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The Easiest Ways to Use Crowdsourcing

I’ve always been impressed by effectively run businesses whose owners seem so stress-free and content. Work almost seems like play to them, and you don’t see them working until all hours of the night or giving up their weekends. But how do they do it? Most people work tirelessly trying to test-drive new strategies and increase revenue, and their work is typically very demanding. However, in order to run a successful business, this does not mean that you have to do everything yourself. In fact, your success rate is likely to be positively correlated with the amount of help that you have, and by “help” what I mean is…crowdsourcing. In this article, you will learn useful information pertaining to what crowdsourcing is and the easiest ways that you can use this technique.

So, first of all, what exactly is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing goes hand in hand with outsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a fantastic way to have thousands of already trained employees at your disposal without having to go through the arduous task of interviewing and hiring a ton of people individually. In a nut shell, all you have to do is go to a crowdsourcing website and type in the kind of task that you need to have completed. Then, your task will be viewed by thousands of trained people. It’s that simple. Plus, your work will get done extremely quickly. When a task is completed, you can individually review the work completed by each person and decide who should get paid (with crowdsourcing, you don’t have to compensate the people who deliver unsatisfactory work).

Now, you may be wondering, “How can I use crowdsourcing?”

There are numerous advantages to be got from using crowdsourcing, and you can use it in a number of ways. For example, you can use crowdsourcing to get articles written for you, have people post on your blog, generate large amounts of social proof, or get top-notch search engine rankings. You can also use crowdsourcing to gain friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter or to gather data for niche research. Basically, no matter what needs you have, you will be able to find a crowdsourcing solution to meet them.

Now that your crowdsourcing appetite has been thoroughly whet, let’s talk a little bit about the best sites to use for crowdsourcing.

Mechanical Turk and Microworkers are two of the easiest to use crowdsourcing sites available. Mechanical Turk has a very fast turnaround rate, and it is not uncommon for receive upwards of 500 respondents to your job posting within a day or two. Just keep in mind that many of the people on Mechanical Turk are not native English speakers, so you may want to stick to tasks that don’t require a lot of English, such as liking a Facebook page or retweeing a message.

With Microworkers, on the other hand, you can select workers from non-English speaking countries or, if your project requires better English, you can choose workers from the United States, Canada, or Australia. The only downside to Microworkers is that it can take between 12 and 24 hours for your job posting to appear on the site, and should a problem occur (which they sometimes do), you will need to wait an additional 12-24 hours for it to be reposted. Mechanical Turk and Microworkers are two of the easiest crowdsourcing sites to use, but should you not find them to be satisfactory, you can also look to CrowdFlower or ShortTask to fulfill your crowdsourcing needs.

Crowdsourcing is a great way to get more of your business needs met in a timely and efficient manner. To learn more, visit Happy Outsourcing where you will find additional crowdsourcing tips and tactics to help your business grow!