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Being able to type fast isn't too important. Having the ability to listen and type is much more useful. Things like dialogue, typing in lots of things like time codes, and bad quality audio will slow you down. I've heard that a good speed is averaging 15 minutes of tape per hour. I wasn't really doing that at first but now that I've been doing it for a month I can see definite improvement. Fake edit: Oh, another thing that really slows me down is that you're expected to look things up. If I get something with a lot of unfamiliar jargon, I can spend much more time than I wish trying to figure out exactly what they're saying and then how to spell it so Google doesn't give me something obviously wrong. That's only happened two or three times. Edit: To actually answer your question, I think I can do over 70 WPM but I doubt I ever get close to that when I'm transcribing. And I would do one of the applications and see how you like it! The Focus Forward audio for the application is clearer (and possibly easier, but I'm still in the middle of finishing it) than Daily Transcriptions, but kazmeyer's quote in the OP lists some good reasons to get into media, which is DT more than FF. Tesla Insanely Coil fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Jul 6, 2012 |
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Jul 6, 2012 08:15
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Shadaez posted:All the Search Engine Evaluation jobs I've seen require a college degree, have any of you got it without one? I'm also interested in what WPM the transcribers here are doing. I can type pretty fast and have thought about doing transcription work in the past, but reading all the rules for it makes it look pretty daunting. Thanks a bunch. I encouraged a couple co-workers from my other job to apply to Lionbridge, neither of whom have college degrees (well I think one has an associate's but not a BA or anything like that) and their applications were accepted although they failed at the test portion of the application process. This was last year though, I don't know if it's different now.
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Jul 6, 2012 16:15
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Tesla Insanely Coil posted:Being able to type fast isn't too important. Having the ability to listen and type is much more useful. Things like dialogue, typing in lots of things like time codes, and bad quality audio will slow you down. I've heard that a good speed is averaging 15 minutes of tape per hour. I wasn't really doing that at first but now that I've been doing it for a month I can see definite improvement. Well, typing speed helps, because the faster you type the easier a time you have keeping up with a speaker. But I honestly don't know my WPM, and as you say, the tape quality/number of speakers/etc. factors in a lot more to your transcription speed. 15min/hr is a good average, and it's what most places expect and price around (those that pay by the hour), but I've had tapes so lovely I was getting about 5 minutes per hour and I've had some that were so good I was able to do them almost in real-time. And yeah, research can be a pain, but you'll get better at it. I'm lucky because I'm a sponge for useless information, so when someone spouts off a technical term or medical condition there's a chance I've heard it before, and I'm really good at parsing terms that I'm unfamiliar with. If it's really slowing you down, just use the [PH] or [?] tag or whatever the client wants for when you have to sound something out and just move on; they love it when you get stuff right, but if it's killing your time don't worry about it. And yeah, you definitely want media experience, and you want a rep for being able to turn around work fast. Get both of those, and you'll get rush and as-broadcast work, which is where the real money is. The usual transcription grunt-work will pay the bills, but a single special assignment can make a huge difference to your weekly take-home. I did two episodes of The Newsroom for DT this past weekend -- as-broadcast scripts -- that by themselves were double what I made all last week from them. 
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Jul 6, 2012 17:23
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This transcription stuff is nuts. My brain is telling me to write things they aren't saying! I have to go over it so many times just to get what they're actually saying and not what they meant. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds. I'm doing Dailytrans because of your recommendations. I don't have pedals but I have a video editing wheel which should help out when I can find it.
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Jul 6, 2012 20:41
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You'll get the hang of verbatim. As a matter of fact, it'll become so second nature that the few clients who ask you for non-verbatim (usually called light edit, means leave out ums, uhs, stutters, and false starts) will drive you absolutely bugshit.
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Jul 6, 2012 21:05
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If I'm joining Leapforce, but I'm moving in two weeks, should I just apply with them using my new address? My IP address will obviously be different, but I'll still be the only person at my new address working for them. Should I just wait for two weeks even though I have free time now?
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Jul 7, 2012 16:25
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gabi posted:If I'm joining Leapforce, but I'm moving in two weeks, should I just apply with them using my new address? My IP address will obviously be different, but I'll still be the only person at my new address working for them. Should I just wait for two weeks even though I have free time now? Unless they've really changed in the last couple of years, you'll never pass the whole application process and start working in 2 weeks. They might not even tell you whether you've passed within 2 weeks.
