Get your Blog Posts Proofread for $0.50

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Photo: Alphabet Soup by cdw9

As a blogger, one of the easiest ways to lose credibility online is by using poor English.  It’s hard for people to trust you if you can’t put a proper sentence together.

I was not an English major, so needless to say, I’m often appalled when I look back over the simple grammatical/spelling errors I’ve made.  When I read over my own writing, I rarely catch all of my mistakes.  My friends and family have grown tired of proofreading my stuff.  Not to mention, their turn around time is way too slow.

That’s when I came up with the perfect solution:  “Crowdsource it!”

Using a service called Mechanical Turk, I was able to get 2 people to proofread a blog post in 1 HOUR for ONLY $0.50. Here is how I did it:

Step 1: I registered as a “Requester” with Mechanical Turk:

Step 2: I chose to create an “Individual” Human Intelligence Task (HIT):

Step 3: I created a HIT.  My description pointed out that I wanted someone to proofread the provided text (my rough blog post) for “errors in grammar, spelling, and sentence structure”. I pasted the text of my rough blog post draft into the “Detailed Instructions” section.  Here, I also gave more details about how I wanted them to copy and paste my text into a Microsoft Word document before editing, and then to upload it once completed.  I chose the “File Upload” Answer Format so that my proofreaders would have a place to upload my edited blog post.  The amount I would pay for each task was $0.25.

I set the job to expire in 4 hours and gave each person 1 hour to finish the task once they began.  Note:  this was at 7PM (PST) on a Friday night.

Step 4:  One hour later I had my results! Of the 3 results, one did not follow the instructions so I was able to reject them.  The other two, however, were clearly edited by strong English writers! My favorite proofreader actually suggested sentence structure changes and ways to phrase things.  If one proofreader missed an error, the other one caught it. Because I rejected one of the results, I only paid for two, which was whopping $0.50!

The Result:  It took me only 15 minutes of first-time set up, and $0.50 to get a rough draft of a blog post proofread by native English speakers.  This was well worth my time AND money! If you haven’t tried Mechanical Turk yet for proofreading your content, I highly recommend it!