 Today, I'm going to be interviewing an expert in making consistent money online in your spare time, doing micro tasks like user testing, surveys, and market research. She's going to tell us how she does it and makes $2,500 to $3,000 every single month. Hey, everybody, it's Robin with Creativity RV. I hope you're all doing well out there. I am doing great. I'm excited because I've been wanting to interview our guest for a couple of years because she is an expert at making money with these little micro tasks. Now, you might know that I'm the author of the book, Work From Home While You Roam, the ultimate guide to jobs that can be done from anywhere, which is a resource guide with hundreds of jobs for all kinds of people with links to apply. I have chapters specifically dedicated to the type of jobs that she's going to be talking about today. I get comments all the time from people asking how to make money doing these micro tasks. Either people apply for one and they think that they're just not the desired demographic for the job, or they get the job, it pays $5, and they don't think it's worth their time. There is a strategy to making the money consistently, and our guest, TJ, is going to tell us all about it today. Hey, everybody, this is TJ. And she's using an avatar for the interview because she really makes her money doing these micro tasks. And she prefers to stay anonymous because she's sharing her system with us. So, TJ, thank you for agreeing to do the interview. You're welcome. I'm so glad to be here. So, tell everybody how we met. So, I started doing micro tasks, thanks to your book. I actually thought that in order to do work from home, that I had to work from like 4 p.m. to 12 p.m. doing customer service. And I have a full-time job and a kid, and that just wasn't going to happen. So, I bought your book and I found all of these places to sign up for. And now I'm consistently making $2,500 to $3,000 a month in my quote-unquote spare time. It's great. So, after I had been making money for like 6 months, I had to send you an email to thank you because you sent me on this path. And that's how we first met. And I can't, I honestly, I can't thank you enough because I never would have really understood what was possible out there without your book. And I'm going to use it doing these micro tasks when I retire in about another year. And so, I'll be able to do these on the road. I like to see that the book is working for people. But I was so impressed by you and how you've made it work. And since then, we've become friends and I've been dying to interview you so you can tell people how to make this work consistently every month. I mean, how much time are you putting into it to make that money? That is like four to five hours per day on weekdays and probably maybe an hour on Saturday and Sunday. But it's sort of give or take. What would you say, 80, 90 hours a month? That sounds about right. Yep. Yeah. So it's a job. I mean, you've made this a real job. Yes. But I mean, quick math, a job that pays $25, $27 an hour overall. Yes. But the big thing is is that I can do it on my own terms when I want to and I could take a day off when I want to. I can go to the store. I can just decide not to do it today. It's on my terms, which is fantastic. My only commitment is like 10 minutes for a user test or an hour for an interview if I've set that up on a schedule. So it's completely my own, which I love having the power. For people that are brand new to this, can you tell us what the difference is between user testing and surveys and market research just really quickly? Like what kind of things are you really doing for these companies? Yes. So user testing is when a for the website user testing, that is when a company is changing their website or they're creating a new website and they want to make sure that it works properly, that people understand how to use it. Maybe you're Verizon and you are wanting, you're creating a new way for people to sign up, right? So maybe you want to talk to people who use Verizon already and have them go through the menus so that they understand how to sign up and what's supposed to happen and no one is confused by using their product. So you're testing their new website or homepage or app. Correct. It's not like you're going with your own Verizon account and going over and putting in some information. I know people are really scared about being scammed. You're just as a real person giving them feedback on if these websites or apps or pages, whatever, are easy to understand. Is that right? Correct. Maybe it's a shopping website and they'll say, what do you think of this? They'll just say, give us an overall impression, right? And maybe they want to know where would you go to find furniture for the bedroom and they want to see if you can find that or would you be confused? Or how would you find red sheets? Well, can you find the bedroom things and can you find the filter for the sheets? That's what they sort of want to figure out and they want your thoughts and your opinion as you're doing the little tasks that they give you so that they understand that people understand how to use their site. I mean, it's very smart and most companies do do that now because they spent all this time with their developers building out these sites and then regular people can't figure out how to use them. So you're helping them to make it more user friendly. Correct. That's exactly right. Yes. With user testing, there's also one-on-one interviews. So the website user tests that I just talked about pay $10 and