I want to do more hits that pay more than the hits I normally do (no more than a dollar usually), as I'm trying to make at least a thousand dollars a month. When I send in a qualification request, I never get a response back. I've done over 1600 hits-I feel it's time I've "graduated" to turks with larger payments.
I think some of the qualifications are only temporarily available or once they have the pool of workers they want they don't respond. I have a bunch sitting in my pending queue. Of course, I've only been doing this for a month - just hit 1000 HITs. Last week I averaged $15/day and found that pretty easy so I upped my goal to $20 and have actually manged a $30/day average this week without Turking too hard.
I usually look at how many are qualified - usually the more qualified the easier it is to get that qualification. Also don't be afraid to take any qualifying tests as it won't hurt you if you don't qualify but it can help you if you do qualify.
5k's the first big milestone, at that point you can do most anything that doesn't require a special qual. most everything you see is closed qual stuff, they open once every ten years during the dark of the moon when you sacrifice a virgin manchild upon the altar, for 30 seconds, for the first ten people to come along. don't worry about them. (setting up some notifications for variations of "qualification hit" is worthwhile though, you never know.) get to 5k, and then gaze with longing upon the hits that require ten k tocomplete. or the dodds batches at 50k.
Whan you send in a qualification request nothing usually happens It's not like a light lights up on the requester's dashboard. The requester isn't even told that you made the request (so Amazon's responses are misleading). For requesters to get that information, they have to dig pretty deep. You will get quals that are autogranted (like ProductRnr), and sometimes a qual test will assign results right away. But for other things, it goes to a place the requester can't get it from, without some extra custom programming-like work.