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Secrets You

Need To Know

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Disclaimer and Copyright Notification:

Copyright © 2011

The contents are based on the author’s personal experience and

research. Your results may vary, and will be based on your

individual situation and motivation. There are no guarantees

concerning the level of success you may experience. Each

individual’s success depends on his or her background,

dedication, desire and motivation.

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product based on my review and/or recommendation, I will receive

a referral commission. Whether I receive a commission or not will

not have any effect on the purchase price of the product.

Additionally I am sometimes offered a complimentary product to

review. My decision to promote these products is based on my own

satisfaction with the products. I do not recommend crap, and any

review I make will be based on my own experiences, which are not

typical. You could do better, you could do worse, you could do

nothing at all, and that is totally out of my control.

We make every effort to ensure that we accurately represent our

products and services. There is no guarantee that your results will

match examples published in this report.

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Some links may change or even not work for many reasons

beyond the control of the author and distributors. They cannot

guarantee or otherwise be responsible for what you might find

when you click through to sites not under the control of the

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Crowdsourcing

Some tasks are just NOT meant to be outsourced to a single

person. It takes them to long to complete. The alternative is

“crowdsourcing”.

Definition: Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks

traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of

people or community (crowd) through an open call.

The concept of crowdsourcing depends essentially on the fact that

because it is an open call to a group of people, it gathers those who

are most fit to perform tasks, solve complex problems and

contribute with the most relevant and fresh ideas.

For example, the public may be invited to develop a new

technology, carry out a design task (also known as

community-based design or "design by democracy" and refine

or carry out or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts

of data.

Blah, blah right? Let me put it to you this way. If I want 100

people to +1 me on Google plus so that an article or video I

created will jump in the search engine rankings I can get it done

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overnight and costs me only a couple of pennies. Basically,

crowdsourcing is a fantastic way to get thousands of TRAINED

employees at your disposal without having to hire a ton of

people individually.

Basically, you just go to a website (I’ll give you several below.

Plus some videos to watch) and type in the type of task that you

need to get completed. Thousands of TRAINED people will see your

task right away and your work gets done extremely quickly.

Here is a little history:

In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk,

a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs"

(Human Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized

and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so.

Dubbed "Artificial Intelligence", it was named after The Turk,

an 18th century chess-playing "machine".

1. The first crowd sourced documentary film is the non-profit

"The American Revolution," which went into production in

2005, and which examines the role media played in the

cultural, social and political changes from 1968 to 1974

through the story of underground, free-form radio station

WBCN-FM in Boston. When the project began, by seeking

archival contributions from the public, the term "crowd

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source" was not in use, and so the film was referred to as the

"first open source documentary film." The film is being

produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit

Filmmakers Collaborative.

Article One Partners, founded in 2008, is a community of

technology experts who execute crowdsourced prior art search

by researching and contributing information related to

patents. By submitting research to the online platform, the

community members compete for cash rewards, ranging from

$5,000 to $50,000.

Australian Historic Newspapers provided by the National

Library of Australia encourages members of the public to

correct/fix up/improve the electronically translated (OCR) text

of old newspapers. This means the full-text search capability

is instantly improved for everyone. The service was released

in August 2008 and by March 2010 over 12 million lines of

text had been improved by thousands of public users. This is

the first library project in the world that has undertaken

crowdsourcing on a large scale. The leader of the project Rose

Holley is an advocate of using crowdsourcing to help libraries

and archives expose and improve digital resources and has

written articles about the Australian newspaper achievements

[8] and tips for libraries on how to crowdsource effectively.

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DARPA's Adaptive Vehicle Make is a project to crowdsource

the design and manufacture of a new armored vehicle.

Summary

There are 500,000+people on Amazon Mechanical Turk willing to

complete work when it is made available. However, not necessarily

every worker on Mechanical Turk has the skills needed to complete

writing and editing jobs. In order to ensure that workers have the

proper talent to create content, they issue rigorous qualification

tests. These tests judge workers on, not only, advanced grammar

skills, but also the ability to follow instructions, the strengths in

each worker’s writing style and the ability to implement a unique

style guide.

Description

Some may think that it is impossible to leverage Amazon

Mechanical Turk for top-quality content creation but they've found

that the Turk marketplace is filled with excellent writers and editors

who can prose articles, product descriptions, blog posts and even

18-page essays. (More on the 18-page essay in the next blog!)

With the right workforce, it is possible for business to produce

quality content quickly and cost effectively. With continuous

qualification and recruitment of skilled writers and editors, they

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have successfully tapped into Mechanical Turk’s extensive

workforce for content creation.

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5 Secrets to Crowdsourcing

1. Understand clearly what Crowdsourcing is. Just read the

previous page. Crowdsourcing is a process so what matters is how

you plan to adopt it. Make it your own.

2. Understand clearly what Crowdsourcing is not!

Crowdsourcing is not Social Media, it is not part-time recruitment,

or market research, not Twitter, twatter, Bing, bang or bong. Lots

of people claim that what they do is Crowdsourcing -- a few

actually do it.

3. Crowdsourcing is about Crowds. This may sound obvious,

but the ONLY thing that makes Crowdsourcing, well Crowdsourcing,

is the Crowd. You need to really understand what a Crowd is and

how to attract and shape one. It is not a structured community. It

is not a permanent workforce. It is a group of people that like a

Crowd at a stadium concert come together voluntarily, without ties

and together enjoy and support a certain event or cause.

4. ‘Social’ is critical to Crowdsourcing. To understand

Crowdsourcing you have to get ‘Social’. That includes Social Media,

Social Networks, Social Media Marketing, Social Leadership, Crowd

Management and Social Communications.

