Affiliate Summit East 2010

Crowdsource Your Success

Matt MickiewiczCo-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

1. Diversity of Opinion/Knowledge/Skill2. Independence3. Decentralized. Global is better than local4. 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?

Poll: Q&A for Crowdsource Your Success