When it comes to generating content, many websites are using crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing refers to when a company outsources its work to a group of people—not their employees.
Basically, a company will take a problem and ask the crowd for solutions. The answers from the crowd then become the property of the company, and the crowdsourcers are generally compensated for their time.
If you want to use crowd sourcing for your own business, you need to implement it into your strategy. The following are three ways that you can access crowdsourcing and start using it for your own success.
1. Blogs
Blogging is one of the best ways that you can crowdsource. People are visiting your blog on a daily basis and leaving comments, so it serves as a great hub for you to start your crowdsourcing endeavors.
You can simply start the conversation with one of your blog pieces, or you can post the problem on your blog and specifically ask for solutions. You can even use your blog to determine a specific group of people to source. For example, if you have a handful of people regularly commenting on your blog, reach out to them and ask if crowdsourcing would interest them. If so, point them in the direction of your challenge and let them provide you with great content and even greater solutions.
2. Question Forums
Sites like Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn are a great way to start crowdsourcing. Both of these tools allow you to post questions and receive feedback from other users. You can post questions on these sites as much as possible and receive a large number of responses.
On LinkedIn, you can post the question and reach out to others you are connected with and ask them for their feedback. This allows you to choose whose answers you receive and gain insight from individuals who are considered experts.
3. Contests
You can run a contest to gain ideas from other people. Pose your problem as the challenge to your contest and allow users to write in and say how they would solve the problem. Doing this is extremely beneficial. First, it generates a great deal of content to your site. Second, you gain valuable solutions from a large number of people. Third, it doesn’t cost you much, as the only fee you’ll have is the grand prize (and marketing, of course).
With any crowdsourcing, you want the content to appear on your site. This will ensure that your site is gaining valuable information each and every day, and it provides a wealth of keywords and unique copy for the search engines. Before you can start crowdsourcing, you need to enable your website to accept content from others, so you may have to pay for the initial setup of this feature if it’s not already available.
Once your site is enabled for crowd sourcing and once you have determined how exactly you’re going to gain users to crowd source for you, you will see a great deal of benefits for your site. Crowdsourcing does take some work in order to get it started, but the payoff is well worth it.
Jacob Smith writes articles for Review Trackers that help business owners with marketing strategies.