Crowdsource Your Success

Affiliate Summit East 2010
Crowdsource Your Success
Matt Mickiewicz
Co-Founder: 99designs, Flippa & SitePoint

About Matt Mickiewicz
Started SitePoint.com in 1998. It’s still one of the Top 1000 Websites as ranked by Alexa
Launched 99designs in 2008 which went on to become the most popular marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design
Created the first ever web-platform for buying and selling website via auction (Flippa.com) which has sold $39M in websites to date

Predicting Who Will Win the Oscars
Since 1995 Paul Johnson has been asking his students to guess who will win the Oscar in 12 categories
The average student got 5 predictions right
The average is right 11 out of 12 times, and beats any single student (even in a class of 125!)

Can Crowdsourcing Make You Successful?
The Many Are Smarter Than The Few, i.e. “Ask the Audience” on Who Wants To Be A Millionare has a 91% success rate
X-Prize, Wikipedia, Netflix $1 Million Prize

4 Pillars of Crowdsourcing
Diversity of Opinion/Knowledge/Skill
Independence
Decentralized. Global is better than local
Aggregation. Wiki’s, Marketplaces, etc.
Crowdsourcing is NOT Rent-A-Coder, ScriptLance or Guru
Crowdsourcing is One-To-Many.

Landing Page Optimization – FiveSecondTest
Get quick feedback on landing page designs – FREE
Do your calls to action stand out? Get people clicking on “hot spots”
Can visitors understand what the site is about?
Give viewers a memory test: what can they remember about the landing page?

PPC Management – Trada
Turn over PPC Management to a group of AdWords Qualified Professionals
Experts work to your metrics: CTR or CPA
They create keywords, ad groups, and write ad copy
On average, you get 24 people working on your account, 110 ads & 6500+ keywords
Covers AdWords, Yahoo & Bing

Crowdsourced AdWords CTR Improvement
BoostCTR.com allows you to get experts competing to write the best AdWords ad copy for you
Boost clickthrough rates, quality score, and lower your CPC
$99 per ad group with guaranteed improvement

Product Development – Quirky
Crowdsourced product development
Submit new ideas for products or influence products currently in development and earn cold, hard cash

Vitaminwater & Dell IdeaStorm & Doritos
VitaminWater developed new flavours & promoted themselves via Facebook App
Dell’s idea storm has resulted in the company going carbon-neutral, selling ink in retail & more
Doritos – #1 Superbowl ad in Youtube in 2006

Feature Requests – UserVoice & SuggestionBox

Group Input: Voting
You can discover what will be popular in advance
SxSW solicited its fans to vote on their favourite
T-Shirt design. The winner ended up being the #1 seller
at the conference.

Crowdsource Your Naming & Brand
iPhone App Developer paid $27.50 via Amazon MechanicalTurk for 500 responses and came out choosing iReadFast

Crowdsource Your Naming & Brand
Beware: isnack 2.0

Develop Your Website or Software
TopCoder.com allows you to get concepts, user-interface prototypes, debugging, project specifications, algorithms and more sourced via global competition to 250,000 coders.

Find JV Partners
Jigsaw.com is a massive crowdsourced database of contact information. Find email addresses & phone numbers of those hard to reach JV partners.

Crowdsourced Banner Design
Ad Creative can make or break your media buys
Run a global competition and get hundreds of designs to choose from
Buy as many, or as few designs as you want

Crowdsourced Banner Design

Crowdsourced Landing Page Design
Many “design contest” marketplaces allow you to buy the rights to use multiple concepts
Announce “multiple winners” to boost designer participation
Fantastic way to get “out of the box” ideas from a global pool of designers, each with their own unique perspective
Outsource the PSD to HTML conversion to someone like PSD2HTML.com

Crowdsourced Landing Page Design

Video For Conversion
E-Commerce Retailer A:
Control group without video embed: 1.04%
People who could watch video but did not: 1.47%
People who watched video: 4.06%
Overall Increase: +46.22%
E-Commerce Retailer B:
Control group without video embed: 3.27%
People who could watch video but did not: 4.06%
People who watched video: 4.82%
Overall Increase: +27.05%
Source: Treepodia.com

Crowdsourced Video
The problem is that companies like Transvideo, Splainers, Say it Visually charge $20K+ for a single video
That’s an expensive A/B Test!
GeniusRocket.com allows you to crowdsource videos for as little as $3500 (save 70-90%)

5 Principles Of Successful Crowdsourcing

You Reap What You Sow

Tight Deadlines Work

Keep It Simple, Stupid (K.I.S.S.)

Don’t Be Scrooge. Offer more than the minimum.

Summary: 5 Principles of Crowdsourcing Success
You Reap What You Sow
Be clear and take time in describing your call
Deadline.
Author Rick Warren had 5001 cover designs in 72 hours
Don’t be a Douchebag
Feedback is often a prime motivator.
Crappy work can become great work if you respond.
You became the “Coach” for the crowd.
Keep It Simple Stupid
Don’t use multiple marketplaces for the same project.
Keep your project briefs & requirements super concise.
Don’t be Scrooge. Feed the Greed.

Q&A
Share your past crowdsourcing successes & failures
Your current outsourcing & crowdsourcing challenges
Other?

Don’t forget: You can copy-paste this slide into other presentations, and move or resize the poll.
Poll: Q&A for Crowdsource Your Success

Crowdsource Your Success

by Affiliate Summit on Aug 23, 2010

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