I recently wrote a post, entitled, What’s Wrong With Most Business Blogs, in which I outlined a failure I see in many business blogs – that is the blogs  are too much about the business, when they should be more about the customer. In an earlier post, I suggested using a simple survey to find out more about your what your customer wants. Today, I am going to recommend another method which will give you a deeper look into what consumers really want and need.

If you haven’t heard the term before, crowdsourcing refers to using  your audience to help with business tasks like product/service research, testing and development. The term was first coined in 2006 when Jeff Howe wrote an article called The Rise Of Crowdsourcing for Wired magazine. Wikipedia is one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing – although it is not without its critics for the inaccurancy of some of its content, it still works remarkably well.

How to use crowdsourcing on your blog

As mentioned previously, you can use the principles of crowdsourcing to find out more about what your customer wants. You can also use crowd sourcing to create content for your blog. A good example is the  crowd-sourced interview post. You ask a selection of niche influencers to answer a question, collate the answers and turn them into a great post on your blog.  Here is an example  of a crowd-sourced post in which I participated. And check out this great post as an example of how to really maximise crowdsourced interviews.

In the video at the top of this post, you can watch and listen as Jeff Howe, the King of Crowdsourcing, talks about how crowdsourcing is driving the future of business. I hope the video and this post will spark some crowdsourcing ideas for you.

Have you tried crowdsourcing ideas for your blog content? How did it work out? Is crowdsourcing something you would like to use on your business blog? Do you have any questions on crowdsourcing? We would be happy to answer them for you. Just leave a comment below.

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