they take 10 or 15 minutes of your time and you're all done. For the interviews, you fill out the screener and if you qualify, then you schedule a time coming up in the next day or week, for example, and you would schedule either 30 minutes or an hour and you would talk about what one-on-one, just like we're doing on a video call about whatever it is they want to talk about. And it's called an interview but it's really a discussion. For example, they want to talk to Airstream owners. So you have filled out the screener and you qualify and they're designing a new component for Airstreams and they want your opinion. Like, what would you think of this and what do you like about that? So they're just asking your opinion on things. It's very friendly and it's super fun. And with user testing, it pays $60 for an hour or $30 for a half an hour of one-on-one interview time, just giving your opinion. Tell us what you do every morning to be successful with these micro tasks. Yes, I have something I call my morning coffee routine and that is I front-load my time by filling out different screeners and different little mini applications for the tasks that I'm going to be doing. So on a very consistent basis and what I call that is fishing, you have to put your pole out a whole lot. It's like fly fishing where you put your pole out a whole bunch of times real quick and, you know, every 10th time or so you catch a little fish. So you have to put in the time in order to get the tasks. So in the morning, you go to these many different companies that you do this work with and you see what screeners or applications are available and then you just go boop, boop, boop and you fill out information about yourself. Are there any tips that you have for what people should do to be chosen for those jobs? So what you want to do is be consistent and be honest. Don't say you're a back-end cloud developer if you don't know, you know, a hard drive from a USB port, you know, so you definitely you just want to be yourself. You want to be you want to be honest. That's really all there is to it. And then if you qualify, there is no specialized knowledge that you need. You're going to you're going to have the knowledge that you need to do the user testing if you follow the screener correctly. Yeah, because you're just being yourself. You're giving your opinion as a consumer, maybe. That's correct. Yes. There are longer screeners. If you're going to do market marketing research, those are like focus groups like, for example, women's tennis shoes. Those screeners may be longer because they're setting you up to be to be in a group for an hour or an hour and a half. And that may pay one hundred and seventy five to two hundred dollars. But they're looking for specific people. And so that that survey may be a little bit longer. So there's a little bit more time invested up front for those big ones. But they do pay when I get a task or a marketing research interview, I keep a list of those in a Google spreadsheet. It's the same spreadsheet where I keep the tab open that has all of the companies that I've ever signed up for because there are so many you can get lost. So I keep track of those. Very simple, the date, what the subject was, how much I'm supposed to be paid. And then also when I schedule an interview, I always put it in my Google calendar so that I don't schedule over anything else and so that I don't miss any interviews. That's very important. You cannot. This is very important. You cannot schedule an interview and then not just show up. You've got to commit to it or you might be kicked off the site. You need to be professional. We've talked all about it. You do it with a lot of different companies. People can see other companies you can do this with in the book, of course. But today, you're going to be showing us how you do this with screenshots with three companies. What are the three companies you want to show us? Yeah, so the first one, I think it's the easiest for everybody is an app on your phone, which is Android and iPhone. And it's called D Scout, D S C O U T is basically a marketing research app. It's where companies are put together with people who use their product or service so that they can get their opinion on it. And it is so much fun and it pays really well. How would you characterize D Scout? What are they looking for? So most of the time you are doing things on your phone. You're taking a video or pictures or doing little diary entries on your phone. Every once in a while, they do have live one-on-one interviews, which would take place on your laptop or your phone. I mean, I'm sorry, your laptop or your tablet. But for the most part, it's all done on the phone. With D Scouts, there's two kinds of missions. There's the express mission and with the express mission, if you qualify, you're going to fill it out right there. And it'll take they'll tell you it'll take eight minutes or 10 minutes to complete the mission. And it tells you it pays between five and twenty dollars. And then there are the regular missions and those applications can take eight to ten minutes. And you'll find out in a week or two if you qualify for that. And so you want to do as many of those as possible and keep doing them for anything that you think you qualify for. And you've got to kiss a lot of frogs, like I said, but you will get the jobs if you keep applying. Now, can I give you three tips about using D Scout? Yes, please. OK. So when you do your profile, you want to. And when you take any videos on D Scout, you're going to want to make sure that