My top 4 Crowdsourcing sites

What is Crowdsourcing anyway?

If you're not sure what Crowdsourcing is, it's the process of getting a large number of people to each do one small task for you. It is the sum of the accumulated tasks the crowd does for you in which the power lies.

Let me give you an example. Say you start a new forum and it's a virtual wasteland. You don't have any traffic, and even if you did, they'd soon turn around and leave because there's nothing there to read or contribute to.

Now what if you could get 1000 people all to make a post on y0ur forum for a small fee each? That's crowdsourcing! You end up with a populated forum, and each poster gets a small fee for their trouble. In the above example if you paid 20 cents per post, you'd end up with a forum populated with 1000 posts for a mere $200.

What can Crowdsourcing be used for?

Crowdsourcing isn't only limited to forum posting, here's some other ideas to get your juices flowing:

Backlink building
Twitter following
Article distribution
Article writing
Post writing
Blog commenting
Data validation
Facebook friends (Yes, you can buy firends!)
Facebook 'liking'
Youtube voting
RSS submission
Pinging
Whatever else your imagination can dream up!

You really aren't limited by anything here. If you need smoething done many times, then crowdsourcing is for you!

Isn't this just like Outsourcing?

Crowdsourcing differs of course from Outsourcing where you pay one provider for a larger body of work like building a website or creating some banners or software for you.

The services where you can hire crowdsourcers are specifically designed to allow you to specify how many workers you need to perform the stated task.

Here's an example of the parameters for a fictitious project:

Name: Create a backling to my website

Number of workers: 300

Payment for task: .20

Description: Please create a backlink to my website from your blog...

This would give you 300 backlinks @ 20 cents each.

Where can I hire these crowdsource people?

The best known crowdsourcing website is Amazon Mechanical turk: http://www.mturk.com

Unfortunately, this service is only available in the U.S.

I have tested 3 other services available world-wide.

Microworkers - work & earn or offer a micro job
Microworkers is quick and easy to register. You can top your account up with Paypal funds and get creating a campaign straight away. There are no deposit fees for paypal, however there is a 7.5% campaign fee. If you sign up as a worker, you get a $1 bonus. You will need to wait up to 24 hours for your campaign to be reviewed and approved. There are minimums to what you can pay workers depending on the type of task your project requires. I created a linking campaign which had a minimum of .25 cents per task. You can however specify the quality of the links you will accept. I set mine for PR2 links on the home page of a google cached blog.

Work at Home, Make Money Online, Paid Work at Home, Online Jobs - ShortTask.Com
Shorttask was also simple and easy to register an account with. The concept is very similar to microworkers. You need to top up your account before you publish your project. They also accept Paypal for instant payment. The people completing your task are called 'Solvers'. Shorttask has a template system where you can setup templates for recurring tasks - for example an ongoing link campaign. I found the grey font used in the shorttask interface hard to read. Shorttask charges a 15% commission fee, so a $10 project will cost you $11.50. However there do not seem to be limits set for what you can charge for tasks, so you could potentially get backlinks for 10 cents each.

CrowdFlower - - Crowdsourcing / Labor-on-Demand
Crowdflower is another potentially good service. I registered for the service and received an email from support asking what type of project I would like to create. I responded, but have not received a reply. Presumably their service is more personalised or they are just trying to weed out people creating scam or illegal campaigns. I'll update this post when I have more information.

Online Project Management, Task Management and Crowdsourcing Software | Smartsheet
Smartsheet is another excellent crowdsourcing site. It ostensibly pitches itself as a type of project management tool which incedentally allows you to access the crowdsourcing services of Amazon and LiveWork. I have yet to check out LiveWork, but may review it at a later date. The most promising thing I can see about smartsheet is the abiolity for non U.S nationals to access the Amazon Mechanical Turk system via this 3rd party. A basic account is $9.95 per month and gives you access to create 10 sheets or projects and sotre 3GB of files. I haven't tested this yet, but will give it a whirl once my shorttask and microworkers projects are complete. If it does provide access to Amazon mechanical Turk, then I think this will be an ongoing membership site I remain a member of.

If you're not crowdsourcing, check out the services above and start using these great resources to do all the boring little tasks that you hate.