Boost Your Business: 8 of the Best Crowdsourcing Sites

Boosting your business through crowdsourcing may be one of the best opportunities the Internet offers when it comes to helping you compete in a challenging market. By calling on the online community rather than on employees or contractors to fulfill the needs of your business, you keep costs low and broaden your horizons.

Here are some ways to expand your business: 8 of the best crowdsourcing sites that you can use to get more work done as you minimize expense!

1. Mechanical Turk

This is a crowdsourcing site operated by Amazon where you can pay people to enter data, create content, transcribe, proofread, and a host of other “Human Intelligence Tasks.” You decide what you want to pay for each task and when workers on the site decide to do it, you get the work done and the workers get paid from your account after you approve it.

2. 99designs

Use a crowd of designers who will design your logo and website to give you a professional looking appearance online. 99designs will also design icons for your software applications and blogs. You can also hire the talent at 99designs to produce great looking stationery, documents, t-shirts and more. You decide what you want done and then launch a project. The cost of your project involves the amount paid to the winning designer, any listing upgrades that make your project easier to find on the site, and a flat listing fee that goes to 99designs ($39 is the listing fee for a logo design project) and then a prize handling fee that varies depending on the amount you pay for the project.

3. Trendwatching

Find out about trends around the world with a crowd of spotters that report everything they see. What you gain is access to an incredible database that helps you match your business, products, and services to your market. For $1199 per year you get access to the trends database, the annual report, and tips for using the information you get. You can stay on top of market trends, and not just follow them with this unique fee-based service. Trendwatching also has a free email newsletter that gives you a small taste of what its premium service provides.

4. iStockphoto

iStockphoto offers a huge range of stock photography that you can easily afford. Once you purchase the photographs, illustrations, videos, or other images from the site, you have royalty-free access which means that you can use them as often as you like. With iStockphoto you can have the best designs around at a fraction of the cost of traditional stock photography, helping make your business look more professional for less.

5. Flickr

This is possibly the most well known photography site where you can find thousands of images to spur your creativity or use according to the licensing terms of each. You can even request permission from users to use an image. This is a great way to find graphic content for your website or for printed material.

6. NineSigma

At NineSigma you can get affordable services such as strategic advising, intelligence gathering, consulting, collaboration, sustainability advising, and others that will help you develop your brand into a leading edge competitor. NineSigma prepares a request for proposal (RFP) based on your specifications and then solicits bids from its members. The result is world class management information at a low cost. Fees depend on the services used and the rates of the provider of the RFP you select.

7. Textbroker

Use TextBroker to get quality written content for extremely reasonable prices. You decide what level of writing expertise you are willing to pay for and define your requirements in a job. When the site’s registered users choose to do your work, they submit it and get paid from your account after you accept their work. Starting at 1.2¢ per word you can get all the written content you need for your business quickly, and at a great price.

8. Name This

This is a site where you can crowdsource names for your products, services, and brands. Create a naming project, define your requirements and define the rewards you wish to pay and you’ll be on your way to getting away from bland, corny sounding names to those which generate interest, embody your mission, and put money in your pocket.

Crowdsourcing allows you to define what you want and then permits you to boost your business. The 8 ways to use crowdsourcing to your advantage listed here will get you on your way to doing more with your business without spending an arm and a leg.

What do you think of crowdsourcing? Do you know of any other excellent crowdsourcing sites?