Promote Your Content Using Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a great website for making money in your spare time. However, not many people know that Mechanical Turk makes it easy and fun to cheaply promote your website or blog content. Even better, you can use it to promote your articles, videos, and other content published here at Associated Content, provided you are careful not to violate AC's Terms of Use.

According to Amazon.com, Mechanical Turk allows you to "Ask workers to complete HITs - 'Human Intelligence Tasks'..." or tasks that require human logic to complete instead of computer input. For example, you just published a video tutorial here at Associated Content. You want to promote your video, so you create a HIT on Mechanical Turk that asks workers to write an honest review of your video, and post their review and a link to your video on their blog or website.

Why Mechanical Turk?

In the aforementioned situation of wanting a review of your latest video tutorial, there are at least three important benefits to using Mechanical Turk. 1) You get more web exposure. Exposure is an important part of web content promotion. 2) You get a web link, which should benefit your search engine placement. 3) You get someone else's honest opinion of your work.

However, be warned: if you ask your Mechanical Turk workers to give you an honest review, in most cases that's exactly what you will get. If they don't like your video or find your narrator's voice annoying, they WILL say so. After all, that's what you are paying them to do.

This article will show you how to get started promoting your content at Amazon Mechanical Turk. We will be using the video tutorial example to create our sample HIT. Of course, you will want to replace my title and description, etc. with your own.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do is point your browser to mturk.com. Next, click the "Get Started" button under the "Get Results from Mechanical Turk Workers" heading. This takes you to the Requester section of the site.

In the top right corner of your browser window, you will see a Sign In link. Click on it to go to the Amazon.com Sign In page. If you have an Amazon account already, simply sign in.