As business look for ways to outsource specific business tasks, many are turning to crowdsourcing as a way to fulfill their outsourcing needs. Crowdsourcing is the process of  outsourcing your business tasks to undetermined, usually a large group of people or community in the form of an open call.

Why use Crowdsourcing

For those who are looking for a way to minimize time and cost for outsourcing their tasks, crowdsourcing may an answer to your business needs. I understand that crowdsourcing may not work for every task or even every business owner. This is just an alternative option to meet your outsourcing needs.

Who offers Crowdsourcing

There are different options available to you as a business owner that you can check out. The type of website source that you use depends on your needs as a business owner. Whether you are looking for a branding source, or a creative source or you might be looking for a just a freelance resource website. Whichever you are looking for, I have created a short list of recources below:

• CrowdSpring
• 99Designs
• oDesk
• Elance

Check these out and let me know what you think. Also feel free to leave a comment and add to the list of resources who provide crowdsourcing opportunities. The video below provides more details about how crowdsourcing works.

Image: SXC.hu

How can your recession proof your business to ensure that you don’t end up closing your business? Try implementing change into your business. I’ve been in business for several years and have found that if you are not open to change then you could be faced with the challenge of keeping your doors open.

There are many things that you can look at in your business that you might need to change in order to recession proof it and keep your doors open. The list below is a start list of things that you can do to help change the way you do business.

• Cross-marketing: find business collaborators that you can work with to help each others businesses grow
• Outsourcing: select tasks in your business that you can have someone else complete so that you time can be freed up
• Creative project hunting: bid on jobs that you may not have all the skills but your can outsource to other to complete the job
• Social media advertising: find ways to use social media such as Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook to advertise your business

To help you further learn about some ways that you can be open to change I have included a video below.

No sooner did I ask about the next low cost country (LCC), than I stumbled onto the Gartner Group’s research on Outsourcing, which includes a list of the top 30 countries for offshore services.

Gartner publishes a lot of interesting business research, mostly on topics revolving around IT. Take any IT business topic which I have looked for information on in the past 5 years and Gartner has published a white paper on it. Content management, customer relationship management, SAP, enterprise software, you name it, Gartner covers it.  My only problem is, they also charge for it. I only hear about Gartner reports when someone else quotes them, as did Cecilia Piaggio in an article about IT outsourcing in Argentina.

The article is full of interesting facts about doing business with Argentina. According to a popular saying, “Argentineans are Italians who speak Spanish but think they are English”. The country has the fastest growing economy in Latin America, close cultural proximity with the US and Europe and engineering wages significantly lower than in Hong Kong. Around 40,000 IT professionals work in the country; both Google and NEC have recently opened regional hubs in Argentina.

Unfortunately, Cecilia conceeds that engineering graduates from Argentina’s 50 universities cannot keep pace with demand. We all know what that means - expect salaries in Argentina to start rising.

The search for the next LCC continues…