Crowdsourcing In Lieu of Outsourcing

The last couple of decades have seen a trend toward outsourcing versus traditional hiring to meet business needs. Coming out of the Great Recession, there is an even newer concept starting to pick up steam. It’s called crowdsourcing. Why not tap the power of the crowd when you have a specific task that needs a solution?

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach to problem solving. You normally think of handing a task to a specific employee or to a manager who will delegate it to a particular employee. In lieu of that, you can go out and bring in a temp or contract employee or forget the employment model completely and hire an outside firm to do the work. If you want to sell a building, you contract with a real estate agent. If you want to build a building you contract with an architect and general building contractor.

Crowdsourcing works something like contracting with a local firm except that the world is your marketplace. Many tasks like web design, logo design, artwork, article writing, app development and so on don’t require someone located nearby. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer can be done anywhere on Earth. On the network, the home office in Beijing is just as close as the corporate office down the hall.

Isn’t this just another form of outsourcing? It is, but on a micro scale and with interesting payment options. What I’m describing is farming out your tasks to individuals and crowds, not setting up your own shop to get cheaper labor overseas or partnering with a major corporation as a service provider.

When you go out for services locally, you probably start with the Yellow Pages or an online directory equivalent. You pick from who’s available in the area so you can meet with them in person to describe the assignment, write the contract and review the progress & results. When you go out for services online you do lose the ability to press the flesh or get your hand around somebody’s throat - literally. But if you can get comfortable doing business without the physical contact, you open up a world of new opportunities - literally!

The biggest enabler for online contracting or crowdsourcing is having a marketplace were buyers and sellers can meet. It’s a lot less dicey than trying to conduct business in forums and chats. Fortunately there is a very large and established marketplace already available with 6 million members worldwide. It’s called Witmart. They’ve got the resources and the tools that make it easy for service providers and clients to hook up successfully.

Here’s where the crowdsourcing idea comes in. You have the usual option to offer a job on a contract basis where you specify qualifications, negotiate the reward, job content and completion date and then pay upon completion. But you also have the option to make a contest out it. You specify the job and the amount of the reward and let the marketplace have at it. You then pick from best solution or solutions and release the reward to the winner or winners.

Where does the contest approach work best? It’s for things like logo design, business card designs, website design, marketing slogans, promotions, and so on. These jobs need quick solutions, don’t demand a lot of time and effort, and the value of diverse perspectives is an asset.

Contracting is more suitable for bigger jobs that require lots of time and effort, need considerable communication and coordination and have many specific requirements. Often the work is done in stages with payment released based on meeting milestones.

Do you occasionally or regularly need to find someone to build a website, translate documents, develop an iPhone App, promote a brand or come up with a company logo and find it a big hassle? Your life could get a lot easier right now by checking out the freelance marketplace with verified high quality providers at Witmart.

IT Training Videos Get You Up to Speed

Have you ever done this? You need a business or design tool, so you buy the software package, load it on your computer and start poking around the menus to get up and running. Does this work? You bet it does. Is it efficient? That’s debatable. Do you really master the features of your application? Ha! That’s not the point.

What is the point? The point is that we’re all time-starved and probably lack a bit in the patience department as well. We need to get up to speed quickly and, hopefully, with a minimum amount of pain. Unfortunately, this need for speed leaves us only nibbling around the edges of what any sophisticated program can do. If you are like most of us, you probably learn just enough to use the features you absolutely need and never bother to dig in any deeper. When you need to do something you haven’t done before, you poke around in the menus again until you discover or stumble upon the commands you need.

I think we’ve all felt like we’re missing out on the real power of programs like Microsoft Office, or Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop. How about Web design using CSS and HTML? Oh, yeah. Those subjects are a mile deep and we just scratch around the surface.

Well, why not take a course? Not a bad idea if you enjoy classwork and have, say, six months to really get into a subject. That worked great when we were students instead of, you know, business people with, you know, obligations. There are always the manuals to peruse. Poke around at Barnes & Noble some Saturday and you’ll come out lugging enough books to curve your spine. Will you read them? Fat chance. You might start, but after passing out in an hour or two, you’ll go back to looking things up as you need them. It’s always easier to interrupt a knowledgeable colleague with “just one more little question.” If you are especially lucky, they won’t spin their head around with that Exorcist face and snarl, “RTFM!” That’s “Read The Fine Manual”, for you uninitiated. Or, something like that.

Oh, yes, there is the help function that is built into every program these days. It’s there so the manufacturers can avoid the publishing expense of all those fine manuals and also claim that help is just a click away. Right. Has anyone actually been helped by a help tab in the last 20 years? I’ve found that Internet searches come up with real help a lot faster and more thorough than a program help function. Even so, if you can’t find something quickly and have to plow through the forums, it’s going to be awhile before you get the answer.

Is there anything better? How about being shown how things work instead of just reading print on the page? That’s the idea behind LearniTAnytime. What they’ve done is create a library of video modules for a wide variety of design subjects and software applications that you’re likely to use. Each topic in the video module takes 3 to 8 minutes. The entire module takes a couple of hours to complete including “try it yourself” time interspersed with the instruction. You can even make a course of study out of these by doing the suggested homework assignments.

