When starting a business on your with little investment, or you are trying to run a boot strap business, staffing may be difficult to manage. You may find you are not able to afford someone full time, or you do not have enough work for them to have a full time job. However you are finding there are many things to do and are a pain to complete for you and your current team.
The solution could be “Crowdsourcing”. Crowdsourcing is a method of outsourcing your work ro a distributed group of people to complete it for you. For out sourcing to work the tasks that you need to have done are broken down in to micro jobs and are distributed across your crowdsourcing platforms.
Crowdsourcing is a word combination that comes from crowd and outsourcing. Tasks and projects are divided among the manpower and intelligence of a crowd of Internet users (outsourcing). The most well known example is “Wikipedia” the Internet encyclopedia in which Internet users make their knowledge and contributions available free of charge.
In paid Crowdsourcing Internet users, so-called Clickworkers, are paid for their services. Creative tasks are generally offered in the form of tenders in which only the winner receives payment. Tasks such as the creation of short texts, translations, tagging, categorization and web research are divided into micro jobs. Every Clickworker who has completed the task correctly will receive a predetermined fee. You can decide to pay a Clickworker by time, for example two our a week or for the completion of a task.
What crowdsourcing can achieve?
Crowdsourcing offers a large variety of options and opportunities. The following are only a small list of the services crowdsourcing offers to founders of business startups in particular.
- SEO optimisation tasks such as adding metta tags, and description to your pages
- Managing your Google adwords account
- Translations Crowdsourcing platforms
- Revision and optimization of existing texts Blog articles Response to user questions
- Translations of all types of texts, the text for translation can also be split in to manageable micro jobs so the work can be distributed.
- Tagging and categorization of web content – Categorization of products – Categorization of archive data – Tagging of articles – Images and videos
Web research can also be done using crowdsourcing
- Research of product information and prices and research of manufacturer data and competitor information. Reseach projects may be large at fist but as always when micro Jobs they are manageable.
- Market research surveys – Testing of websites – Testing of online services – Testing software or products
Graphic design work
- Logo design
- Website design
- Flyer and poster design
The process procedures vary between crowdsourcing platforms, but they all do the same essential task of distributing micro jobs to their network of workers. Any business start-up can decide, irrespective of the services listed above, whether it can use crowdsourcing to promote its own requirements and ideas. At the startup magazine we have started to use crowdsourcing to support our business.
If you have any questions or commets about crowdsourcing please post them in the comments section bellow, we will do our best to help.
Related articles
- How to spot cash flow warning signs? (thestartupmag.com)
- Starting a Retail Business: Finding the Right Place (thestartupmag.com)
- How is the Government is encouraging enterprise finance? (thestartupmag.com)
