Internet Marketing Tips – Mechanical Turk – What’s The Deal?
Well, by now you’ve probably heard of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Maybe you saw the video of the kid who got 10,000 people to draw pictures of sheep for him. Maybe not. Well, if Mechanical Turk is a foreign concept to you, fear not. This article will give you the five cent tour, but more importantly, will show you how to use Mechanical Turk as a form of marketing. This may be the cheapest publicity you ever got in your life. Or, it may be the biggest waste of money since they made 8-track tapes. We’ll see.
The deal with Mechanical Turk is simple. You advertise a service you need to have done and offer to pay people a ridiculously low fee for people to do it. This guy offered two cents to each person who would draw him a sheep. He got 10,000 people to do it and it cost him $200. Now, the money wasn’t for nothing because if you saw the video, you saw what this kid did with all these photos and right now he’s got a web site that is pretty popular. Think he won’t be able to monetize it?
This is all well and good, but how can we, as Internet marketers, make use of something like this? Well, off the top of my head I could think of a few things. One would be to offer two cents to each person who will post a link to our site on their web page. It would take them all of five minutes, at that. Imagine how many backlinks we would get if we offered to do this? However, there is a problem with this scenario. If we get that many backlinks that quickly, the search engines won’t take to kindly to this, so actually this isn’t a good idea. However, if we limited it to a small number, say 10, and made this offer once a week, for 20 cents, we’d get 10 backlinks to our site each week. Naturally, you’d want to specify that the site has to be related to our niche.
Now mind you, it’s 7:52 in the morning, I’m half asleep and the above idea was right off the top of my head without really giving it much thought. But can you imagine if you sat down and really thought out a strategy for using Mechanical Turk? For a very low cost, you could significantly increase your web presence and send your business to another level. All it takes is a little imagination.
Is Mechanical Turk a fad? Maybe…or maybe it’s here to stay and something that’s going to become every Internet marketer’s dream. Honestly, I have no idea. I do know this much. One kid did make something of this and accomplished something that wouldn’t have been possible without it. So before you dismiss this as a fad or something that has no value…sit down and think about it.
It just may be the one thing that your business needs.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
By: Steven Wagenheim
Tags: Amazon, Backlinks, Five Minutes, Internet Marketers, Internet Marketing, Marketing Tips, Mechanical Turk, Niche, Photos, Pictures Of Sheep, Publicity, Search Engines, Top Of My Head, Two Cents, Waste Of Money, Web Page