Congratulations to my friend Brad Fallon and his team for the launch of something truly new in the world of online marketing, Internet marketing, and entrepreneurship: FreeIQ.com.
In some sense, it’s like an entrepreneurial channel on popular video site YouTube except, well, it’s a whole lot more too. Imagine a site you can go where you can find hundreds of informative videos and ebooks on a wide variety of business and entrepreneurial topics.
To be fair, though, some of what you’ll find in this first iteration is what I would consider the worst snake-oil salesman marketing “opportunity” information, but really, that’s no different to the junk that predominates on YouTube, Google Video and other multimedia content sites, is it? One of the fundamental challenges in any business space is winnowing out the quality material from the questionable, whether you’re in a Chamber of Commerce party or an Internet Marketing workshop advertised through hype-mad radio spots.
A better comparison is against eBay. eBay isn’t an auction site, it’s a venue for auctions to transpire online. A subtle but very important difference. Further, just as eBay shouldn’t be rated by the lame auctions it sometimes hosts and the rip-offs that are interspersed with the legit buyers and sellers, so FreeIQ.com should be recognized as an underlying infrastructure toolkit for the Internet marketing community, not just a nicely organized repository.
Let me explain…
One of the challenges of marketing products or services online is that it’s complicated to create affiliate programs and it’s hard to learn about new products. In business terms, there are problems with relationship management and discoverability.
You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever clicked on an AdWords advertisement and ended up on a landing page that endlessly extolls the virtue of a particular “guru” and has glowing testimonials from unknown third parties to convince you to buy their product. Heck, I know about it, because I sell some products that way too, albeit considerably toned down. See what I mean with my course Exploding Your Business with Blogging! As it happens, Brad was my partner on that project, so maybe it’s all just a circle after all. 🙂
Even with what I have on that site, however, it’s hard to know whether you’re going to find me a good teacher and find my material of value without some sort of sample. Further, I have an affiliate program but, candidly, I don’t really pay much attention to it because affiliate programs are complicated and difficult to manage.
That’s the beauty of the FreeIQ infrastructure. Utilizing its video hosting capabilities and commerce back-end, I could shift my entire course onto the system, offer up free samples, and automatically tap into the thousands of affiliates that are already signed up for FreeIQ. All without me doing much more than just uploading a video or even a PDF.
If you are interested in Internet marketing or just curious about what Brad and his team have pulled together for this underserved market of buyers and sellers, I encourage you to spend a few minutes learning more about FreeIQ.com.
Corp. references: Google, Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG), eBay, Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY).
I came across Free IQ the other week and I quickly tuned out for some reason? I think you are right in many ways as what turns out to be a fantastic idea gets stomped around by a million and one snake oil salesmen.
You Tube is saturated with junk and I can’t buy anything decent on eBay anymore, without trudging through a minefield of fake products? Anyway, I think that niche video content sites like Free IQ could definitely help rather than hinder any internet marketer looking for quality content.
The question is, how do newbies to internet marketing filter through relevant and timely content and those produced by slick haired salesmen trying to earn a quick buck? Any suggestions?
Thanks for checking out the Free IQ beta while it’s less than two weeks old.
Two important points: First, we have a patent pending on our ranking algorithm, called Review Rank. It will rank the search results, by topic via user-defined tags, based on the quality of the free content. The quality is ranked according to weighted user reviews and other patent-pending factors. We think that this will allow users to see only the content they want, with the best stuff at the top of the list.
Second, don’t judge the entire site and idea based on content that users have loaded in the first week. Most of the early users are full or part-time affiliate marketers, many of whom sell information about internet marketing.
But soon, many experts, authors, speakers, consultants, trainers, teachers, and publishers will discover Free IQ. The value proposition of free hosting, streaming and delivery for unlimited amounts of video, audio and ebooks should be compelling for true subject matter experts of every topic imaginable. Plus, they can use our e-commerce platform to sell all types of new media information products (premium media products) such as video and audio seminars, webinars, teleseminars, ebooks, subscription newsletters, and more through their own efforts and our dedicated affiliate network.
Many e-commerce sites have an affiliate program, but affiliate marketers like ours because we pay affiliates for referrals, not just for a one-time sale, but for any purchases made by their referrals for an entire year, from any author on the entire web site.
We also reward affiliates for referring quality content providers. I think that over the coming months, we’ll see tons of quality content uploaded and made available, both for free and for sale.
For people interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), here is an example: Jeff Johnson, one of the leading experts in SEO, spoke at a $3,000 conference. He won the award for Best Speaker and the only people who got to see his presentation paid a lot of money. But now, people can see a video description of his presentation for free, and order just his presentation for $49.
More quality content, on every conceivable topic but with a clear focus on business, will be added over the coming months. For an example, see Jeff Johnson’s page on Free IQ here: http://www.freeiq.com/confessionsofanundergroundinternetmarketinginsider21
Free IQ has been live barely a week. Our corporate blog is located here: http://www.FreeIQTeam.com.
We welcome your feedback and suggestions!
Thanks,
Brad Fallon
CEO
Free IQ
Thanks for stopping by, Brad. As you and John both indicate, the make-or-break test for the future of FreeIQ is quality control. If your ranking system will indeed help sort results by quality, then it’ll ensure that the top matches to any entrepreneurial query will be solid, trustworthy and credible gurus indeed offering up “free iq points”, as the name suggests.
At some level, of course, the quality of content is irrelevant to the value of FreeIQ as an infrastructure tool (eBay isn’t hurt when 0.001% of its auctions are fraudulent) as long as there still *is* good content to be found. As the ratings start to come in – and are screened to avoid gaming the system – you’ll also be able to feature the best of the best on the site, and that’ll significantly help too.
Thanks for announcing this. The concept of FreeiQ appeals to me. I am an information provider (info about selling stock photography) who moved his family to a rural location in the early 1970 and set up what the news media in those days called the electronic cottage.
When TIME Magazine January 3rd 1983 declared the computer as -Man of the Year-, a picture of me (page 17) at my desk in the barn, working on my newsletter and the ol- TRS-80 was featured on half a page.
I am still producing the PhotoLetter and struggling to find affiliates that I can trust to treat me right. Apparently FreeiQ is going to do this for me. I salute Brad Fallon and his partners and look forward to working with them. -Rohn Engh
On a related note: the Stompernet Blog isn’t a blog at all. There is no subscription button on it. What’s up with that?
You’re right, Tom. I’ll ask ’em about it. 🙂