Brad Fallon, the mastermind along with Andy Jenkins behind the uber-successful StomperNet (by the way – StomperNet is opening their doors again very soon), recently launched the beta version of his very cool Free IQ – The Marketplace for Ideas.
Free IQ is about about empowering individuals to distribute their knowledge online using media such as video, audio and text. The Free IQ site acts as the communication medium and allows any person to set up an account with a personal homepage and begin distributing their media.
What makes Free IQ different to say a YouTube or Google Videos, is that Free IQ has been created with Internet marketers in mind. What this means is you can set up your page, sell your products, collect opt-ins to your mailing list, offer affiliate commissions and effectively base an entire Internet business just on the service provided by Free IQ.
I’ve created my homepage which you can see here: http://www.freeiq.com/yaro
As an example, let’s say I complete a series of videos on blogging. I can then upload this product to Free IQ, set the price, sell and distribute the product all through the service. You can do the same with audio and text, like PDF books, and physical products that you ship to Free IQ who then distribute for you.
You can also provide free materials which, assuming Free IQ takes off and gains mainstream penetration similar to other online video services, has the potential to go viral and best of all, bring users back to Free IQ to buy your paid products. It’s like YouTube with a sales conversion process that you can profit from.
If you go to the FreeIQ homepage you will see that it looks a lot like Google. When you conduct a search, the free info appears in the main area, and down the right column you get the content for sale listings. So just like Google the free listings are paired with “paid” or in this case, “for profit” listings.
The hope is that lots of great free information will be plugged into FreeIQ giving it the critical mass of traffic and users. The potential to then monetize this audience through paid products is very appealing.
As online marketers are learning, in order to demonstrate credibility and expertise it’s very important to put your best stuff out there for free, then with trust in place, you can begin selling paid products. FreeIQ lets you do both these functions, build trust through provision of free value, and then sell your paid products.
Best of all, and especially from Brad’s view, if lots of people use FreeIQ to do this process, then the site itself will become super popular, which will also help each individual content author as well since everyone benefits from the increase in overall traffic.
Will Free IQ offer the power of collective wisdom and commerce all in one place? Possibly, as long as it doesn’t become a source of really junky Internet marketing products that you have to sift through in order to find the good stuff.
Brad Fallon knows Internet marketing and so far playing with the system you can tell his team know what Internet marketers want to see in a system like this. I expect Free IQ could be quite huge and if nothing else makes it very easy for anyone to get into information publishing.
Free IQ Affiliate Program
You won’t be surprised to know that a system like this has an affiliate program too, which is two-tiered. When you refer people to Free IQ, like I am doing with this post now, if those people then go on to sell things through the service, you make a commission from sales for the next 12 months.
Since the service is brand new there is a fairly significant opportunity to refer people now during the early days, so check Free IQ out and if you like it consider promoting it to your readers too.
You can read more at: www.FreeIQ.com
The FreeIQ sounds like it has potential, if enough people use it.
Yaro, what are your thoughts/opinions of Stompernet? If you’re an ‘advanced’ web seo/marketer (and I know ‘advanced’ could mean very different things to different people), would Stompernet be worth it, or is for more beginner/intermeddiate onlone marketers?
Hi Jason,
I can’t give an thorough opinion of StomperNet because I am not in the program.
However I have seen detailed screenshots of all the member features, like the homepage, the community, the teachers, the videos etc.
It appears to be by far the most comprehensive search marketing membership course out there. They tailor the package to everyone in the sense that the core materials are reasonably advanced, you do have to have a website up and know how to alter it in order to implement what they teach.
For beginners they have a 0-30 days program designed to get people caught up with the whole Internet business concept.
The big thing about StomperNet is that it is a company. It’s got many staff, a physical office and paid experts/trainers. It’s more like a school than an info product.
Personally if I wasn’t focusing most of my time on implementing and going through Rich Schefren’s program/watching product launch formula/reading all the existing info I already need to get through, I’d be in StomperNet myself.
So to answer your question I definitely think it’s tailored for advanced SEO people and in fact I think it’s the advanced who already have businesses online that can potentially benefit the most since they have online assets that can be used to apply stompernet techniques from day one, rather than having to build something from scratch.
signed up with freeiq, and i must say so far it looks promising, i’ll give it a shot and most certainly write about it
Thanx for sharing the infos Yaro
Have visited FreeIQ. Interesting, have a lot of free Internet marketing resources in video, audio and PDF formats. So far I only see Internet marketing stuff there, I wonder is FreeIQ limited to Internet marketing niche only.
I’ve just signed up to FREE Iq as well. I think it will be something big. Let’s see how it goes.
Alan – FreeIQ can be used for anything, but I expect because it’s been marketed so far to a lot of Internet marketers we are seeing a lot of content from that group.
Over time it might change but I have a feeling the major use will be to sell IM products and give away free IM information. I hope it expands beyond that though as it would help to legitimize it to see many different categories.