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I like to start the week with a big meaty blog post but I haven’t had a chance to write one for you yet because of one very good reason - I just bought a house!

Yep, my first home purchase, a three bedroom townhouse in Brisbane where I live in Australia. It’s in a suburb about 7 kilometers away from downtown Brisbane, within the very popular and expensive “inner city”.

The Brisbane property market is nuts at the moment and I’ve spent the last few months since I returned from Canada hunting for a home only to find that most places are gone by the time I find them or I have to compete with five other buyers in a horrible silent auction process. That’s the problem with a city growing very quickly in population and not enough land to go around.

The market in Australia is pretty much like this everywhere and it’s a scary thought that for a lot of people, especially people in my age bracket who might be limited by working normal jobs (yet another reason to be an entrepreneur - no salary ceiling) that they may have to rent for a long time or choose to buy property far out from the main city area.

Thankfully I found a place that I like and can afford. It’s not ideal in location but I’m pretty happy with it, especially as a first home and investment. Keep your fingers crossed for me over the next few weeks as I go through the loan application process and all the other things you need to get done when you buy a house. I’ll have some photos of it for you once I can finally say it is mine.

Today I’ve been busy getting all the little details sorted with the property purchase, so to keep you busy I thought I would offer some recommended links. I’ve been saving up a bunch of good links for a few weeks now so take your time and enjoy…

Recommended Links

• My friend Erik Vossman from Hawa’ii offers up 41 Links to Help You Start a Blog Network. There’s some great links and tips for any blog empire builders out there in this post.
• How to Be a Successful Blogger: Learning From the Best presents some quick points on what it takes to become a great blogger. Any time I see my name along with the likes of Michael Arrington I have to send out a link
• Kevin and his site Blogging Tips is the latest text link sponsor of my blog. His blog topic is pretty obvious and you might think it’s yet another blog about blogging, which it is, but I can tell from the post frequency and content quality that Kevin is serious about this project and it’s worth checking out.
• I might be a bit late with this one, but if you are interested in a gig as a paid b5media blogger covering the topics entrepreneurship and start-ups, then this job ad should interest you.
• The team over at Young Go Getter published a great article - The Devil & Online Advertising - which struck a cord with a lot of people considering there are currently 74 comments on it as I type this and it has been dugg 103 times too. If you have an interest in online advertising, and as blog publishers you should, then have a read of this article.
• The Lazy Owner continues a recent theme I wrote about on my blog last week with the article Freelancing is Not a Business Model. Hopefully freelancers really get the idea that if they want freedom eventually some form of business structure and systematization is necessary.
• The Go BIG network has launched their new service called Projects, which is a clearing house for connecting freelancers and service providers with start-ups looking for help. The idea is that start-up companies, who may be tight on capital, can offer equity or stock options in exchange for labor.

If you ever want to see your site in my recommend links here’s a tip - write something worth recommending for starters and send some link love my way in the article. I check my referrer stats everyday and I often come across other bloggers who mention me or my blogs in a post and of course that’s one of the best ways to get a blogger’s attention and some link love sent back your way in return. No promises of course, but it’s a good way to start relationships.

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As I slowly make my way towards launching Blog Mastermind I’ve been playing with new servers to release training videos on. The idea is to offer speedy downloads and different sized files to help those with slower net connections.

I’m trying out a special service designed specifically for hosting and distributing large media files such as video. It’s called cachefly.com.

I know many people had issues with my server when trying to watch the video I produced on how I currently make money from my blog. I’ve uploaded the video to cachefly and also produced a smaller version.

You can access the videos at the links below and remember, you only have to wait for the first 10% to download and then the video will start.

How I Make Money Blogging Video - Standard Screen Size

How I Make Money Blogging Video - Smaller Screen Size

If you haven’t seen this video before, especially if it was due to speed problems last time, can you take 20 minutes now to watch the video and tell me what you think of the download quality by leaving a comment.

The video outlines exactly how I make money from my blog including details on how much I make from each monetization method.

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A quick welcome and thank you to the latest sponsor of Entrepreneurs -Journey.com, Search Engine Guide.

You should already see there banners floating around here and if search engine news and education is your cup of tea, or you want to learn how to optimize your small business for search engines, spend some time at SearchEngineGuide.com.

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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

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You can listen to the free sample here: http://freeiq.com/davidbainyarointerview

David Bain, an Internet marketing trainer from Scotland grabbed me for an interview about blogging. He asked some great questions and is using the recording as a bonus audio in his upcoming 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing product.

You can sample a free 10 minute excerpt from the full interview hosted on the Free IQ service (more on this new company by Brad Fallon soon).

In the free sample you will hear me talk about blog hosting, themes and plug-ins and outsourcing blog design. In the full interview we cover a lot about blog marketing, strategy and tactics. It’s one of the most in-depth interviews I’ve done because David really had some great questions.

If you want the full interview you either need to purchase the 13 Pillars product from David, or wait for Blog Mastermind as I’ll provide it to my students as well.

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