[DavidDavidDavid]

Brutha, you are mixing up the issues here.

My post was not about anything other than the misleading practice of citing Alexa ranking in sales copy.

It's misleading because Alexa is not accurate. For Steve to cite it as evidence that SBI! works when he knows full well that Alexa is worth very little as a measure of traffic is not helpful for someone who claims to want to help others realize their potential.

The only reason to cite Alexa ranking is to bamboozle people; after all, it's inaccurate, as you readily agree. So what's the point behind citing inaccuracies as "proof"?

I'm very disappointed to see yet another guru corrupted by money -- and, perhaps worse, people willing to rationalize away and thus excuse misleading business practices: Steve pays no attention to Alexa not because he has his server logs, but because he knows Alexa is inaccurate compared to those server logs!

No less an observer of human nature than Thomas Jefferson himself warned against a country run by businessmen (as a racist slave-owning hypocrite, he should know): they will do anything for money (which is power, for ego-aggrandizement). Any thing at all. Including holding other human beings in bondage for personal gain. Or, in our more genteel age, shipping jobs overseas. Or keeping afloat the oil dictatorships that support religious terrorists. And all of that starts with a simple lie, or cunningly misleading statement...as McCann-Erikson once put it ever so cynically, "the truth well-told." It all starts when we are willing to excuse our friends their petty misdeeds.

Now Steve's "review" of SBI! is obviously sales copy, which is generally fine except for the "Top 3%" reference, which trades on his visitors' innumeracy or outright ignorance of Alexa.

SBI! is indeed a good starter's kit for a certain kind of person, but to promote a good thing with bad tactics is bad business all-around (akin to our government spreading "democracy" across the world by means of war and CIA chicannery).

As Ben Franklin is supposed to have noted, honesty is the best policy.

Citing Alexa ranking is not honest. It's playing on a newbie's ignorance of how Alexa works and what traffic actually means.