Well since my last post I have been working very hard research a new source of income on the internet. No doubt you've heard the story of eBay millionaires and maybe you want to get a piece for your own. From what I've found, the gold rush over there in auction land isn't quite what it used to be, it's now dominated by large volume selling power-sellers. However there seems to still be a bit of a profit available for small time drop-shippers. You may or may not have heard the term drop-shipper before but just so we are on the same level:

Drop shipping is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer or awholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. As in retail businesses, the majority of retailers make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price but some retailers earn an agreed percentage of the sales in commission, paid by the wholesaler to the retailer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping

So basically, as a drop shipper, you will generally be purchasing  all of your good from china, plain and simple. China is notorious for having poor quality products and as a retailer that has no chance to inspect your merchandise this can be a little bit risky. Often you can order sample products from the manufacturer to see the quality before you sell it but that defeats the purpose of our quest, to make money, not spend it. One way around this is to make sure your Chinese manufacturer will accept returns. If you end up selling a crap product and your manufacturer does not have a good return policy, try to help your customer out, stop payment to the manufacturer and grant them a refund. We are trying to make money but not rip people off.

One way to get started drop shipping is to buy some products from Dealextreme. I have had no problems with them so far the only problem is, they are an aggregate which means they are basically a middle man turning a profit distributing these products. But for our purposes to get started we can use them.

Basically what you do at this point is look for products that you think would sell well on eBay and more importantly items you can turn a profit on. If you see something that is really cool looking, that you might even buy yourself and it seems really cheap, imagine what the price would be if you bought it in a traditional retail environment. Finally, scour eBay for any listings of the item, if there are none, list the item at the price you came up with. If there are already listings for your item, see if you can undercut the competition a little bit.

I'm going to play with it some more, I will report back with my findings. I suggest you do the same if you want to make some money!

Sorry if this post is lacking in a little bit of quality but to be completely honest my mind is absolutely numb from the last few hours of working on MTurk (this is the cool short way to say Mechanical Turk.)

Some people say they hate their job, well this is like a job that hates you. The tasks are absolutely soul crushing, I have never seen anything worse, seriously.

Here are a few examples of the tasks that I did:
Choose the best category for a product (Category Recommendation)
Write suggestions for tasks
Categorize the following business and capture their URLs
Moderate Tags for 5 Images - Magnum Photos

Out of all of those only one was halfway decent, the "Moderate Tags for 5 Images" was ok because you got to see some actually pretty interesting pictures, the ones I saw were from Iraq. Still, the task itself sucked, you  are required to go through all the tags for the image which about half were relevant and half were totally random and unrelated, so it ended up that instead of looking at the picture you were mostly reading random tags and their description. Also I earned $0.04 for 10 minutes worth of work on this task, not sure what that equals in dollars per hour but it doesn't seem worth it to even try and calculate.

All in all I'd have to say Amazon's Mechanical Turk just isn't for me. I'm probably going to work on it a little bit more and write a little bit more about it but if you'd like to try it here's the link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Give it a try and see if it is for you, apparently there are people out there that can do this kind of work, and you may be one of them.
On a positive note, Amazon is an awesome company and have always been reliable and their payment system is great so you at least don't have to worry about getting paid.

Time for the my first post with actual content! Today I have decided to talk about a program from amazon called the mechanical turk. The Mechanical Turk is what is known as a crowdsourcing internet marketplace, and basically Requesters (employers basically) offer small to medium sized tasks for you to complete, each one having a different monetary reward.