Free IQ First Look

Brad Fallon of StomperNet fame has been working on a new project that bills itself as “The Marketplace for Ideas” called Free IQ. It’s like YouTube for the business community – but isn’t limited to video. It’s for all sorts of media including ebooks, audio and video.

Still in beta, Free IQ lets you search all sorts of media for cool freebies. Anyone can join – here’s my FreeIQ Author Page where I’m able to write a brief bio about myself, link to my Aweber mailing list, and upload content. At the moment, I’ve uploaded 2 podcasts.

Market Your eBooks and Podcasts
If you’re a podcaster, ebook publisher, or vlogger, you can easily set up an account and add your content in a few minutes. It took me like 2 minutes to sign up, and depending on your connection speed, a few more minutes to upload your audio or video.

FreeIQ ranks content based on a ReviewRank, which allows anyone to rate your content. The rating system also takes into consideration how long people listen to your stuff, who’s doing the reviewing, and other tracking factors they don’t disclose.

Make Money with Free IQ
But the cool thing about FreeIQ is that it’s not just for free content – Fallon has built a monitization strategy into FreeIQ from the start. If you have content you’d like to sell, you can upload that and they’ll promote it for you. Content for sale is placed on the right side of the screen. Free content is on the left.

How can you make money? Sign up to become an affiliate. Even if you never upload content (which you should – it’s another way to market your stuff), you make money whenever someone you refer through your affiliate link buys something.

Just like YouTube, you can also embed anyone’s content onto your own website or blog. For instance, here’s an audio Paul Colligan did on Free IQ for the Podcaster.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I can’t say I’ve gotten a ton of traffic from FreeIQ just yet, nor can I tell you I’ve made tons (well, any) money, but given that the site just launched, that’s not too surprising. I will say that it’s something to watch out for, both as a source for educating yourself about virtually any subject (without having to sift through a million annoying sales letters), buy stuff, and promote yourself.

The Drawbacks of Free IQ
Of course, a site like this is only as good as the content that’s uploaded and there will always be people who try to take advantage of the system. I’ve seen some pretty snake oil sales content on the site, but hopefully, as people start using the site more, reviewers will push down their rankings while rewarding great content.

Also, from my limited experience with the ReviewRank, it seems like shorter content will do better than longer content simply because more people will listen for a higher percentage of the time. If you have an audio or video that’s 5 minutes and one that’s 50, and someone watches 2.5 minutes of each, it seems to me (and I could be completely wrong on this) that the 5 minute one would be ranked higher than the 50 minute one because someone watched 50% of that video compared to only 5%. From my observations, the longer the content, the less of a ReviewRank something tends to have. That won’t deter me from posting my content, but it is something to consider if you’re fighting someone for the top position.

How to Use the Site
1) Go to FreeIQ.com.
2) Do a search or click on a keyword.
3) Hopefully, the search will return content. Left content is free. Right content is stuff you must pay for.

For anyone looking to market their products, this is an extremely easy way to do so. I encourage you to try it out.

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