Completing small tasks online can help you earn some extra money during your spare time. These short tasks are collectively known a micro jobs or crowdsourcing jobs.
Thousands of businesses small and large across the US require your skills to complete micro-jobs. Hence, they’re fairly easy to find.
Since you might not know about micro jobs, I’ll start by telling you what they are.
What are Micro Jobs?
A micro job is sometimes known as crowdsourcing jobs or micro tasks. There are no clear definitions about the kind of work you’ll do. Broadly speaking, there’re two kinds of micro-jobs or crowdsourcing jobs.
- Online Micro Jobs: You’ll perform these micro gigs online from your computer or smartphone. There’s no specific location or time: they can be done from anywhere.
- Offline Micro Jobs: These are the most common. Again, there’re no specific descriptions about the type of work. However, offline micro-jobs would usually be just somewhere around your home or even office.
There’re various websites where you can find both online as well as offline micro jobs. Micro jobs involve fairly simple tasks that take a few minutes to do. Hence, you can expect only a few cents or at best, a Dollar for completing the task.
Offline micro-hustle takes longer. Hence, you could earn some decent money from these. However, this too would depend upon the nature of work.
If you’d love to take such side gigs and make money, here’re some micro jobs you can consider.
Popular and Highest Paying Micro Jobs
Here’s a list of some simple online as well as offline crowdsourcing jobs that you can find easily. Indeed, it makes good sense to take more than one micro job. That way, you can earn a lot of money during your spare time.
- Basic proofreading: This involves checking grammatical, spelling and other minor errors on invitation cards, business cards, stationery, and other similar items.
- Detecting duplicate or incorrect content: Usually e-commerce companies and online stores require humans to check whether proper images and product description appears on the website.
- Game testers: Software developers ask you to play a video game for a couple of minutes to detect any glitches before releasing them in the market.
- Review writing: Some companies award you points for writing positive reviews in two or three sentences about their product or service.
- App testing: This is yet another interesting micro job. You test apps before their final release and write a small review for money.
- Sorting email: Individuals that receive lots of emails want someone to sort and assign them to proper folders. They pay you a few cents for every minute.
- Errands: Running errands is an offline micro job. You simply fetch something for someone from a nearby store and get money.
- Labeling: Another simple micro job you could get at stores or warehouses. It involves fixing a few labels on parcels and packages for mailing.
- URL searches: You’ve to search Google with specific keywords and find which websites rank on the top. Provide the information to your employer and get paid.
- Content moderation: Some businesses require people to moderate comments that people post on their social media or websites to avoid negative publicity. You might also have to post a small thank you note for various comments.
Actually, there is no shortage of online and offline micro-jobs. In fact, you can find any micro gigs that match your skills easily.
This brings us to the question, where to find micro gigs?
The answer is very simple: you can find several side gigs online. And you can find lots of micro jobs within your neighborhood too.
Therefore, let’s look at some of the best micro job websites.
Top Micro Jobs Websites for Side Gigs
Looking for a good crowdsourcing job isn’t as simple as looking for regular, freelance or part-time work. However, that’s nothing to worry about. There’re websites that specially list all sorts of micro jobs or offer them directly.
1. Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon mturk is the best website to find crowdsourcing jobs.
As the name suggests, these crowdsourcing jobs are available from Amazon, the largest online store in the world.
There’re several small, odd and easy micro-jobs that require human intelligence. These can include detecting wrong images, incorrect product descriptions, and other errors.
Amazon Mechanical Turk, also known as Amazon mTurk offers excellent micro-jobs through its website.
2. Clickworker
Simple, small tasks such as data entry, writing brief descriptions, proofreading, app testing and online surveys among others are available from this amazing website Clickworker.com.
They don’t hire or pay you on hourly basis. Instead, you get a few cents or a few Dollars for completing a set of various tasks daily.
Register on Clickworker.com and create your account to get email alerts on micro jobs they have at any point of time.
3. Fiverr
Register on Fiverr to create your account and list various types of micro jobs you can do. You get paid up to $5 for every task.
Of course, you can charge more by offering add-on or value-added services. However, for easy crowdsourcing jobs, you will get a maximum of $5 only.
Micro gigs on Fiverr include writing short essays or content, uploading mystery pictures, giving details about something or even translating something.
Look at the various micro-jobs that people advertise on Fiverr before creating your own profile.
