The following is a guest post by Lior.

For those of you new to crowdsourcing, it’s something that you may want to look into if you need work done and want to save some money. It simply means the job you need doing is farmed out to a community of workers rather than one particular company. A good example would be if you needed a designer. Instead of putting your “eggs in one basket” so to speak, by going to one company, you could go to several design options from multiple designers. So why in the world would they do this? It is a golden opportunity for them to show their capabilities and hopefully put them above the competition. Basically it comes down to a competition and in this case, may the best designer win!

Here are just five of many sites that allow for these types of competitions.

1. Prova

Here the small time business can submit their design ideas for almost any medium they want. Perhaps for mugs, sweatshirts, personal gifts, gift certificates. The site doors are open for the customer here as well. They can submit audio books and other items they feel are competitive. It is a community of its own and perhaps has a higher social level than the others. Competitors who win the contests here will be promoted by the site as well as the customer who bought the services.

2. 99designs.com

Probably for newcomers to crowdsourcing this is the best site to resort to because it has become so popular. It is easy to use which probably puts it a step ahead of the others. All the customer has to do is enter a brief asking for a design in categories such as themes for wordpress, background for twitter or even web design to name a few. Included as well can be merchandise designs. It has a money back warranty of 100%. With such a large community base it is perfect for the customer because there will no doubt be numerous designs to be able to choose from.

3. GuerraCreativa

Relatively new and only has about 10,000 designers ready to enter a contest. This site will only accept briefs for designs but will include 3D or flash. Has a money back guarantee and if you are in need of this type of service then its worth checking them out.

4. CrowdSPRING

This Company is pretty impressive and boasts of a few awards that they have such as the Stevie Award for 2009, and the ITA CityLights. They are also known to have some pretty heavy hitters as customers such as SmugMug for example. There are a lot of brief options here to run contests on. For example graphic design, web design, industrial designing and even writing assignments such as product or company naming. There is valuable talent to be found here, with a community of 65,000plus. There is no risk based on the money back guarantee.

5. DesignCrowd

This site is a smaller version perhaps than some of the others with fewer competitors for a project. They also offer fewer categories to submit a brief and run a contest for. They do have several design categories. The money prizes are not all that great but the bottom line of what the work is worth is up to the customer. The problem here though is that low budget contests are not going to draw the attention of high quality designers. It will basically come down to getting what you pay for.

So as you can see these are just a few crowdsourcing sites that you could really take advantage of if your dollars for your business are tight right now. It is a least worth giving it a try, as you could end up with some amazing results.

This post was written by Lior who is a consultant for a task management start-up and also works with Milk Nursingwear, a nursing tops company.