Fairly new to the whole clickworking/mturking thing, and signed up with CrowdSource after doing a few of their hits on Mturk. Decided to get serious about using clickwork to bring in a few extra dollars through birthday and holidays. Wondering though, is $5 to $10 a day a realistic/reasonably achievable and consistent goal working directly through the CrowdSource site?
I wouldn't use CS as your only source of turking. Sometimes they post great batches that can make you bank for an entire day, but a lot of the time all they have is their SEO stuff rotting away. In a general sense... how many hours do you work? That's going to determine how much you can make off of Mturk, as is your stats (HITs approved, qualifications, et cetera). Starting off 5-20$/day may be more feasible, but it's certainly possible for non-masters to make as much as 60-100$/day on good weekdays. Rule of thumb: most good work is posted on weekdays, generally in the EST workday. (So 5am-3pm PST.) Mturk is very transient. The good work if discovered by more than one or two people tends to be posted on forums, and then shortly there is lots of people doing it and it'll die off fairly quickly. Being on top of what is going on as it pops up can be the difference between a money day and a mediocre one.
Right now, my Mturk rating is sitting at 89% (give or take), don't mind dong the SEO stuff--work is work. I generally try to put 3 to 5 hours a day into doing hits--time permitting. 5 bucks at day is basically what I'm shooting for, a extra $30+ a week.
I wouldn't count on CS completely either. I do a lot with them, because I've been there awhile and have some great quals, but even so, I can't count on them daily. Some days there is nothing worth my time. With 89% you aren't going to get any great hits. You need to build your numbers up and get that up past 95% to see anything worth doing. I'm at 99.6% now with only 3,000 hits and get a lot of $1-$3 surveys. I'd do those before I would count on CrowdSource.