What is SiteVestors.com?
SiteVestors are a new affiliate program describe themselves like this:

SiteVestors.com is a marketplace for individuals and organizations interested in buying and selling established websites and premium domain names. With over 500 Million registered domain names worldwide there will always be a growing market for people interested in selling websites and domains.

In other words, they are a ‘Domaining’ website; but also sell sites that are more developed. Their affiliate program has two possible earning methods.

1. SiteVestors pay a flat rate of 25% on all sales made through your affiliate link.

2. You can refer affiliates. You earn 5% of your referrals sales (there is no ’second tier’).

SiteVestors is a very young affiliate program and as a result there is little ‘chatter’ about it on the net. This eliminates a major method I use to evaluate a site, which is seeing if anyone has had a bad experience and has accused a site of being an internet scam.

However there is a flipside to SiteVestors youthfulness. Super affiliates often say that the way to do well with an affiliate program is to get in early and snatch up easy affiliates. This is true with SiteVestors to some extent, however the pay rate for making referrals in only 5% and there is only a single tier. Of course it is easier to make actual sales if you ‘get in early’ because there is less competition and that would probably pay more handsomely.

Promotional tools wise they are satisfactory as usual. Banners like the one above are included, as well as some text links and also PPC phrases to use.

So far it looks pretty good for SiteVestors, but there are few little snags that drag them down. One of these annoyances is that affiliates cannot log on via the log in menu for actual buyers and sellers. I had to go to Google and type ‘Sitevests affiliate login’ to find the login page. (Admittedly I didn’t spend very long looking for it on site).

The second oddity is on the SiteVestors homepage. In the ‘recent website sales’ there was apparently a sale for $23456. Is that really true SiteVestors? 23456 seems a bit suspicious. My gut tells me that SiteVestors are such a new program they are having to make up sales, but don’t take my word for it.

Conclusion
Given the lack of talk about SiteVestors on the net it is impossible to tell whether it is an Internet scam or not. I would say it is a new site that has potential. It has not made it to my ‘recommended affiliate programs’ section because of the lack of proof that they are not an Internet scam. They need to develop more trust and built a reputation. In the future if they continue to develop I will re-review them and maybe they will make it to my recommended affiliate programs section.

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I recently wrote a review of Zotspot, which is similar to SlashMySearch in many ways, the most obvious being they are both ‘paid to search’ sites. Zotspot didn’t make it to my recommended affiliate programs section but will SlashMySearch?

As expected the promotional tools are functional. They provide a number of ‘OK looking’ banners and the usual affiliate link. There are also some fairly useful tools for analysing your referrals activity. Earnings are updated several times day which can be nice to see if your earnings are steadily increasing.

A big Positive is that SlashMySearch has a much higher pay rate than Zotspot. The screenshot below shows the payment plan:

As you can see, the proposed levels of earnings are significantly higher that Zotspot, which offers only $280 per year with a downline of 1110 people. The second level SlashMySearch referrals allow for some potentially large earnings. You and your referrals earn by using the SlashMySearch search engine and also for reading and posting on the forum.

Unfortunately, that pretty diagram is just about the only good thing about SlashMySearch. Take note of the small print in the corner, “Payment terms are Subject to Change”. SlashMySearch is one of the few programs where I have actually seen the Payment terms change dramatically; and in case you are wondering, they changed downwards

Above is a screenshot of the Alexa tracking of SlashMySearch’s Pageviews. Alexa is infamous for being an unreliable tool, but what it shows fits perfectly with my experience with SlashMySearch.

The SlashMySearch site is often down. They are very unreliable and the search engine is terrible (Hence the dramatic drops in traffic). This is the cause of the decrease in payments; they simply cannot afford their promised plan because the site is down for ‘maintenance’ so often. Admittedly they are still in ‘BETA’ and so frequent updates and additions to the site are to be expected.

In addition to these problems, they claim (much like Zotspot) that it takes them two months to collect their money from advertisers. This means you have to wait at least two months till your first payment, which is way to long!

The Alexa graph shows that SlashMySearch got off to a flying start. There was a lot of hype about them flying around in the blogosphere which has died down due to all of the problems I listed above.

Conclusion
I doubt they are an Internet scam, I trust SlashMySearch’s ‘intentions’ but not its ability to payout. For all of the reasons I mentioned SlashMySearch has not made it to my recommended affiliate programs section. In the FAQ SlashMySearch say they will be out of BETA “soon” and by then all those problems will be fixed. When that day comes I will re-review them. Fingers crossed that they fix them.

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Readers of my blog already know my view about Wealthtoolbox. However, it is one of the affiliate programs that is quite obviously an internet scam and everyone should be warned.

I try my hardest to give a balanced, fair review of affiliate programs, but sometimes it just is not possible. This is one of those times. I must also apologise for the lack of screenshots and images in this post. There will be none simply because there is nothing of Wealthtoolbox that is worth taking a screenshot of.

Wealthtoolbox barley gets away with being called an affiliate program. There is currently no reward for referring people, although it used to be a flat rate of 50 imaginary dollars per referral.

The way Wealthtoolbox works is simple, too simple. To sign up all you need to do is enter your e-mail address. They then deposit $50 (this amount has now gone up to $100!) in your account. And that’s it! You just sit there, while they ‘invest’ your money, and somehow your balance just keeps on rising. Mine has now risen to a whopping $629.53!

It should be obvious that they will never pay out. According to the terms and conditions they will payout after two years, which is way to long. Also their ‘business plan’ simply doesn’t make sense. If they could magically ‘invest’ and make more money like that why would they need to put money into our accounts to do it? Why not just do it without us?

Anyway, entering your e-mail address seems like a pretty low risk right?

Wrong

Our e-mail address is the only thing they want from us, so it must be the way they are going to make money. My prediction is that they are creating a massive list of email address of gullible people with the intention to sell it. A list of a million e-mail addresses is worth a lot of money.

What does being on the list mean?
In a word, spam. Who ever buys that list will have paid a lot of money and so will want to put it to ‘good’ use. They will probably do this by sending large amounts of promotional e-mails. You don’t want to be on it.

In a way it has already begun, somehow someone managed to steal a chunk of the list and have been sending spam emails to everyone on it. Me included. So far it has only been about 3 or 4 emails over a couple of weeks, but everyone who was sent one now has access to those e-mail address and can start spamming too.

Conclusion
As I have said Wealthtoolbox is clearly and Internet scam and I advise you to avoid it at all costs. You have been warned! It is a HYIP scam (high yield investment program scam) with a twist. No investment and no yield.

Keep those site suggestions coming in!

See the Wealthtoolbox Update here.

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