I tried one of their sample videos on Dreamweaver, the gold standard for web page design. As I suspected, I knew only just the rudiments of even creating links using this program. In a matter of minutes, I saw several different approaches to link building that were more efficient that just hacking away at it, my default methodology. Admittedly, this is a pretty simple example. You should pick a few of the sample videos and see if you like the style and actually learn something.

What if you find that this is a lot better approach than what you’ve been doing for years? Then the thing to do is subscribe by the month to have access to the entire online video library. There are no DVDs or CD-ROMs to load in your computer. This is more like watching YouTube without the dramatic chipmunks or keyboard cats. It’s priced about what you pay for one of those premium movie channels and you might actually pick up enough skills for a better job by watching this. Interested? learn more and watch sample IT training videos now.

Website Reseller Hosting For One

Most people think of a website reseller hosting account as an easy way to get into the hosting business with a private branded turnkey operation. The other obvious use for reseller hosting is for the web designer who builds many small sites for local businesses and maintains them for a fee. But there is yet another important application for a reseller account. It’s highly flexible hosting that you use all yourself.

What sense does this make? The more domains you have, the more sense it makes. Back in the early days of the Internet, domain names were expensive and most businesses were happy just to have one domain for their online endeavors. But over the last decade or so, domains have gotten cheap enough to build a collection. You may want a separate domain name for each of your product lines, each division of a business, or each outreach program of a charity.

The next step is how to put all those names to work. In some cases, it is appropriate to build one site and point each domain at a different page or section of the website. In other cases, you really want different sites with different designs. Each domain supports a single site. Unfortunately, each site needs its own hosting.

Some companies buy their own servers and set them up to host their domains. Fewer small, medium and even large companies do that anymore. Like domains, hosting has become inexpensive enough that it makes more sense to buy the service rather than trying to run it yourself.

Here’s where economics comes in. You can give each domain its own hosting account at anywhere from $4 to $10 per month typically. If you only buy a few domains over the years and just buy them when you want to start up a new business, this is probably the low cost way to go. If most of your activity is online rather that bricks and mortar, you may have a collection of domains that numbers from a half-dozen to hundreds. Many online entrepreneurs and large organizations easily have 50 or 100 domains.

You can see how the cost of hosting dozens of domains can run into the hundreds of dollars per month with individual hosting plans. What many companies do that this point is move up to business hosting plans that let you host multiple domains on one service. The way this works is that each site you build has its own folder in your account. The hosting company sets up its servers to know which folder to grab files from for a particular domain name.

Does this approach work? Yes and no. You still have only one account, so you have a single .htaccess file that works across all sites. It’s possible that you can do something to tweak one site that will affect another. If your sites are all pretty similar and simple in design, loading a few domains on one hosting plan may work fine. I’ve done this over the years with good results. Even so, there is something even better that gives you the flexibility of having multiple hosting services but at a price more like one.

That something is website reseller hosting. The beauty of a reseller account is that it is already configured to keep your individual sites separate. You wouldn’t want a hosting customer or retail client of yours to be able to do anything that would affect another customer’s site, would you? Of course not. With reseller hosting, what you do with one of your sites will have no effect on the others.

The way this works is that you have two control panels. Many companies selling reseller accounts running on Linux servers are using WHM (Web Host Manager) and cPanel. The WHM panel is designed for you as the administrator of the site. It allows you to create and modify the hosting for each domain. You can allocate each site the amount of storage and bandwidth it needs. WHM is the master control panel to monitor and control all sites.

cPanel, the control panel, is intended for the webmaster of the individual site. Each site gets it own separate cPanel. You can log-into the cPanel with its unique username and password so that you can work on a particular site. If you are hosting for clients who want to maintain their own site, you give them the username and password for their control panel. You can always get to any site at any time through either the cPanel or the Web Host Manager.

What does the cPanel do for you? It lets you set up forwarding email addresses or POP mail accounts for a site, FTP files to the server instead of using a separate FTP client, access the server logs for that site, password protect directories, deny access from particular IP addresses who are bothering you or trying to hack your site, set up and administer MySQL databases, install server hosted software, and set specific server handlers for that particular domain.

I’ve been using HostGator Website Reseller Hosting for a couple of years now with excellent results. I’m running a couple of dozen domains, each for a separate site, on their smallest reseller account with plenty of capacity to spare. What’s considered small today compared to a half dozen years ago is really quite impressive. For $24.95 a month, you get 50 GB of disk space and 500 GB of monthly bandwidth to share among your sites. I’d suggest setting up a variety of hosting “packages” of various size storage and bandwidth in your WHM. Then you can assign the little sites small packages and save the big packages for your larger or more popular sites. You’ll be able to monitor and adjust bandwidth and disk usage for all sites from your WHM.

One peace of mind I really like about a reseller account is that you can set up a new site on a whim whenever you want. Just buy a domain name from HostGator or other favorite registrar and by the time you’ve got your account set up and your first pages created, you’ll be ready to go live online. It can be 3 AM when the muse strikes. With your reseller hosting you can add new accounts yourself in a matter of minutes any hour of the day or night. The best part is that the incremental cost of adding another site is only the cost of the domain. There’s no extra cost for adding another site to your reseller hosting.

Does this sound like the kind of flexibility you need in running your online operations? If so, check out the various low cost hosting packages, especially Website Reseller Hosting, that you’ll find at HostGator.