So How Can You Get uQast For Free?

uQast For Free

• Be patient – eventually a version will be launched with a reduced feature set. You won’t have a /yourname or /yourkeyword URL and someone may even be using yours if it is at all competitive – a bit like domain names
  I don’t own andybeard.com Youtube.com/andybeard myspace.com/andybeard skype:andybeard and probably quite a few more.
  I regret not grabbing hold of those when they were available
  The exact details of the reduced feature set are not decided or I haven’t details, plus the feature set is a moving target with continual innovation. uQast Pro users will remain on the leading edge.
• Join the uQast affiliate program – I know it is a little corny but as an affiliate all you have to do is refer one person to uQast as you get UQast Pro for free. I am not sure whether that covers some of the other bonuses such as the V.I.P launch seminar or the magazine subscription, but it is a very fair deal.
  If you have a number of SEO clients this is an easy way to rack up one or more valuable media profiles that they control with high quality multimedia presentations and lead capture. It could possibly pay for itself with affiliate referrals as well.
  This is just the affiliate program for the launch – after launch everyone who has a uQast account is a uQast affiliate.
• Domaining – in theory there is a “domaining like” opportunity for premium names, though be warned there isn’t an interface set up to handle transfers – not strickly free but potentially a way to offset the cost of a portfolio

Why & Who Should Sign Up As A Founding Affiliate?

I am going to avoid “forward looking” statements about features that are just on the drawing board or have yet to be implemented.
This is intended to be “no hype” – my own evaluation of the potential of uQast some of it based upon what I initially saw in the platform, and partially from my work with the uQast team.

• Amazon S3 For Free – with some caveats

  If you look on using Amazon S3 for hosting streaming video for your sales pages or members areas, uQast can currently provide a very useful service with no bandwidth charges ever for uQast Pro users. This is especially useful for anyone doing a product launch where the bandwidth costs can be significant.
  10,000 optins watching 400MB of video is 4000GB of data – that is probably at least $500 in fees with Amazon S3. With Kajabi that is $1880.
  What you can’t offset in this way are things like theme CSS files, javascript & images for which you might use a conventional CDN service.

• Reputation Management With Lead Capture

  It is my belief that uQast is going to become an unsurpassed platform for lead capture from syndicated media. I have written blog posts about how unhappy I am with current offerings.

  If you have clients with budget (my readership between them probably have 100,000 clients with budget) – now is the time to get in, secure their names and keywords and not have to pay $200/month which is what I have heard the uQast Pro will eventually be priced at.

  uQast will be a landing page of choice to push up to the top of the SERPs for your clients because they will be able to present great content, and capture leads directly.

  I should note this isn’t a “Leapfish” like pitch – there are no guaranteed search rankings or placement for buying a URL with a uQast Pro listing that I am aware of. Rankings internally are based on quality, and external are in the hands of Google & Bing.
  A URL might offer a small SEO benefit, but the biggest effect is for branding.

• Existing sellers

  If you are selling digital products already, this is another marketplace that you can leverage. You might make some extra sales. The product listings are based upon a patent pending algorithm which focuses on quality and reviews, not how much money you have to pay for advertising – oh and being listed is free.
  Some systems focus only on the newest products currently being promoted – the hope is that products on uQast will have significant longevity with an emphasis on quality not hype.

• Upsell System

  For those selling digital products the upsell system in uQast is extremely easy to implement and doesn’t have some of the restrictions of competing services.
  Of note is you can track the upsell process whilst maintaining session for Google Analytics.
  Up until relatively recently the popular solution for 1-click upsells was Infusionsoft – $300/month for the version with cart and affiliate program. Then there is the added cost of reliable integration and support – I have seen figures of $15k-$20k mentioned by multiple people though there are cheaper alternatives.
  I have tried other systems, but the technology wasn’t necessarily as straight forward as you might assume from the sales information, and they relied on having your own merchant account.
  Clickbank can do upsells but last I heard that was limited to existing high volume partners.

• No Merchant Account

  Some people don’t have a merchant account or would have great difficulty geting one for a number of reasons, yet a merchant account or the equivalent from Paypal is the only way to do an upsell chain effectively – all uQast sales are processed by uQast – they handle all transactions, product delivery, refunds, chargebacks (cross fingers very few) etc
  Don’t ask me how much the fees are – in testing they were set somewhere below that offered by competing market places.
  I also can’t say how long it takes to receive funds – likely initially it would be subject to the refund period – I am not going to speculate on longer term possibilities.