5. A Crowd has to have a clear leader and a great cause.

Crowdsourcing, like Open source, is cause oriented. A Crowd

always needs a reason to come together. Think hard about what

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that reason is, whether it is good enough or sustainable enough

and whether you will be able to communicate it effectively. Money

is just one type of reward for your future workers.

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Now let’s break it down into two simple steps.

Step 1: Figure out what you want to outsource

Once you figure out the types of things that you’d like to

outsource, you’re going to have to figure out who to outsource

them to.

One option is building up your own team, one person at a time.

Another is something called “crowdsourcing”. This is a secret that

vry few people even know exist, yet it can be so powerful and

productive for you that you will be laughing all the way to the

bank.

To use crowdsourcing you simply have to go to a website and type

in a task that you need completed. Thousands of trained workers

will see – and complete - your task right away.

When a task is completed, you can individually review the work

that everyone did and then select who should get paid and, in the

event of unsatisfactory work, who shouldn’t. You are in complete

control.

Crowdsourcing can benefit you in a lot of different ways. Here

are some things you can use it for:

Get articles written for you

Have people post on your blog

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Generate massive social proof by having thousands of

people “Like” your Facebook page

Article distribution

Getting friends on Twitter and Facebook

Have people retweet your message

Get excellent search engine rankings

Get data for niche research

Get views for your videos

Have people like your blog post/article for social proof

For instance you could pay each person just 10 cents to like a

page/article/video/fan page etc. This would generate you all the

social proof you need to jump in search engine rankings for your

targeting keywords and industry.

So let’s say you want 2,000 people to like your page/article etc.

Hiring 2,000 people separately would take forever and would

not justify the cost and time. This is where crowdsourcing

comes in. 2,000 fans/likes in less than a week for just $200 is

amazing.

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Step 2: Choose the site you want to use

Any of the sites below could get you the same result. So let’s

take a look at the other 3 main crowdsourcing sites you can

use. Some of the other sites you could have paid just a penny

per like!

Here are 4 of the major crowdsourcing sites:

• Mechanical Turk

• Microworkers

• CrowdFlower

• ShortTask

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http://Mechanicalturk.com

http://microworkers.com

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http://crowdflower.com

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http://shorttask.com

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Let’s look at the two most popular:

1. MechancialTurk.com

2. Microworkers.com

MechanicalTurk.com

Mechanical Turk is the biggest crowdsourcing site online. There

are tons of people – especially internationally – who are looking

for work.

Because most people on Mechanical Turk don’t speak very good

English, I use the site for projects where I don’t need a lot of

English.

Projects that Mechanical Turk is fantastic for the following:

• Liking a page on Facebook

• Retweeting your message

• Getting data for a niche (So, for example, if you have a FOREX

site, you can ask people to explain their biggest frustrations

with FOREX for you. This is a UNIVERSAL thing and will give

you excellent market research.)

• Content/starting a blog (For example, you can start a blog

with comments from different people at different IP addresses

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of how people can use the information you are providing. This

might cost you 10 cents for each post of 20-30 words.)

Mechanical Turk is perfect if you need a task done quickly. Short

deadlineswill get you faster response from potential workers. 4-7

days is a typical timeframe. Time frames can be extended if you

need to.

Mechanical Turk automatically publish your ad as soon as you post

it. So expect to see a lot of results very fast.

NOTE: Language might be an issue so try to explain your

task in very easy to understand words and be very detailed.

In you ad request more people than you actually need to

complete the task.

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After the task is Completed be sure to screen the completed

assignments and make sure that you’re only the paying people who

did what you asked for. There is always a section for “proof” that

you’ll have access to and that’s where you decide who should get

paid and who should not.

NOTE: Some people think you will not check and they won’t

do the work so always check. You can use a regular virtual

assistant that we talk about in Outsourcing X-Factor to do the

checking for you if you don’t want to do it yourself. It’s

always up to you to see if you even want to check or not to

bother because you pay so little anyway.

Microworker.com

Microworker allows you to choose workers by country or just keep

things in the US/Canada/Australia for better English speaking

workers.

Microworker costs a little bit more but I find I get better English

speaking workers. This is good for articles, blogging and

commenting.

For instance you can get a nice article written for about $3 and you

can choose who you want to pay.

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NOTE: It takes 12-24 hours for your job to display in their

system. If changes need to be made to the ad the clock

starts all over again. So double check before you post the

ad.

NOTE: You can get “red flagged” if you don’t pay people for

the work they do. SO be honest.

This site is also great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tasks

that get you free traffic because of your high placement in the

search engines.

Here is an idea that an associate did that you can easily duplicate.

They wanted to get more high quality backlinks to their main

website. Backlinks move you up in the search engine rankings and

links from other high rated sites work even better. They paid

$3.25 per link back to their site where the sites had to be a PR4 or

better. They ignored free domains like BlogSpot. They created

an anchor text/keyword and had that link back to their website

they wanted ranked. They mad the link permanent and “do

follow”. If you don’t understand all these terms its not a big deal.

You SEO virtual assistant can do it for you (see Outsourcing

X-Factor). They required the url where the link was displayed so

that it could be checked.

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So here’s what happened. They had a bunch of people who did

not do the work and a bunch who did not understand the task

because of a language issue. They had 15 do it correctly which

instantly jumped their website on to the first page of Google for a

search phrase that had over 2 million search engine results. It

cost them$48.75 to get a first page ranking! Sweet.

Wrap Up

So the idea is simple. Use crowdsourcing to get results you could

not do easily yourself. Crowdsourcing is a powerful secret weapon

that can be used in any industry and in any country. So watch the

videos, use the websites and drop me an email when you have

your first success.