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Jul 7, 2012 17:10
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drat, how long does it take usually?
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Jul 7, 2012 17:18
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I'm doing some researching on dropshipping but it's hard to find legitimate advice, probably because BUSINESS SECRETS or whatever. Anyone have advice on how to look for niche areas that have high search traffic but low competition? It's pretty hard to get a feel for this starting out.
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Jul 8, 2012 00:42
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gabi posted:drat, how long does it take usually? The whole process from application to being an agent took 10 days for me personally this May, but I applied as a non-English and non-US evaluator so the supply/demand might factor into wait times if you do apply for US-English roles. Other goons probably have more concise wait times.
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Jul 8, 2012 22:06
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gabi posted:drat, how long does it take usually? It's hard to remember exactly, but I heard back within a few days of applying (2 or 3?). Took the first test, heard back within hours I think. I spent at least a couple of days reading material and doing sims before taking the second test. I took my time on the second test - I think it took me 6 hours. Heard back 10 days after submitting the second test. So I would say, assuming they respond right away to your application, about 2 weeks total.
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Jul 9, 2012 02:28
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hayden. posted:I'm doing some researching on dropshipping but it's hard to find legitimate advice, probably because BUSINESS SECRETS or whatever. Anyone have advice on how to look for niche areas that have high search traffic but low competition? It's pretty hard to get a feel for this starting out. I posted this in an A/T thread about setting up an online store that never got a response: quote:Note: All this assumes you'll be going B2C since you said 'sell one at a time' Dropship supplier protection is actually pretty important. I can think of three cases off hand in the last 8 months where I heard someone got ahold of someone else's upline supplier and immediately started an identical business. If company A is dropshipping something, and you have more money you can buy a container of product Company A is selling and basically price them out of the market because of economies of scale. This is the main reason dropshippers are wary of sharing information about this stuff. Someone else asked about auto parts in this thread and I posted some similar information: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3491659
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Jul 9, 2012 02:35
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Scaramouche posted:I posted this in an A/T thread about setting up an online store that never got a response: Thanks for the response. It's all good information. Is Google checkout okay for this? I like them a lot better than Paypal (I like eating dog poo poo better than Paypal). It's really hard to tell if dropshipping is an area worth pursuing. It seems for the most part that you can try a bunch of product areas that fail and sometimes get lucky and strike it really well with one in particular. Like you said finding dropshippers that aren't terrible is apparently the key to all of this and isn't easy to do. I'm also not so jazzed about the idea that I could be spending thousands on PPC and never come close to breaking even. For the most part it seems like drop shipping works because people will come to a site and buy and item without cross-shopping it somewhere else. This would work well for stuff like wall art where you can't just type "cute cat painting yard" into Amazon and find the same print, and is also why categories like electronics and clothing don't work at all. The criteria I've come up with that's needed in products to choose are: -Where quality doesn't matter much (knives are a good example of crappy quality items that people will be upset with) -Don't appeal to people who to call and complain (fishing gear, bible covers, auto parts) and cause lots of customer support issues -Have a 50%+ profit margin (cheap to manufacture) -Won't have high returns (clothing) -Small, inexpensive to ship -Not easily cross shopped and looked up elsewhere -Can be priced between $50 and $200 -Not immediately obvious where to buy said item online or in a retail store (an example is artsy stuff, there isn't exactly an "art store" with wall art everywhere or a website for art that's a house-hold name) hayden. fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jul 9, 2012 |
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Jul 9, 2012 03:24
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I have serious downtime at work during the Summer, about 4 hours a day if you slap them all together, so I decided to look into penny work like mechanical turk on Amazon that I could do maybe 20 minutes worth a day, maybe make 10 dollars a month and buy an extra case of beer or something. So to experiment and to get used to the system yesterday while I was in the office checking on something else I did 20 "HITs" mostly involving tagging whether there are men or women in an image, adding tags to images, stuff like that. Problem is, there's no guarantee the person posting the HITs will actually "accept" your work, and they don't have to pay out immediately. It seems if you're asking people to work on piddly downtime junk for 2 cents, you shouldn't have an "approval" process. So I checked into the account today and I have now officially earned a single penny. Fuuuuuuuuuuck that. This poo poo's for the suckerest of suckers.
