Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have no doubt heard about outsourcing and by now you know it can help you get more done in less time.
What you may not have heard about is “outsourcing steroid pumping freak of a cousin” called – CROWDSOURCING. Basically, crowdsourcing is outsourcing on a massive scale.
Before we get to talking about that though, I wanted to update you on some pretty cool stuff going on in my personal life.
Where In The World Is Justin Brooke?
First of all… I’m sitting in a parking lot in Stone Mountain Park, GA as I write this blog post. It’s the 4th day of our year long trip across the U.S.
So far we are having a blast and living a dream filled with campfires, s’mores, and tons of family time. I’m hoping the “shinyness” of it all will never wear off, or will it?
Our Campsite - Stone Mountain Park
Will I, some day, hate opening the door of my camper to the view of lakes, mountains, sunrises, and all that nature has to offer? Or will the Mosquitos and Red Velvet Ant’s chase us away?
I dunno but so far I just can’t stop thanking god for putting me on this path. As well as thanking myself for putting in the work and never quitting.
Ok Back To Crowdsourcing Lesson
Think of it like this, when you outsource something you are giving a task to one person and with crowdsourcing you are giving it to many people.
If you needed 1,000 backlinks to your blog would it be fast for one person to get them all or would it be faster if you got 200 people to get 5 each?
What if you wanted to write a book? Would it be faster for you to write all 100 pages or would it be faster to get 100 people to write one page each?
That’s the power of crowdsourcing!
Instead of one person doing all the workload it’s dispursed over many people and the workload gets finished much faster.
Uhmm… Cool… But Where Do I Hire a Crowd?
There are places like Amazon mTurk where you can hire people in mass to help you finish a project. A big secret in the Internet Marketing guru product launch world is using mTurk for blog comments.
That’s how they (some of them not all of them) get 1,200 blog comments on each of their pre-release pieces of content during their product launch.
Basically with mTurk you bid a small amount of money per repitition of your task like blog comments or digg votes.
<h3>mTurk is Artificial Crowdsourcing Though</h3>
Real crowdsourcing entrepreneurs are not paying strangers to do their crowdsourcing. They are enlisting their fans, followers, friends, and family to crowdsource their projects.
STOP!
I can just hear some people saying “Sure Justin, easy for you to say, but I’m not like you I don’t have fans, followers, or subscribers.” To which I say “Neither did I when I first started.”
After putting in the work, I got those things and you can too. Then once you’ve got a “crowd” you can try some of these projects below…
Example Crowdsourcing Projects For Serious Entrepreneurs
Info Products
Send a message out to your crowd that you want to create the best source of information in your niche. That you need their help with creating and to send in their best tip.
For example if you were in the SEO niche you could ask your subscribers to all pitch in one or two strategies to get backlinks. If you have enough subscribers you should get hundreds of strategies submitted.
Now you just edit it down and you’ve just created an extremely valuable product. If you want to incentivize or encourage your subscribers to participate make them feel like a part of the project.
You can make it a free ebook for everyone to be able to giveaway.
You can put it for sale using RapidActionProfits shopping cart system and give away 100% of the sales to each person who participated so that they now have a product to sell also.
You can create an affiliate program and give everyone who participated an extra 25% in commissions over normal affiliates. It could even be as simple as giving everyone who participates some credit at the end of the book or under each answer.
Affiliate Marketing
Build a niche blog and run a contest giving away something related to your market with a value of $50 – $200. Contest terms are that everyone must submit a 300 word article about your niche topic and one lucky person will win the prize.
If you do this right you should end up with dozens to hundreds of free articles to publish on your blog. Queue them up in WP and now Google will love you for all your fresh content.
Local Service Providers
Offer all your past clients a small piece of free work done for them if they sned you a referral that signs up with you.
For example if you were providing local SEO services you could tell all your past clients that you’ll get them an additional 100 backlinks for every one new customer they send you.
The ideas are endless…
Everyone has a crowd to work with also. Whether it be your family, friends, an online forum, or your Facebook friends. You just need to take a minute to think of where your crowd is at, what do they want, and how can you help them.
Then start thinking about the things you need to get done and think about what you can do for your crowd to get them to do the work for you. If you keep their best interests in mind and upfront then they’ll gladly do the work.
You must be thinking about their best interests first though or else you’ll just come off as an arrogant marketer looking for cheap labor.
If you have something you would like crowdsourced but don’t know where to start, leave your question in a comment below. If you do then we’ll all help you come up with ideas. (crowdsourced comment responses!)
Go Bigger,
Justin Brooke
Internet Mad Scientist
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Not so sure about the title of this post. Crowdsourcing doesn’t get the day-to-day work done, but it is an excellent concept. I read the book you’re linking to 2 years ago when it came off the presses and implemented many of the ideas and concepts taught. You can’t go wrong giving it a try.
