Work From Home - You won't get rich but you can make money

As you know - we don't believe in the get rich quick scams. A common theme at the Corporatepreneur is that building a business can be very rewarding but takes time, talent and hard work.

I just saw a great article warning about the work from home scams. This article talk about how work from home scams are on the rise as the economy weakens and people become more desperate for money making opportunities. From the referenced article:

Durst says Staffcentrix researchers screen about 5,000 home jobs leads every week, and there is a "54-to-1 scam ratio."

"This means that for every 55 [work-at-home] leads we investigate, only one passes our legitimacy standards," she said.

This came as a bit of a surprise to me. I wasn't sure there would even be one legitimate work from home opportunity in 55. Of course there are (like selling dental plans) but none of them will make you rich as I warned just a few weeks ago!

So I did some investigating and I found a cool new feature from Amazon! So I am fascinated by this because it is a seemingly legitimate way to make a little bit of money from home - though likely not too much money (maybe $5 / hr depending on how you do it).

Amazon.com has launched a service called Mechanical Turks where you complete tasks for a specific fee. You can be paid in cash or amazon.com gift cards after you have a certain amount of credit. I think the real opportunity for this work would be for people in India or other countries where working for a few dollars per hour is meaningful compared to local labor wages.

These are jobs that just can't quite be automated by a computer.

Examples of "job" opportunities (take a look on your own too - there are 47,000 tasks listed currently)
1) Review online profile pictures to make sure they aren't inappropriate before they are posted to the web. ($0.01-$0.03 per photo)
2) Re-write an existing paragraph to deliver the same overall content but in a new manner ($2.00 per paragraph) (likely trying to get around any plagiarism)
3) Write a 350-400 word paragraph from scratch about how LED lights are the future of lights (there are 10+ LED topics so you could spend a little time researching LEDs then crank out a bunch of paragraphs) @ ($4 per article)
4) Review images and associate the proper image description "tags" to the image ($0.01 per image)
5) Some of the higher paying tasks include audio transcription - where you listen to a 10 minute clip of a meeting and create a written text of the meeting ($3.00 per transcription)

I plan to test it out for pure curiosity's sake. I've calculated that to make $7.20 per hour you will need to make $0.01 every 5 seconds. So if the task is to review an image for a penny, make sure you can do so in under 5 seconds. Also factor in "lost" time because it is unlikely you will be able to work for an hour straight without interruption or even a break. I believe with the audio transcription you could make in the $9-12 per hour range depending upon how fast your typing skills are.

From what I understand some of the better paying tasks require you to qualify for - which makes sense. Check it out for yourself!

Work From Home - You won't get rich but you can make money