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Jul 9, 2012 17:15
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pathetic little tramp posted:Fuuuuuuuuuuck that. This poo poo's for the suckerest of suckers. The key to MTURK is finding a community that posts all the good HITS. You typically have to monitor it all day because the good ones go fast. Also, don't bother with anything less than $0.10/minute, though it's hard to tell how long anything takes without a community helping eachother out. A good way to find HITS is to search for "survey" that's at least $0.25. My full time job is super slow these days so I'll MTURK over the course of about 7 hours, taking only the best jobs, and I'll earn on average about $15-20. A good day can be $25+. These 7 hours are a mix of 70% surfing the net or whatever and 30% clicking through surveys.
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Jul 9, 2012 17:37
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My LF exam was due by July 5th at midnight, so who knows how long before I receive an email if I passed or failed. I did pass the Butler Hill test the other day, tho, and I don't know how long it will be before they contact me again. So much waiting  Welp, turns out I failed the LF exam, but they offered me a retake. Punk da Bundo fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jul 9, 2012 |
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Jul 9, 2012 20:45
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hayden. posted:Thanks for the response. It's all good information. Is Google checkout okay for this? I like them a lot better than Paypal (I like eating dog poo poo better than Paypal). If you're handling the checkout yourself Google Checkout is... well it's something. I used to love it when they were introducing it, but then the intro offer went away and they jacked the rates. It's relatively easy to implement, but base PayPal is 0.05% lower when you're starting out at the basement rate. Bizarrely I also prefer PayPal's AVS setup and chargeback protection, though I only got my feet a little wet with Google and that was probably 3 years ago. As for choosing your category in dropship, it's kind of tough. There's two ways: 1. Be a little fish in a big pond and work to your strengths. This is what we do. We're in a very large, very competitive category, but we keep our costs low through automation, clever database work, good customer service (yes, good customer service can actually save you work in the long run), etc. The auto parts example would be like this; the category exists, but there's no 'google' that currently owns it completely. 2. Lightning in a bottle/leverage China (and work to your strengths). Basically you identify something, something that's going to go big and you either invest in it to make it go big, or you're just psychic. I'm less a fan of this because it feels like you can't build up expertise in your category, and all you're doing is shifting cheap crap roughly equivalent to chia pet or the pet rock of this era. You're also constantly on the prowl for the next 'big' trend and generally spend more time sourcing in China than you do selling. Here's the prototypical example of lightning in a bottle dropship to me: http://www.amazon.com/Direction-Single-Bracelet-Concert-Wristband/dp/B00796P8IM/ I've sourced these in 5000 unit increments; they cost about $0.10 in China, about $0.18 landed. Amazon takes a 20% cut in the jewelry category from his $12.85 ($8.88 + $3.97 'shipping') selling price so $12.85 - $3.53 - $0.12 - ~$2.50 shipping = $7.60. Let's be pessimistic and say $7 is his profit. The thing is and has been on the jewelry/sport bracelet bestseller list for at least 3 months, he was probably moving 30 a day at the height and is probably down to 10 a day now. So what you say? That's only $7 * 30 = $210/day or $6300/mo! Search for 'jewelry one direction' in Amazon. He's got >15< of these products on the first page. Some are higher bestsellers, some are lower. Even if you jack it down to $3000/mo, and say only 10 of them are at that rate, that's now $30,000/mo. On lovely wristbands for a boy band no one likes. And that's just Amazon, who knows what Buy.com, Nextag, Shopzilla, and organic site sales are like. And that's not even counting his other stuff. So yeah, lightning in a bottle. But how do you spark it? That's the big question. I was going to write more here but I've got real work to do unfortunately. I would like to see more discussion on this kind of stuff though since parts of it are fascinating to me.
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Jul 9, 2012 21:36
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Is it really permissible for Textbroker clients to post orders with a set word count, but then threaten to reject submissions if they aren't several hundred words beyond it? That seems shady as all hell. "Yes we want 600 words, but will only pay you for 300 of them." Yeah, okay.
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Jul 10, 2012 04:09
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RabbitAmbulance posted:Is it really permissible for Textbroker clients to post orders with a set word count, but then threaten to reject submissions if they aren't several hundred words beyond it? That seems shady as all hell. I haven't run across that, but I'd definitely contact the TB staff about it. If "not doubling the maximum word count" is the only rejection reason, it's totally not legit.
