Wealth Toolbox Review

Okay, so this isn’t much of a review, because there isn’t much to review.

WealthToolbox.com is a site that claims you can “Join, Earn, and Learn”.

You join for free, and as a bonus they deposit $100 into your account. They invest that money (that they gave you) and you earn from the results. They also pay you $20 per referral, down 5 levels. So they’re paying out a total of $200 per member.

The learning portion comes from this line, “In time, we’ll create and give our members access to audio, video and web tutorials”.

Those tutorials do not currently exist. In fact, as far as I can tell, there are exactly five pages on their website (the main page, the terms and conditions, the privacy policy, the member account balance page, and the member referral page).

Reading their terms and conditions shows that after 24 months, you’ll be paid the balance of your account via PayPal.

This yells “SCAM!” so loudly that it’s deafening. A lot can happen in 24 months Internet time, let alone the fact that, officially, no money is going into the system.

Checking the whois report shows that the domain name was initially registered on February 27, 2001. The Wayback Machine doesn’t bring up anything, as the website specifically blocks their spider via robots.txt.

I’m sure that many sites have valid reasons for blocking the Waback Machine’s archiving of their content. But at 3 public pages, this site doesn’t seem to have cause. Makes me wonder what they’re hiding about the history of the site.

When I run across something like this, I try to imagine myself as the founder. How could I possibly get money out of this site, given that they provide the money into your account and (supposedly) invest it.

There’s this phrase in their terms and conditions:

Account payout is dependent upon you maintaining an active account and abiding by the Terms of Service and membership requirements.

The Terms of Service are on the site, but nowhere is there to be found membership requirements.

So here’s how I would work it. Provide some basic page that allows a member to track how much money is in their account. Send out regular emails telling members how much money they’ve gained or lost based on investments I’d made. I wouldn’t bother with the investments, the point is to gradually increase the amount in their account until they have a vested interest in getting the payout.

Then the “membership requirements” would kick in. They’d need to buy something through an affiliate link, or join a site, or do some other action that would financially benefit me. And I’d keep it up, making them do these things on a regular basis, for the entire 24 months until even the most strong-willed among them would give up in disgust (thus forfeiting their payout).

And if someone somehow managed to get to payout? The chances are good they’d have spent enough money along the way to let me honor it. Or I’d find some fine print in the unwritten membership requirements and weasel out of paying them.

At least, that’s how I would do it if I were unprincipled and unethical. Is that what this site plans?

I don’t know, but I’ll keep you posted.

Hub Pages, Giving Squidoo A Run For Their Money?

I just ran across Hub Pages the other day.

Hub Pages is a Squidoo like site, where you can create web pages about pretty much any topic, and earn a share of the advertising and affiliate revenue generated by the page.

The tools seem comparable, and make creating your page and embedding photos and videos quite easy. What distinguishes Hub Pages from Squidoo is the transparency of the accounting.

At Squidoo, all revenue goes to Squidoo and at the end of the month you learn how much each of your lenses earned. What goes into the calculation is a bit mysterious, but it’s definitely related to your lens’ traffic and page rank, and lots of other things.

At Hub Pages, you enter your Adsense id, your Amazon ID, your Ebay ID, and your Google Analytics tracking ID into your profile area. 60% of the page impressions generated by your page use your IDs. So you get tracking of those impressions through the various affiliate programs, and any income is paid to you directly by those programs. Hub Pages never sees your money.

I’m a big fan of Squidoo, but the transparency in Hub Pages is incredibly attractive. Being able to log into my Adsense account and see how many impressions and clicks I’ve gotten through my pages is very nice. Earnings should also tend to be higher, on average, with the 60/40 split.

Another great feature of Hub Pages is that you can create a link to one of the pages created by someone else, and when you drive traffic to that link you also earn a percentage of the ad impressions generated by that page for a while. So you can get impressions just by driving traffic to other people’s pages! This alone fosters a sense of community assistance. When other people can get paid to drive traffic to your pages, you won’t be the only one promoting them.

I haven’t yet created a hub over at Hub Pages, but will do so soon. I’ll add Hub Pages to my monthly income reports, along with Squidoo and Yuwie.

Click here for the Hub Pages tour.