You know I love urban dictionary definitions - here's a couple more for you:

Home-shoring: Instead of "offshoring" your admin, you can "home-shore" it by using an assistant in your own country. Forget language barriers, timezones, cultural and communication difficulties - wouldn't it be nice to speak to someone who understands where you're coming from?

I'm not denying that the cheapness of paying $9.99/hour is tempting. But it's negated by the fact that you spend two hours trying to delegate the task so it's understood, wait until they wake up to complete it, spend another hour checking it and sending it back for alteration overnight, by which stage the task is a day late. They've also spent 5 hours on something which should have taken 45 minutes - so it's not really a saving either in terms of your time or the money you spend.

However, at times you aren't looking for comprehensive answers or difficult tasks, we're happy to recommend a cost effective alternative which we've been trialling for a couple of months: Crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing: This requires a bit of explanation. It's not outsourcing as such - it's recruiting multiple virtual workers to complete simple tasks. We have access to a bank of virtual workers who work as a leisure activity to earn pin money. Over 70% of them live in the USA, so their task comprehension is excellent, and the tasks range in price from $0.01-$5. You set the budget according to the difficulty of the task and how long it will take. Typically a task assigned a value of $0.05 should take 30 seconds to complete (this makes it equate to US minimum wage per hour).

Whereas a lot of outsourcing websites relies on the outsourcer being able to comprehend and complete a large task, the Crowdsourcing format allows you to be in control of the task by breaking it down into small simple steps, done by many workers simultaneously, meaning turnaround times are fast and you can be assured of great results.

e.g. say you were looking to find the contact details for a list of 20 different journalists. Your Crowdsourcer's task would be to find one of those journalist's telephone number, email and mailing address for $0.05 and enter it into a database. Only one Crowdsourcer can accept each task, so there is no risk of duplication.

Alternatively if you wanted to garner opinion on your new website from as many people as possible you could recruit 100 people to look at it and make comments or rate its effectiveness in terms of layout/calls to action/types of deals etc. They each get paid $1 but you have proofread and bug-checked your website in an afternoon across all sorts of browsers.

For a free Crowdsourcing trial please email info@virtuallysorted.com
including your name, email, tel and what you would like to try out!

 

Leads can be found using the Crowdsourcing method, but there are also a couple of other of ways to do it:

www.marketingfile.com - segment your list by size of company, location, industry, turnover and even how many people they have working for them. Your list will be small but perfectly formed. Added bonus: they offer TPS screening for a small additional cost.

www.yell.co.uk - If you need to find how many nurseries there are in the M1 postcode, here's a great way of doing it. It's relatively easy to use this list, but it probably needs a fair amount of tweaking before it can be used as a database. Please note: It is not MPS/TPS checked.

And the very best way.... Through your own leads: Building your own list is actually the highest quality leads you can get. These people know you and your business, they are interested in the product and with careful capturing of details, you can make sure they convert into sales. Ask us about our Aweber set up.

For more info on converting leads visit us online at Sales Sorted or call Steven on 0131 564 0833.