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Jul 10, 2012 04:12
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RabbitAmbulance posted:Is it really permissible for Textbroker clients to post orders with a set word count, but then threaten to reject submissions if they aren't several hundred words beyond it? That seems shady as all hell. When I was doing textbroker, I remember there was an announcement made saying to report or contact them about any jobs that said that. It's against their rules for a client to do that.
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Jul 10, 2012 04:19
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hayden. posted:The key to MTURK is finding a community that posts all the good HITS. You typically have to monitor it all day because the good ones go fast. Also, don't bother with anything less than $0.10/minute, though it's hard to tell how long anything takes without a community helping eachother out. A good way to find HITS is to search for "survey" that's at least $0.25. Look out for NetMSi's HITS...but only when you're at home. You get to create short, funny porn titles for $.08 for at least 41 character titles, and $.12 for 90 character titles. The 41's are really fricken easy and I can bust out probably 3-4 a minute. Approvals take awhile but they do get approved as long as you are creative/somewhat funny. The bonus is you get to watch porn, so if you get bored you could always jerk off while getting paid to make a title for the porn you just jerked off to.
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Jul 10, 2012 04:28
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Today marks one week since my Textbroker writing sample was sent in. How much longer am I expected to wait? I was really hoping to get started soon.
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Jul 10, 2012 18:40
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Can you work for Butler hill and Leapforce/Lionsbridge? I know you can't work for Leapforce and Lionsbridge, but I'm not sure if Butler Hill conflicts with them.
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Jul 10, 2012 19:26
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lancelott posted:Today marks one week since my Textbroker writing sample was sent in. How much longer am I expected to wait? I was really hoping to get started soon. Mine took less than 24 hours to get approved, but some of my work has taken a week to get reviewed by their staff. It must have gotten busy recently.
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Jul 10, 2012 21:28
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Shadaez posted:All the Search Engine Evaluation jobs I've seen require a college degree, have any of you got it without one? I actually got a Internet Assessor job at Lionbridge before even graduating from high school, so it's definitely possible.
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Jul 10, 2012 21:47
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Auron posted:Mine took less than 24 hours to get approved, but some of my work has taken a week to get reviewed by their staff. It must have gotten busy recently.
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Jul 10, 2012 22:20
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I've given Elance a try for a couple days now and so far it's going better than MTurk. I've been doing simple PHP apps and helping people setup simple websites. If you know a little bit of programming it seems like this is the better avenue (compared to MTurk). So far the only problem I'm running into is the lack of "tokens" to apply to jobs. It seems like I'll run out quickly and new ones are expensive, I think. It wouldn't be a problem if I was taking on long, complicated, well paying projects, but I'm working for like $10/hour on stuff that only takes a couple hours.
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Jul 10, 2012 23:29
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Is anyone else seeing a lot of NRT in Lionbridge lately? Even last week when they sent me a text saying I could do up to 30 hours, by the weekend when I had time to put in some extra work I got in like 45 minutes on Saturday and 20 minutes on Sunday.
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Jul 11, 2012 02:19
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I tried to find rules about this on Elance's website but couldn't. After I finish a job on the site, am I allowed to give them my personal email and suggest that we do the next job offsite to save on fees (if they're cool with that)?
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Jul 11, 2012 12:16
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Taco Pirate posted:Is anyone else seeing a lot of NRT in Lionbridge lately? Even last week when they sent me a text saying I could do up to 30 hours, by the weekend when I had time to put in some extra work I got in like 45 minutes on Saturday and 20 minutes on Sunday. LF and Lionbridge share the same task pool, and things have been lean at LF lately as well. Last summer was light on work too, and according to the guys at LF who were in contact with Google, the backlog of work had just "run out." Maybe it's because there are more students off school and moms home with the kids, so less work to go around. hayden. posted:I tried to find rules about this on Elance's website but couldn't. After I finish a job on the site, am I allowed to give them my personal email and suggest that we do the next job offsite to save on fees (if they're cool with that)? They specifically say that all payments should be conducted within their system, but the chances that you'd get caught are probably next to nothing unless you have a highly-visible account that does a ton of work. I regularly had clients offer to contact me by email so we could take care of the billing personally and I never had a problem.