your background is clean and uncluttered. You want to want to make sure that there's no bright light behind you, that they can see your face clearly. And when you want to set up your camera, like at least so that it's leaning on something, you're not holding it and it's not moving around. And you want to make sure that it's at eye level. No one wants to look up your nose. So you want to be bright and clear and cheerful. And if they ask you a question like in a one minute video, tell us what you like about Cheerios. You don't want to say, I like Cheerios because they taste good. You want to be bright and energetic and say, I love Cheerios because they taste so good. And I like them with bananas and use your hand and be dynamic. So they have to be able to see you and hear you well and you need to have an opinion and be energetic. And that makes you more likely to be chosen for those missions. Correct. OK. Now, with D Scout, if they're looking for somebody who wears a Fitbit watch and you don't wear a Fitbit watch, don't say that you do because they're going to ask you for a picture of your Fitbit watch or a picture of the cheese that you say that you eat or the shoes that you say that you own. So you you just want to be honest and, you know, and if you get picked, great. You'll have a great time doing these missions. They're a lot of fun. You can put out your line and do the title screener. And for those you get picked right away and do them on the spot and get paid or for the bigger pain ones, longer application you find out in a week and then you get those jobs. Later on. Correct. Yeah. So sometimes you find out a couple of days later, but it's usually a week or two. And when you click on the mission to do the application, if you scroll down, it'll tell you when the mission is supposed to start, how long it will take. And so you sort of have an idea, but I don't pay attention to that. I just fill out lots of applications and hope for the best. How does DeScount pay you? DeScount pays you via PayPal. Every week. It pays you. It will tell you in the mission, but it's usually like within a week after the mission ends. The next company that TJ is going to tell us about and show us is IntelliZoom. Yes. So within IntelliZoom, for the most part, you're going to be recording your screen like I talked about before. And there is it'll tell you at the bottom of the screen what it wants you to do and you fill out the screener. And if you qualify, you're going to do the task right away. And it will be navigating a website or it could be something called a card sort where they're just going to ask you to move these words into different categories like maybe you are. Let me use Bank of America again and you're changing all your menus. So they give you a whole bunch of things and ask you to sort them. Would this go under loans or accounts or, you know, whatever it is. And it's whatever you think it goes to. There's no right or wrong answers. And they have a whole bunch of people do that to crowdsource to make sure that they're going to put those things where most people think they should go. So that's a card sort. And then in IntelliZoom, you could also do screeners for interviews. And you just look at the website, see what's available and fill out a screener. I'll check IntelliZoom multiple times per day. Why is that? Because screeners come up all day long randomly. So you need to check pretty consistently. Like I'll keep a tab open and sort of check, you know, every half an hour, every hour or whenever I have a moment, I'll go and see if there's if there's nothing on user testing, I'll pop over to IntelliZoom and see if there's a screener there. IntelliZoom pays 21 days after you have done it. What do people need to do to be successful with this company? So you will need to audition the first thing, but it's very easy. It leads you through exactly what you want to do. And with all user testing, the most important thing to understand is that they, if you're user testing a website, they want your constant stream of thought. So no silences whatsoever. Supposing at the bottom, it says, you have just landed at the shoe store. What do you think of this website? Scroll through. And so you scroll down, you would say, well, this looks really great. I like the colors. This part is confusing because it's pretty crowded and blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's, you know, so you just keep going. And then the next little task might say, where would you go to find women's shoes? And so before you even move your cursor, you go, well, for women's shoes, I definitely would look for something across the top that says men's or women's or those categories. I see over here that it says women's. So I would click on women's and look at and and as you're doing each thing, you're going to say what you're doing. You just keep up a stream of thought consciousness and it becomes more natural after a while. So you want to make sure that you do that, that you're bright and clear. You want to have an opinion when they ask you, how does the website look? Say, I don't care. It looks fine to me. They don't want to hear that. Don't say that. You want to say, give an opinion. Well, it looks clean and uncluttered and I like this or I don't like this or this font could be better or, you know, I'm I'm a 70 year old woman and this font is really hard to read. They want to know that. So you don't have to suck up to them. They really want to know your real opinion so that they could make it better. Do you think that the more jobs you do, the more