[DavidDavidDavid]

Hey, Matt:

SBI! is a great service, but marketing is marketing, and you got to watch out for marketing hype.

For example, their much vaunted affiliate program, while very generous indeed, does have the stipulation that lifetime earnings from your referrals do not actually get you continued commissions **unless** you keep bringing in new customers! That is, you get *credited* for previous referrals' re-subscriptions, but will not actually be cut a check unless you continue to bring in new customers. Now it's still a very cool affiliate program, but not the hustle-then-heaven affair it may appear to be at first.

Another thing is that Web 2.0 features are lacking from a basic SBI! subscription. You cannot do blogs or have your own forums without a hundred dollar upgrade, and then you have to host those blogs or forums on another web-host, for technical reasons unique to the SBI! model of web-hosting, which typically means almost another hundred dollars a year.

Last thing I can think of is that though they advertise examples of web businesses dealing in hard goods, their expertise is almost entirely in marketing and network marketing, so if you're looking to get into selling other things online besides e-books and affiliate stuff, well, they're significantly lacking in that regard (though in the private forums you can get feedback from subscribers who do deal in hard goods anyway).

Now I love SBI! -- else I would've "cashed out" on their 30-day 100% money-back guarantee already -- and I believe in SBI! but unfortunately marketing hype will be marketing hype so I urge you to try it out for yourself, since there's no risk at all, because it's important that you form your own impressions. If there's one thing SBI! has taught me (somewhat unintentionally), it's that a businessman must develop his own instincts. In this age of "free google," we may have forgotten how to "hunt"....