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Jul 11, 2012 17:38
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Auron posted:Mine took less than 24 hours to get approved, but some of my work has taken a week to get reviewed by their staff. It must have gotten busy recently. It wouldn't be so bad if I could just find something about somebody else waiting longer than a week to get a response. lancelott fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Jul 11, 2012 |
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Jul 11, 2012 21:44
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RabbitAmbulance posted:Is it really permissible for Textbroker clients to post orders with a set word count, but then threaten to reject submissions if they aren't several hundred words beyond it? That seems shady as all hell. I buy content on Textbroker and have had a couple of articles come in way over what I asked for, which I thought was really strange. Maybe angling for direct orders?
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Jul 11, 2012 23:31
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Finally got around to doing the transcription tests. DailyTrans is impossible to hear, I've gone over certain parts like 30 times and have no idea what the person's saying. Even after Googling and trying to use context. So I went to try Focus Forward's and it's so incredibly easier. Is DailyTrans so much better that it's worth torturing myself through that test? I'm only about 2 minutes in and there's been about 4 places that stop me dead and take me forever to figure out what's being said, and now once I absolutely can't hear at all. I understand I could put [INAUDIBLE] but I can kind of hear him. I can hear some syllables but I can't put a word to them.
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Jul 12, 2012 01:28
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By any chance are you using the type of ear buds that come with your ipod? Or maybe not any headphones? If you have access to a good pair of headphones, it will make a world of difference. Once I started transcribing I got a $50 pair and I wish I had gotten an $80+ pair because even my music sounds so much better. If you are using a good pair of headphones, then I don't know what to tell ya. Maybe try a different computer?
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Jul 12, 2012 01:46
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imabanana posted:I buy content on Textbroker and have had a couple of articles come in way over what I asked for, which I thought was really strange. Maybe angling for direct orders? Same here; asked for 300 got 500.
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Jul 12, 2012 01:54
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For transcription, you definitely need decent headphones. A $20-30 pair of Sonys will work just fine (like the ones I'm using right now) but the key is closed cans, you need the ones that completely cover your ears to cut out ambient noise. This will make an enormous difference in how well you can understand audio. And yeah, Daily Transcription is worth it. Most of their tape isn't nearly as bad as that sample, they pay slightly more per minute, they have rush and specialty work available that pays a good bit more, and it's media transcription, which is your gateway to the really lucrative jobs. Focus Forward isn't awful, but I'd definitely try to get in the door with DT if at all possible.
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Jul 12, 2012 04:27
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I have good closed headphones, that's not the issue. I can hear it fine, there's a car passing at the same time and the guy mumbles. It's just not fun to try and understand that guy, and I feel like I'd have to do perfect to be considered. I think I'm going to stick with Focus Forward until I'm more experienced, at least.
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Jul 12, 2012 04:30
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Yeah, DT is pretty cool and they always have people around ready to answer your stupid questions. I decided to up my minutes per day on the schedule and apparently they like that because I have tons of work now. I'll be making around $150-200 this week. They sent me four files the other day which were all part of a series. The first and last five minutes or so were the same exact audio for all the files so a little copy/paste easy money there.
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Jul 12, 2012 05:20
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Spartan421 posted:Yeah, DT is pretty cool and they always have people around ready to answer your stupid questions. I decided to up my minutes per day on the schedule and apparently they like that because I have tons of work now. I'll be making around $150-200 this week. They sent me four files the other day which were all part of a series. The first and last five minutes or so were the same exact audio for all the files so a little copy/paste easy money there. I got some of those too! It doesn't make much sense for the company to have DT transcribe the exact same thing thirty-five times but I'm happy to do it. Re: headphones. When I decided I wanted a better pair I of course found the SA thread on headphones because there is a thread for anything. That's where I learned that people will drop $300 on headphones, which seems crazy to me but I also learned a lot about the technology.
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Jul 12, 2012 05:47
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Is it a bad idea to try to transcribe on DT or FF with $5 earbud headphones? That's the only pair I currently own. The sound quality is OK, not great, and I have a good quality dedicated sound card. If it's a really bad idea, what's the cheapest adequate pair of headphones I could get that I could maybe find at a physical store? And is the preferred type closed ear headphones?
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Jul 12, 2012 19:31
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