A reader suggested I take a look at FreeIQ, and I liked it well enough to do a review.
The basic concept behind the site is providing helpful and educational videos for free. Think of it like article marketing, but with video and audio. Videos are not to be too promotional, but rather educational with links to your own site for more information. The same sort of standards as EzineArticles has, in fact.
The videos don’t have to be of you talking, but could be demos of programs or techniques. Using something like SWF Demo Maker you could put together a nice Flash video tutorial. You could show, for example, a case study involving online keyword research tools. Or how to setup an Adwords account.
FreeIQ provides an affiliate system that gives you a commission on any purchases your referrals make for one year. You also get a commission on their referrals’ purchases.
At this point you should be asking yourself, “If they provide videos for free, what’s the commission on?”
Content providers can provide videos for sale. The basic approach would be to provide a free video that gives an overview, and more detailed videos that must be purchased. It seems like the real money at FreeIQ would be made referring content providers to them, since you get a cut of all the sales they make.
Since commissions expire in one year, you’d need to keep traffic flowing to continue making money with FreeIQ. So it isn’t the sort of opportunity that will allow you to retire to the beach after a few years, but you could make some additional online money with it.
And if you have the sort of product or service that would lend itself to using video, you could combine FreeIQ with article marketing to attract more traffic to your site.
FreeIQ is still in beta, so it’s hard to say how popular it will become. It’s a logical extension of article marketing, and many people don’t have the patience to read articles but will happily watch a video, so I think it has good potential.
To take a look at the videos currently available, click through to FreeIQ.