Outsourcing manual labor
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As part of this “organic traffic to your website using social bookmarking experiment”, we’ll need to do a lot of clicking — social bookmark the various posts and videos as shown in the viral traffic tutorial (see blogroll on right).
I’m right now outsourcing mechanical tasks (clickery-click on the social bookmarking logos) on mturk.com. (actually, I will in a second, AFTER posting some content on http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/, otherwise there is nothing to bookmark, right?).
The great thing about mturk.com is that you can outsource repetitive, really small tasks — like clicking on links, image-tagging, posting blog-posts, that kind of thing. You can even use their API and automate these tasks (so e.g. if you have 200 pictures which you want tagged, you can automatically point their workers to the individual images, so there is no duplication) — but that’ll take a while for me to understand.
One of the drawbacks of mturk is that you need a US address — handy having a brother who runs a triathlon community website over in L.A. (www.trinited.com)
Places like elance.com are great too, but they’re better for bigger tasks, less mechanical in nature. They also have a $50 minimum charge (as far as I can tell), so not ideal for micro-jobs.
Right then, your input: what other outsourcing places do you use, what advantages and disadvantages do they have?
Oh, btw, I’ll be posting this post over at http://lessworkmoremoneyblog.com/ as well, as the first post…
If that doesn’t ramp up organic traffic dramatically, I don’t know;-)
Thanks for the info about mturk; I have seen how effective social bookmarking can be (I “stumbled” and “dugg” a friends blog & she got over 200 visits with NO advertising!) but doing it all can be deadly boring!
Have you heard of/used Social Bookmarker? It’s also good at reducing the amount of manual work … but you first have to have logins to all the participating sites, and there is still an element of manula work.. but it’s pretty good.
Best wishes
Tracey
Tracey,
do you mean http://www.socialmarker.com or something else? Like you say, you have to set all those accounts up first, however, I’m even considering outsourcing that.
Reason is of course that if you have several accounts for each social bookmarking site, you can then mark each post several times.
What I’m now looking for is a way to then automate the bookmarking to several sites at once (I think roboform is going to melt down…)
Veit
PS: update on mturk coming soon, had a few interesting ‘learnings’….