4. User Testing
You can make up to $20 for spending about half an hour of your spare time through User Testing.
As their brand name suggests, you’ll be testing websites and apps. And posting voice reviews on User Testing.
This is a good website if you have some knowledge about how websites and apps work, but it’s not really essential.
The only flip side here is that you won’t find micro jobs on User Testing daily. But do visit the website frequently and check.
5. Task Rabbit
Task Rabbit is a website where you get offline jobs. In fact, you can find offline micro-jobs right in your neighborhood or location.
These can include running errands to nearby stores for groceries, delivering packages, food deliveries, gardening, cleaning and lots more.
Register yourself to get alerts of jobs in your locality on your mobile and email. How much money you make depends on the type of work.
6. The Smart Crowd
The Smart Crowd is a superb website for micro-jobs. Most of their crowdsourcing jobs, however, require skills.
These micro gigs can include anything from completing short surveys to watching ads, reviewing something or even giving scores of various psychometric tests conducted by employers.
Once you register successfully, it’s possible to select the micro jobs you wish to work upon.
7. Skyword
Excellent at writing or have that special eye necessary to take amazing pictures?
Apply at Skywork.
Once your application is successful, upload content, graphics, pictures, video and audio files. They’ll pay you when someone accepts the content you upload.
In some instances, you can quote a price for your content or pictures. However, you’ve to meet strict standards of Skyword before you can begin contributing stuff to this micro job website.
8. Figure Eight
If you love social media and know how to moderate posts, content and classify them, Figure Eight has some excellent micro-jobs.
After successful registration, you can pick the tasks you want. These can include classifying content into various categories as necessary for the employer, responding to comments on social media, updating posts or sending Tweets.
They pay you per task. Figure Eight was earlier known as Crowd Flower. They work on the principle of crowdsourcing. You can find various micro-jobs for extra money on these crowdsourcing websites.
9. Gigwalk
You can easily earn a few cents or a few dollars depending upon the micro job from Gigwalk.
It’s an app you’ll have to download on your smartphone. Once your registration is successful, the app will display various micro-tasks in your area.
It can be anything such as walking to that nearby bistro to check the ambiance or number of people. Or going to a store and writing a brief review of what you see. These are interesting gigs.
You’ll need to keep the location finder of your smartphone on, as you go around the town. Because gigs can arise at any time at any location.
10. iDictate
iDictate is actually an online transcribing service. You’ll get a lot of money from iDictate if you can transcribe quickly.
Once you register and login to your account, iDictate will ask you to choose from several audio files. Listen to the audio and transcribe.
They also have another service known as Quicktate. With Quicktate too, you’ll work as a transcriber.
Only, Quicktate audios are of less than five minutes duration and hence, the pay is slightly lower. But that doesn’t mean you cannot transcribe more audios.
11. Ingram
Another fabulous website to find side jobs is Ingram Micro. They operate in 64 countries spread across six continents. And they also have 33,000 associates through which Ingram spreads its services to clients and micro workers.
They specialize in micro jobs mainly for the IT sector. As usual, you’ll have to create a free account by registering with your email ID.
Ingram alerts you about IT-related micro-jobs whenever they arise. And they pay extremely well since these are specialized micro-jobs.
12. Microworkers
There’s no shortage of micro-jobs online for any skills anywhere on Microworker. In fact, this is the best website where you can find crowdsourcing jobs almost round the year and from any location.
Microworker is very unique. Their home page itself features a dashboard where you can complete online micro tasks and make money.
In fact, you can perform several side gigs on a single day if they match your skills. Register on this website and provide basic information. This allows you to view and complete micro-jobs that match your skills
Wrap Up
Before I conclude, let me also tell you of other simplest ways to get crowdsourcing jobs.
The first one is through classifieds on your local newspaper. You’ll find small and large businesses advertise micro-jobs in these classifieds sections.
The second option is to sign-up as micro tasker with a local company that provides people to do all kinds of small tasks.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s no shortage of micro-jobs. You can make good money by working during those spare hours.
Pritam Nagrale, a digital marketer and Generative AI enthusiast, embarked on his journey with affiliate marketing in 2004. With over 14 years of blogging, he has turned his passion into a fortune, profoundly impacting the digital landscape. Through his expertise, Pritam has guided thousands to monetize online and achieve their dreams, establishing himself as a beacon for aspiring digital entrepreneurs.