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Being a webmaster of your own sites can be daunting. You actually have to DO most of the work yourself or find someone else who can do it for you. Some tasks are easier to do using the right software and some are easier using a service.

Using Amazon Mechanical Turk is one of the more brilliant ways to outsource. Of course you have to think about tasks that are easy and quick to work on but still need human intelligence. After funding your account, you create Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs for short) and submit them to the Mechanical Turk. After a surprisingly short time you get results coming in from workers around the globe.

I am just starting to experiment with the possibilities but already find this extremely useful.

Example - using the Advanced HIT tool:

Title: Do You LOVE your Digital Camera?

Description: Give us your quick view on it.

Keywords: digital photo,digital camera,nikon,canon,olympus,pentax,minolta

Expires in: 100 days

Provide Detailed Instructions:

• Go read the example at: http://i.digital-photo-web.com/Olympus-Digital-Camera/Olympus-E500
• Tell us in your own words (100-500) about your own digital camera.
• What brand and exact model is it?
• What do you like about it the most?
• What tasks do you use it for?
• Where would you like to see improvements?
• Thanks in advance for taking the time and giving your input.

Select an Answer Format - Free Text Answer

And finally I pay for my HIT: 100 assignments for $0.05 each.

Yeah - you read that right. I get plenty of results for only 5 cents per completed task!

A few examples with minor editing:

• Canon Digital Ixus 430
• Canon EOS 40D
• Canon ixus 860s
• Canon Powershot SD850 IS
• Canon PowerShot SX100 IS
• Canon PowerShot TX1
• Canon Rebel XT
• Canon XTi

All the results I have got are usable and many give valuable insights.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Outsourcing is the current buzz around the net.

I’ll start you off with some pointers in how and what I do - just get some details down and add some meat to the bones…

Lets be clear about the fact that I am no expert in outsourcing. But simply running my daily live I outsource a lot of tasks, sometimes without noticing. You do too. Buy a pizza or take away chicken and you have outsourced COOKING.

Here is a list of a few outsourcing routes I have tried:

www.Need-An-Article.com - I use them for article writing when I don’t feel like writing it myself from scratch. Using the service is pretty straightforward - you get reasonable quality and can ask for one revision. I had one writer that was not up to par but most are ok and I found one that was very good. It is important to get your own voice into the article and make minor adjustments. The cost is a little over $5 for each article as well as a monthly fee of $10.

Example:
http://www.digital-photo-web.com/madame-tussauds-museum-london.html
(took the photos myself)

www.AbsoluteCovers.com - Ovi Dogar is a very capable and quick graphics designer. I used his service for the graphics for creating my eBook cover. The result was very professional. In addition to the cover he made the graphics for the sales page from a photo I sent and some text. Can’t recall the cost but it was less than $200 for the whole package.

Example:
http://www.4×4offroads.com/book.html

www.SubmitEdge.com - I recently started using their services. For $15 I can get 100 one way links from directories. Pretty hard to do that by hand for less. I also am trying out the “Basic link building package” for $79. So far so good - except the first article I just got back is not acceptable. I am just now asking for a rewrite on that.

Photo Journalists hired - I currently have one guy who is writing articles for me on a regular basis. I asked for submissions in my newsletter and got a few responses. The cost per article is fixed and is of course way higher than NAA but the quality and relevancy is also much higher. This way I can have original and interesting articles from places where I can’t be. I am looking for more photo journalists (of both sexes) to take the website even further.

Example:
http://www.4×4offroads.com/off-road-adventure-romania-easter.html

Hope that this list gets someone inspired to try some tasks. Like most webmasters I am sometimes a little too convinced that I am personally the best man for each job. However I think outsourcing is vital for healthy growth to increase profits and safe time.

Popularity: 36% [?]