• Revenue & Actions

  You can’t currently include opt-in forms, micropayment and a shopping cart in many other competing offerings. Ooyala does some of it but at a price – I believe Slideshare can do lead generation on a video embed, but that uses their proprietary system which as far as I am aware doesn’t post directly to your autoresponder forms.
  Note: uQast does not currently support document embeds.
  Some of the players that support payment or lead generation “in the player” actually achieve this using javascript. Whilst it is technically possible to get that working for viral syndication, I have yet to see anyone do it and there are other complications.

• Free player

  The cost of players can add up depending on which you use. JW Player isn’t free for commercial use yet I often see “6 figure” & “7 figure” marketers using an unlicensed player. Flowplayer in theory you can use the GPL version as I believe is used with some Amazon S3 solutions – I have never seen any WordPress plugin or other solution that actually used all the features of these players in a user friendly way – some come close, but add other incompatibilities

  Note: Forward looking statement – There is a major issue with hosting your own player… trust – to get a player accepted for embedding in Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, Google Buzz & appearing in Google Reader the owners of those sites need to trust the code. That isn’t something that will ever happen for self hosted code for small sites.
  If your long-term media strategy is based on using your own player, no matter how well the player is coded you are guaranteed reduced virality.
  The best you can expect if you used html5 is that the html5 video would be shown, but without your custom features.

  This is a forward looking statement in that achieving trust and geting the coding right for uQast will also be a long term currently unfulfilled goal, but as an established community it is a goal that is at least achievable.

My Offer For uQast

As I have mentioned in the comments it is hard to dedicate a huge amount of time for an extended period, and I have full time obligations currently with the uQast team in various ways.
However both for work and in various communities I have experienced the immense value of being a member of private chat groups on Skype. So I am going to set up a private Skype group for all my uQast Pro referrals where they will have direct access to me, and to each other. That means there is a little bit of a self help aspect if I am not around for an extended period of time, but I generally have Skype on most of the day.
The intention isn’t as a general chat room – high signal to noise.

I expect for this founders launch that room is going to be pretty exclusive for a few months and will help people get up to speed fast. Even if it ends up one-on-one that just hopefully means it is just better signal to noise.

It is also in some ways a benefit to me to get direct feedback from customers, though my bandwidth is limited.

This won’t be a route to unannounced information or special access to features, but there are likely some methods to do things that work better than others, strategy discussions etc which would be worthwhile.
This is not intended to be a supplemental channel for support issues of various kinds, as for many of those kinds of problems I am certainly not the person to contact
It also isn’t hand holding, and would most likely suit more advanced users with some technical skill.

Here is an affiliate link again so I can track things

It is hard to place a real world value on such a group/room – one SEO membership I belong to has such a group on Skype of typically 60 people and at times that can get a little noisy as there is general chat, but the level of direct feedback from experienced people is unsurpassed. The value certainly exceeds the $30/month you might pay for that if that is the type of community you can gain a return on time invested from.

As noted in my previous post, I have been subverted/assimilated by uQast and am working for/with them full time in various ways. Thus whilst I try not to be biased I am sure in some ways I am – I am aware of future plans, whatever bugs might be lurking etc, but I am trying to portray things as neutrally as I can and avoiding any hype.

This service is in many ways the successor to FreeIQ, but retains hardly any of the old code (which was pretty good and ahead of its time) – FreeIQ & uQast were founded by Brad Fallon who also is a founder & CEO of Stompernet.
I personally look on uQast and Stompernet as different entities (and legally they are). uQast isn’t about training – it is a software-as-a-service platform that enables stuff you can’t do anywhere else.

If you are not inclined to comment publicly, and you have questions my contact form is available or you can always find me on Skype:call-andybeard .

You really don’t want your clients stuck with uQast.com/HGDFSREW/brandname or uQast.com/LJHTDRSW/keyword

I have compiled a list of the reasons I believe people should be interested in uQast (and what attracted me in the first place)
It also mentions my uQast Bonus

Just over a month ago I watched a preview presentation of a new “software as a service” application called uQast. Whilst watching the presentation I had a browser open and did a little digging around, found the development site and started poking to see what it offered.