As someone who has participated in a Crowdsourcing Project, I can tell you that it was very interesting and rewarding. We created a new product that will help people get their online business up and running without any money out of pocket. It took a bit longer than we had anticipated, but it was really worth it! Plus, it provided a great opportunity to meet some fellow entrepreneurs and create other partnerships. And yes, my name will be on the product since I contributed an entire section, so it will help me that way as well. Done right, it is a great opportunity for those getting started.
I expect we will be seeing this business model hang around! Let me know if you have any questions about the experience – I’m happy to answer them.
Thanks,
Glenna Garcia
Justin, this looks like a GREAT idea! And one that those of us just starting out and with very little money to spend can actually use!
I’m needing lots of comments and back links to my website. So far, all I’m getting is spam. Any help you can give me to help get me started would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the post!
Dawn
[link removed - see comment policy]
Dawn checkout http://seomoz.org/learn-seo for some killer free SEO training. I think that should help you get to the next level
Hi Justin, thanks for the info. However, you mention ‘for local marketing’ past clients. How can I utilize this for new clients just starting out !? If you could please give a little advise … Thanks , … Andre
One way you could get new clients using a crowd is giving away an ipad to the person who refers you the most customers within a certain time frame. If you can’t afford the iPad move down to something lower that you can afford, the better the prize the higher the response though.
I don’t think the “shinyness” will wear off. Sure, there’ll be days where you wish you were in a house and not having to deal with certain things, but you’re gonna love it. My family (6 people) went on a 6 week trip across Canada when I was 18 and the only thing I didn’t like was that it was rushed. I would’ve liked to stay at different places longer and actually have the time to enjoy everything properly.
I’ve heard of mturk often from people who want to artificially inflate their popularity. I was going to try it out on a blog of mine to just try and get some activity going when I first launched it, but it’s only available to the US (like Quibids) so I wasn’t able to use it.
I’ve actually been crowdsourcing some projects of my own and I quite like it. I’ve even seen a guy crowdsourcing the writing of a book, and he charged people $2,000 EACH to participate! He made a boatload crowdsourcing that book – I think he had 100 people involved and he hardly had to do any of the work.
Don’t limit your thinking. Be creative with crowdsourcing as there’s a lot of opportunities!
Shawn
Justin,
Thank you for a great post. I makes a lot of sense.
Gary
Woodstock, Ga, Just north of your campground.
Another great blog post!
I love Amazon mTurk – got some awesome stuff done there really cheaply, although I haven’t done the blog commenting thing – I’d rather use my own following. It doesn’t seem like many people know about the site or talk about it.
Great crowdsourcing ideas …you got me thinking
I got sick of camping for short a while, for me it was being in a confined space – hope your trip goes awesome!
Looks like a logical extension to Outsourcing in terms of turnaround time but I for 1 am not comfortable with all the false posting and testimonials that are going on at the moment, that said crowdsourcing as a concept is great
Question: I am a visual artist (primary pop art) looking to better understand my audience’s preferences. My work is heavily fashion inspired, therefore, I’d like some crowdsourcing suggestion towards better leveraging my female facebook crowd. Any suggestions?
@ChadxSmith There are several different ways but one of them would be to make your crowd feel like they are a part of your art. Tell them your next 3 pieces will include color schemes voted on by the crowd. Or you can use pieces of random photo’s submitted. If I knew your art better I could probably recommend something more closely related, but this should give you some ideas.
If they feel like they helped you make the art piece then they would be much more willing to talk about it with others or even buy it themselves.
You could even put out there that whoever finds you a buyer for your next piece will get a custom piece created for them for free/big discount. Now they will become your sales army!
Nice article on crowdsourcing. I have no doubt that crowdsourcing is the concept which will drive solutions in the future – whether its technology, marketing, creative, design or anything else.
With a splurge of crowdsourcing sites coming up across the globe – crowds gonna have fun!
Wow Justin, that was a mouth full, but to keep it simple..I will like to say you listed some awesome tips..especially the one about people sending in free articles.
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Very good tip, one of those that gets the juices flowing. Thanks. Enjoy the trip, it should be a once in a lifetime experience for the whole family and a great memory maker.
Smart blog post! I have used this method myself and have seen my facebook fans increase. But I want to use this method on a much larger scale, so my blog can increase in participants & followers. I also plan to run a contest for the month of October, $50-200 is not really my budget right now it’s more like $20, but I plan to scrape some sponsors up so no worries. Anyway, thanks for validating, with your post, what I already thought was a great idea!
{ 1 trackback }