Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing which involves contracting out tasks to an undefined group of people. In recent years crowdsourcing has seen a major rise, as more and more people have moved away from traditional desk jobs and are working online on a freelance basis. These include primarily white collar workers who are able to tap into a market for their skills. In this post we will show you how to make money with the help of internet crowdsourcing services and provide a few examples to help you get started.
Elance
Elance is an employment platform that functions on a global basis. Unlike many outsourcing websites that are location restricted, Elance allows freelancers and employers from all over the world to interact and do business. It is one of the biggest e-portals for crowdsourcing and anyone can render services or hire freelancers by making a profile on Elance. There are numerous categories for which you can search and find jobs, including technical writing, web development, application development, network and security, search engine marketing, email marketing, data entry, etc.
The good thing about websites like Elance is that they offer something for everyone. For example, even if you are not highly skilled and are a novice computer user, you can sign up for something as easy as data entry and start earning money. Moreover, the payment is also guaranteed in most cases as employers require funding a deposit with Elance, which is paid out to hired contractors after they complete a milestone in a job.
Odesk
Odesk is another good crowdsourcing service that brings together freelancers and employers from around the world. It is quite similar to Elance and provides a large number of categories for people to search and find jobs from. It is recommended that if you are looking to render freelance services via the internet, you should try out both of these crowdsourcing services.
PickyDomains
If you want to make money with some outside the box idea, then services like PickyDomains are worth trying out. This unique crowdsourcing services brings people together to help them find exceptional website domain names and slogans. The ideas are generated by actual people and not bots and the ones who come up with good ideas are also rewarded.
Services like PickyDomains can be used to find useful domain names and slogans for your website and also to earn rewards if you are good at coming up with interesting names. While the first two examples given above are related to more conventional form of crowdsourcing, services like PickyDomains can be used to make money directly or indirectly (e.g. by finding a good domain name for your website).
Agent Anything
Agent anything is the kind of crowdsourcing service that brings together service providers and employers in the real world. With the help of this service employers (Clients) post a job and hire an Agent to perform it. The task can be as simple as “buy and deliver coffee to my house”. The Agents that signup for the job (Mission) are paid an agreed remuneration. At the moment Agent Anything is restricted to New York and New Jersey and only allows college students to work as “Agents”. The system is strictly regulated and students are only allowed to work as Agents after they are verified. While services like Agent Anything are a rarity, they are likely to increase in the near future.
iStockPhoto
Crowdsourcing can be profitable not only for freelancers or people looking for work but also for entrepreneurs. While some entrepreneurs can benefit from internet crowdsourcing by hiring freelancers, there are also a number of handy crowdsourcing services that can offer a specific service at a reasonable price. A good example this is iStockphoto. It is a royalty free microstock photography service that offers stock photos that can be bought by using the credit system of iStockPhoto. The credits range from $.95- $1.50.
The above mentioned are just some examples of how you can make money with internet crowdsourcing. There are a number of other useful crowdsourcing services that offer various means of earning money. To sum it all up, you can earn money from internet crowdsourcing services by doing freelance work, hiring freelancers for your business to reduce costs, by joining crowdsourcing communities for serving a specific purpose and by acquiring specific products/services that may benefit your business.