I then dropped a friendly email to the developers who I already had extensive contact with from their current & previous ventures with some feedback. I could see a lot of promise with the site, as I had with its predecessor.

Hints were made bilaterally that some more formal feedback could be provided in some capacity, though I really wanted to avoid a drawn out negotiation period, and I could see a rough diamond that I could help polish. Just polish… not cut & shape as most of the real work in creating a massively scaleable digital delivery platform was already done.

At the time I was in the process of puting together my own tightly integrated membership site here on andybeard.eu and to play a proactive role I was going to have to at least postpone those plans for a lengthy period of time.
There was also a ton of products I wanted to promote as an affiliate, articles & commentary that really needed to be written, including formally writing about my weird Pinocchio SEO stuff in public with over 2 years of research.

Somehow things worked out and I have been busy for the last month.

What Makes uQast Different To What I Planned?

For 5 years I have had a bee in my bonnet about creating a platform that in some specific way enables both publishers to publish content and affiliates to promote it with some unique technology or “special sauce” sticking it all together and allowing me to leverage my skills & experience.

uQast isn’t it

I say that in a good way – in many ways my entrepreneurial yearning to create a specific platform, and all the preconceived feature requirements that I had built up over a period of 5 years was a double edged sword – both allowing me to come up with solutions to complex problems almost at the drop of a hat, and at the same time instilling an urge to make uQast a surrogate of what I wanted to create rather than the established mission.

So the largest barrier to overcome in my own mind and in negotiations was that uQast is something different despite whatever significant synergies exist.

uQast Is What Exactly?

uQast’s mission is to be the world leader at collecting, ordering and monetizing valuable digital media content.

You could call that the short form elevator pitch I would probably have to worry about remembering if I was talking to important people.

Digital media content is anything that can be downloaded or streamed. Video, Audio podcasts, eBooks & white papers in PDF or doc format, even software in a zip file is possible.
In theory the platform could be used for hard goods, services etc though there might be issues with delivery validation for the credit card processors that have to be carefully thought about.

There is no advertising on the site – the majority of the business model depends on users actually selling products they create.

As well as being able to use promotional content on the site itself, it is envisioned to be able to embed the content on “any website in the world” and have actions & transactions take place “in situ”.
I say “envisioned” – the player has a lot of great unique functionality but it is currently most suitable for videos, but doubles as audio.
Transactions include actually buying product, signing up to a real email list right in the video player, giving a “tip” for a free video and various sharing and embed options.

Having the content playing on “any” website is going to take a little time. A lot of time over the last few weeks has been spent on embed code improvements, and it is early days yet. The long term goal is to get the videos embeddable on Facebook & Twitter via Oembed, and even viewable in Google Reader, Buzz etc.
There are special requirements to be met and obstacles to overcome – one example is player size – whilst the 640×360 widescreen player can be resized, some of the intenal windows for shopping can’t.

There is also some special functionality I want to add that will help take things one step further and make uQast the defacto platform for video SEO, though discussions are fairly early days.

The video player is highly customizable and it is something anyone can do.

One of the big features that is hard to equate is the tip jar – I don’t know how this micropayment system for free content is going to work. Ooyala has had micropayments for a while, and recently introduced Paypal Micropayments platform.
The uQast micropayment system is their own… there are some hurdles to overcome but it is functional.
Oh, and Ooyala is extremely expensive compared to any planned uQast offering I know about.

This Is A Long Tail Play… For The Little Guys

The long tail is a big deal

In any market, there are a few big players who seem to get all the attention.
But their importance, influence and ability to positively affect consumers are dwarfed by the combined effect of all the small players.

- Brad Fallon uQast Founder

It is also about quality content and a ranking system within search results based upon quality reviews from consumers, that is resistant to gaming.

Advance Features

There are, and will continue to be added lots of advanced features with an emphasis on making them surprising easy to use.

One area I have spent a fair amount of time testing has been the upsell system.

You define a number of offsite pages which will contain your various upsell and downpage offers, and uQast provides you with the “Buy Now” and “No Thanks” buttons to place on each page.

But being able to set up an upsell chain is one thing – being able to effectively measure it is quite another.

