a serious difference.

Cloudcrowd.com posts a lot of jobs on mechanical turk, but have their own sites as well. I do not recommend accepting anything by Cloudcrowd on mechanical turk, because they habitually say they have work until you accept the job, then they tell you they have no work at all and you have to return it. They do supposedly have work on their actual website www.cloudcrowd.com, but at this time I have not accessed it. I took the exam and passed it, every time I visit the site I have to set up a new account. Therefore, the fact that I have proved my skills never shows when I want to find work there. If that ever gets sorted out, I will update this post, so stay tuned if you are interested. Crowdsurf is not to be confused with Cloudcrowd. They also do a lot through mechanical turk, and my experience with them there has been very positive.

A site that pays better than Mechanical Turk to begin with, but has much less opportunity for advancement and - in my opinion - less desirable jobs on the whole, is Microworkers.com.

There are some search and click jobs on there that, when the sites are not having trouble, are available in large quantities and pay $0.18 for less that three minutes (really, I think it is about 1 minute) of very easy "work." Dailysearches and MWsearch, are two of those requesters. Those requsters have a lot of technical problems, but when they work, they are easy money.
There are also many tasks on microworkers where you are paid to sign up for something, paid to visit and comment on a blog - or worst of all - paid to download something. I suggest using this site while you are starting out with Mechanical Turk and others, since it will make you more money, but then quit once the others take off and exceed its potential. If your rating collapses somehow, then come back to it until you recover. If your rating on microworkers drops below 75%, you get fired and barred from the site.75% is pretty bad, especially compared to Mechanical Turk, where most requesters want 97% positive ratings or better. It would be hard to mess these jobs up too, unless you wanted to or did not read the instructions.The only trick is READ EVERYTHING CAREFULLY so you will know what to do.

Microworkers.com will not let you withdraw the money you make with them until you have made around $10. There is a fee for withdrawal, based on percentage, and it varies by with payment method you choose. Paypal is the most expensive, it costs over 7%.

Someone just suggested this site to me today: http://weeklypocketmoney.com/?id=erdavis82 Naturally, I created an account. I do not understand how they are able to pay as highly as they seem to want to do, so I am a little suspicious. The reason may be the extremely high amount you must make in order to actually be paid. You must make $300 there before you can withdraw your earnings. It may be hard for many people to do that, and perhaps the money they save by not paying most people helps them to pay the people who do eventually make $300.00 or more on their site. I have no idea yet, time will tell. My malware fighters have not been triggered, the site is free, and they do not ask for bank information or much information ofany kind at all, so I can suggest giving it a shot. Time will tell if it pays what it promises; I had $20 on my account there in the first five minutes, but it does no good until it is fifteen times that much.
NOTE: a few weeks after this blog was posted, I found that my login information seemed not to work, though the link with my name in it did work. Without logging in, there is no way it can pay me. There is no button for a forgotten password, either. This site is just trying to get hits so they can advertise, it is not a legitimate prospect. I will leave this section here as a warning.

The highest paying sites I have seen for legitimately working online are freelancer.com, which I use but have a few problems with, and elancer.com. Freelancer has many highly technical jobs for freelance programmers and graphic artists, as well as virtual assistant, advertising, and writing jobs galore.

  Some of the employers there are looking for slave labor, and you may have to settle for one of those on a short term basis to get your foot in the door - I did. But as you build a reputation, this will change and you will be able to get better jobs.

 Your reputation will show up on your profile as the average of your previous employers' ratings and reviews of you, your completion rate, and more.

Freelancer.com is free to sign up on, but it costs to take qualification tests. If you have any doubts about passing, I suggest trying a free test like you can find on www.brainbench.com and see how you do. They may not be the exact same tests, but if I bombed a free test, I would not take a similar test that I had to pay for every time I took it. If I aced a free one, I would think I stood a good chance with similar, paid tests. 
Rather than just taking jobs that are given to whoever will do them, making just pennies, freelancer.com workers bid on jobs and submit proposals. Upon being chosen, employers send "milestone payments" to freelancer.com for your work, which are released to you upon successful completion of the assignment. Freelancer also charges $5 or 11% of your pay (whichever is greater). They add the $5 or the percentage to your bid in addition to the amount you actually ask for (see image below). They will take their share out of your account as soon as you accept the job, even if you do not have that much in there. They will pay you back when the task is finished and they release all the funds, the entire bid amount, to you and so pay you back. 