they want to hire you? Do you build like a track record with these companies? You do with some of them. You definitely have there's you're definitely graded like on user testing. You you you're your last certain amount count. So I'm a five star tester on user testing and that takes a while to develop. So I recommend that everyone does the scout first. And then when you get used to talking into the camera and doing that sort of thing and giving your thoughts and opinions, then I would move to IntelliZoom. That would and then after you've done some card sorts, maybe an interview, at least five or ten website user tests. Then after that, I would move on to user testing. You really want to have some experience before you move to user testing because it's an audition process. And if you don't pass the audition, then you can't there are no second chances. So you want to make sure that you kind of know what you're doing first before user testing. The third company you're going to tell us about and show us is user testing. That's correct. Now, you mentioned auditions, so explain what an audition is. Yes. So they're basically going to have you go through a very simple user testing and they're going to make sure that you can follow directions, that you can your audio is working and that your video is working and that you sound intelligent and intelligible, right? So that you know what you're doing so that they know that you can speak and that you can do a train of thought and follow direction. This is the third one you've gotten practice with the first two. Now you're on user testing. Does it pay more than the other ones? So user testing has it pays more in that there's a lot more jobs available. There's a lot more fishing to be done. And so there's lots and lots and lots of screeners. You won't qualify for a lot of them. Just skip to the ones that you think you might qualify for. They have a lot more interviews, like the one on one interviews that pay thirty or sixty dollars. There's a lot of them. And in fact, once you get in there, I go three or four times a day and I do control F on my computer, which is fine. And I search for sixty and I search for thirty. And those are the ones I do first because those pay the most, right? So user testing has lots more screeners than IntelliZoom and D Scout. So with user testing, you're paid exactly seven days from when you did the test. So if I did a test right now and it's a Sunday morning at 10 a.m., I will get paid seven days from now, a Sunday morning at exactly 10 a.m. And it's sent to your PayPal. The most valuable thing that I did was keep track of every single company I signed up for so that because when you're doing a whole bunch all at once, it can get confusing. The other tip I'd like to give people is if this is something that you're going to do and sign up with a bunch of companies, you really, really, I consider getting an alternate email address, something that sounds professional. That's not too hard to type because you're going to be typing it a lot. And it's not confusing for people, but you're going to get that way. Your regular inbox is not clogged up because it will be clogged up. You definitely want a separate email address. So you really tackle this like a job. You have a routine, a process, a professional way to do things. And that has probably made you more successful in the long run, maybe than people that are just doing it haphazardly. Is that true? Yes, you have to be consistent. You really need to do it every day or at least Monday through Friday. And I really recommend that I get up early in the morning and do it before my job because things are starting on the East Coast and I'm on the West Coast. So I get up early, so I'm doing it with East Coast time. There's far less work available on the weekends. It's really a Monday through Friday gig. And there are things on the weekends, but just not as many. So you need to be up early and you need to be up early on the weekdays. TJ, this has been great information for anybody that really wants to make money doing this. So if there's somebody out there that wants to make extra money doing this or has done it before and failed, what would you tell them? What final advice would you give them? I would say keep at it, be consistent, keep fishing. You can't just fish ones and say, oh, I give up. You've got to do it a whole bunch of times and then it will come naturally to you and you'll be able to get those jobs consistently coming in. And even if you only get 30 or 40 extra dollars a day from doing a few user tests, that's more than you had before. I am retiring in another year, but I'm going to have this extra income when I'm on the road. I really will be working from home while I row, right? I really will be able to supplement my income. So it's just going to make it so much gravy. And so far with this money, I have paid off 90 percent of my RV. I've been making double and triple payments. I went to the Yukon, I went to Belize, I went to Cabo San Lucas. I went to Florida, all on money that I made from the side hustle. Thank you, Robin. I can't thank you enough for starting me down this path. You're welcome. But thank you for telling us how you just made it sing. I know that people are going to need this information and I really appreciate you taking the time to walk us through it. Everybody, if you have any questions or comments, please put them down below. You can check out the book on Amazon. And I'll see you all next week with an all new video. Until then, everybody out there, have happy travels and be free.