With uQast we are most of the way there as the shopping cart is maintaining the session all the way through, and thus we can achieve quite an effective sales funnel in Google Analytics.
Ideally there are a few things which still need to be added but I know at least one shopping cart I attempted to use on a project this year where the use of javascript with iframes made it almost impossible to set up a full funnel in analytics. Lots of custom programming to the javascript that embedded the iframe that called the sales buttons was outside my budget, but without it I had to kill the project as being able to demonstrate sales data was an intrinsic part of the project.

Andy Beard Subverted & My Most Biased Review Ever

For the last month or so my “computer home” as in what has been showing predominently on the screen of various PCs has been uQast, the Jira Bug Project & Issue Tracker being used, and various test domains – also a fair chunk of very specific research.
So I have been ripping the site apart trying to make things break all that time, though not to the same intimate level of detail as the programmers working on the project.

I could just publish a list of every outstanding bug or missing feature I know about – if you have ever spent some time delving through the WordPress trac system you would know that sometimes non-security bugs take months to come to prominence, and features might take years unless you code them yourself or they become “blessed”.
But that wouldn’t be a fair evaluation compared to the months/years of work that have already been invested in the project to get it to the current stage.
Development from my perspective is pretty nimble, there is good team co-ordination and dedication to achieve the mission, and create a phenomenal useful service.

This isn’t intended to be a full review of uQast but as the launch wheels have started rolling I needed to get some words out in the ether. Most likely in the next few days I will highlight some of the additional things I personally find interesting and feel important to mention.

And I have left tons of things out that I am sure will end up being raised in the comments… and we can handle them there.

Any questions… criticisms… fire away!

The thoughts about uQast in this post are purely my own and I have liberally peppered this post with referral links mainly because I love tracking stuff, but you might enjoy the 2 tier affiliate program that pays for a year. You can sign up for the launch affiliate program here.

You could believe his shock, with so many popular tech, web design & SEO blogs being allowed to flaunt the rules.

A couple of months ago I pointed out that Vimeo isn’t for commercial use, but that message seems to be largely ignored.

To me it seems that any large commercial undertaking using Vimeo fits one of the following scenarios:-

1. Walking a tightrope with a demand to take their content down imminent
2. In some barter arrangement for link juice worth far more than any blogger has probably ever received for a paid post – I wonder what the FTC would think? It certainly influences a lot of businesses to use something they shouldn’t
3. Blindly walking a path of ignorance having not checked terms of service before signing up

The most prominent I have seen using Vimeo are Read Write Web, Techcrunch and in the SEO community Seomoz

There are tons of commercial funded startups who use Vimeo on their home pages.

Over the Christmas quiet spell I would suggest taking your videos and links away from Vimeo, and let Vimeo stagnate in a non-commercial world.

I have never really understood why anyone creating public facing videos would use Vimeo anyway, their primary saving grace are their privacy controls which would be ideal for membership sites if not for the commercial use barrier.

Their terms of service mentions it

The signup page mentions it clearly… below the fold it is however very easy to miss.

You could also take a look at their community guidelines

It is just as clear within their FAQ

The only place it isn’t 100% is their page for Vimeo Plus – you would expect if you were paying for the service you would be able to use it commercially.

I like Vimeo, the encoding is high quality and they use a top tier CDN (Bitgravity) so even here in Poland the video is relatively smooth even on a low end ADSL connection.
They also have some cool domain locking features which would make it perfect for the members area of a commercial membership site.

There isn’t any lapse in communication of their commercial terms as can be seen by this recent forum thread.

Either a lot of very high profile sites have somehow been overlooked by Vimeo, or they have some kind of alternative arrangement – I am sure they love the Google juice, but isn’t that then payment in kind for links?
However it is also quite possible they don’t realise that they are breaking the Vimeo terms of service. I have had to point it out multiple times in the last 2 weeks to friends, so I am sure this is a common occurrence.

Ramifications? I know Master New Media had their account deleted and they could easily turn around and send you a huge bandwidth bill or threaten legal action. Vimeo’s parnet company however is IAC… why haven’t they offered a commercial option yet?

I have some posts lined up covering lots of alternatives with various advantages.

What are your favorite video hosts, CDNs and FLV Players?