You must have a minimum of $30 in your freelancer.com account in order to make a withdrawal. There are no charges for depositing money from your account into your paypal account,but they will sit on your pay for an additional 15 dyas, minimum, the first time you attempt to withdraw it.They say your withdrawal is under review, and they are only going to do that once. Having your account verified in every way before hand does not prevent this additional verification period. They say it is for user's security, and that is as far as they will go in explaining it. You must meet certain qualifications to deposit directly into you bank, but if you qualify it costs nothing.
Freelancer will ask you to "promote" your bid for around $1.50 every time, but this is optional, as is "highlighting" your bid for $1. They will not let you bid less than $10 for a flat rate job, or less than $2/hr for an hourly job, in which case they split the earnings with you 50/50. You will get $5 of the ten, or $1 of the two. There is a limit to how many bids you can place in a month, and you get only ten with a free account. For a monthly charge, you can increase the bids, the refresh rate on you bids (how fast the bids sort-of "grow back" after you spend them"), the number of skills you can list, and the size of the portfolio you are allowed (portfolios consist of files uploaded by you, but you only get so much space). These can also be increased through earning points by being active on the site.
The main problem I have with freelancer.com is they tolerate indecent solicitations. This is not only under their unfortunate xxx "skill," which one can say that one has if one is willing to degrade oneself that way, but also under clerical work. A data entry position that kept coming up and being reposted for a while wanted an "entertainment girl, and office work" Data entry and virtual assistant, with some "entertainment in between to fill in the time." I could have killed whoever posted that, I was so angry. I am pretty sure that is not legal, but do not know who enforces it, since freelancer.com is based in Australia. I have reported these things more than once, freelancer tells me that "besides the positions you mentioned, we have many others..." They are unwilling to do anything, and no longer respond to my complaints about that at all. Sadly, posted jobs come up in the corner like IM messages and you cannot click them off. They stay until freelancer's system takes them down. So you have to sit and look at that rudeness when it is posted and the only way to get rid of it is to log off of freelancer, which is what I do when that happens. Sometimes that means I am not on the site very much for a little while. For this reason, I recommend using other similar sites if you have a lot of technical skill, and if you must use freelancer to build up a portfolio, do so, but get out of it as soon as you can and tell them why you are leaving (if the indecency is indeed why you are leaving). That is actually what I plan to do.

Elancer.com has a much longer process to get on. It requires an interview via skype and (I think, if I remember right) a background check, in addition to whatever interviews and so forth the actual employers want to give you. This site does not seem to have as many fees as Freelancer.com, and I do not think they tolerate indecent "employers" who are there to exploit people either. I have had some trouble with skype that I have not resolved, and that is why I am still using freelancer instead. I could not do the interview. From what I have seen, I think I can recommend it though.

On all these sites, you will have a multiple day process of setting your bank up with it, and verifying your accounts. Most of them like to use Paypal or similar methods of payment. Microworkers gives you different options for how to receive payment. Freelancer and Elancer want a scanned copy of your ID, but the crowdsourcing sites do not. Requesters or employers are not supposed to get in contact with workers outside of the sites, unless the job demands it. Crowdsourcing sites generally do not give even your name to the employers, but an alphanumeric code number instead so you cannot be found by the strangers you work for. Freelancer will delete an employer's or a worker's account if they post contact information publicly. I believe Elancer has similar rules, but like I said, I had trouble that kept me out of that so far.

I hope this little overview has been helpful. It is a long, slow process to begin making money online. However, what you are doing is building a business, and that always takes time but is well worth doing. It is also nice to have options for at least a little money that can add up, especially when you are out of work or need a bit extra for the moment.
God bless all!