August 8, 2007 by David.

Here’s a set of questions from Oprah for couples considering marrying to consider (listed by CNN) that I thought were pretty good:

Question 1: What percentage of our income are we prepared to spend to purchase and maintain our home on a monthly or annual basis?

Question 2: Who is responsible for keeping our house and yard cared for and organized? Are we different in our needs for cleanliness and organization?

Question 3: How much money do we earn together? Now? In one year? In five years? Ten? Who is responsible for which portion? Now? In one year? Five? Ten?

Question 4: What is our ultimate financial goal regarding annual income, and when do we anticipate achieving it? By what means and through what efforts?

Question 5: What are our categories of expense (rent, clothing, insurance, travel)? How much do we spend monthly, annually, in each category? How much do we want to be able to spend?

Question 6: How much time will each of us spend at work, and during what hours? Do we begin work early? Will we prefer to work into the evening?

Question 7: If one of us doesn’t want to work, under what circumstances, if any, would that be okay?

Question 8: How ambitious are you? Are we comfortable with the other’s level of ambition?

Question 9: Am I comfortable giving and receiving love sexually? In sex, does my partner feel my love for him or her?

Question 10: Are we satisfied with the frequency of our lovemaking? How do we cope when our desire levels are unmatched? A little? A lot? For a night? A week? A month? A year? More?

Question 11: Do we eat meals together? Which ones? Who is responsible for the food shopping? Who prepares the meals? Who cleans up afterward?

Question 12: Is each of us happy with the other’s approach to health? Does one have habits or tendencies that concern the other (e.g., smoking, excessive dieting, poor diet)?

Question 13: What place does the other’s family play in our family life? How often do we visit or socialize together? If we have out-of-town relatives, will we ask them to visit us for extended periods? How often?

Question 14: If we have children, what kind of relationship do we hope our parents will have with their grandchildren? How much time will they spend together?

Question 15: Will we have children? If so, when? How many? How important is having children to each of us?

Question 16: How will having a child change the way we live now? Will we want to take time off from work, or work a reduced schedule? For how long? Will we need to rethink who is responsible for housekeeping?

Question 17: Are we satisfied with the quality and quantity of friends we currently have? Would we like to be more involved socially? Are we overwhelmed socially and need to cut back on such commitments?

Question 18: What are my partner’s needs for cultivating or maintaining friendships outside our relationship? Is it easy for me to support those needs, or do they bother me in any way?

Question 19: Do we share a religion? Do we belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple? More than one? If not, would our relationship benefit from such an affiliation?

Question 20: Does one of us have an individual spiritual practice? Is the practice and the time devoted to it acceptable to the other? Does each partner understand and respect the other’s choices?

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August 4, 2007 by David.

Want your money to go further but not lower your product quality? Here are some suggestions adapted from Smart Money:

• Buy a car on Monday. Car dealers are more likely to offer deals to the few people who visit early in the week when the weekend rush seems far away.  Even better, pick a Monday after a slow, rainy weekend.
• Buy airplane tickets on Wednesday morning. That’s the culmination of post-weekend sale discounting by competing airlines that are eager to one-up each other to offer the best fare.
• Go to the movies, amusement park, or museum on Wednesday. Many of these places offer discounts and special prices on this day. For example, Six Flags knocks $12 off admission to AAA members, and AMC offers free movie screenings Wednesday mornings as part of its Summer MovieCamp program.  It goes without saying that an afternoon matinee is cheaper than the same movie in the evening.
• Buy gas early Thursday morning. Hit the pump before weekend demand causes many gas station owners to raise their prices.
• Buy books on Thursday at Borders and on Tuesday at Barnes & Noble. Those are the days when these chains offer sales and coupons.
• Buy clothes Thursday night. This is when many retailers, like Banana Republic and Express, start their weekend promotions.  You’ll be surprised how many business start posting their Friday sale prices Thursday evening to be ready for the next morning’s opening.
• Buy a Harley between Christmas and New Years. Not only is this a slow time, Harley dealers have good reason to mazimize their annual sales because the next year’s allocation is based on the prior year’s sales.

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August 2, 2007 by David.

When I was looking for an eMail auto responder and eMail marketing system, I had real trouble finding an honest evaluation of Mailloop.  Yes there are LOTS of “reviews.”  Read: hyped sales sites.  How many times can you read nearly exactly the same thing, ending in “my highest recommendation”?  Obviously nearly everyone writing about Mailloop 7.0 is trying to sell it through Internet Marketing Center’s affiliate program.  The couple reviews I did find that were honestly realistic and actually brought up shortcomings or comparisons to alternatives were for substantially older versions.

So, since I have no interest in selling Mailloop, I thought I’d throw out my two cents worth.  I am currently in the midst of a mentoring program through Internet Marketing Center so did feel some bias toward purchasing it. 

For the plus side, I’m not going to go into a lot of detail since there are so many sites that already extol the virtues of Mailloop-7.  Here are some points I consider salient:

• – The on-line training videos are very good and will pretty much teach you what you need to know to use Mailloop.  There isn’t really a manual available.  I did find one but it mostly refers you to the training videos (but is 150 pages so looks impressive).
• – When you go through the purchase process, be aware you will be asked if you want to pay for future upgrades and fixes to the tune of $137 (36% of purchase price).  Actually this isn’t a bad price if you consider the industry standard maintenance fees for commercial business software which I consider 18-20% annually (I’ve been in IT for over twenty years and ten of that as CIO).  That actually leaves a hundred some bucks as a one-time maintenance fee in the ball park - assuming you use the product for at least a couple years.  It is just something that is nice to know is going to “come up” during the ordering process as normally you don’t get asked to pay more money for maintance during the ordering process for software packages this small.  I paid $516, including the $137 maintenance but not including the $200 phone support in the next bullet point.  I do recommend getting the maintenance upgrade option.  You will need it for the bug fixes, if nothing else.
• – Speaking of add-on costs during ordering.  Would you like a 90 minutes of help to set it up for an extra $197?  Personally, I’d recommend against it unless you are in a super hurry or hate sitting through video tutorials.  I didn’t use this service, but based on my experience I’d think about whether you actually can get it set up in an hour with someone on the phone and therefore have to pay even more to finish the process.   Just be aware that when you read “all for one very reasonable, low one-time payment — and NO EXTRA charges, ever!” it may not mean what you think.
• – I havn’t called their support line yet so don’t have a comment on how good that is.
• – I dug around in the database files a bit. Part of the system is in Access 2000, which I don’t have a problem with (and you can bring the file up in Access and modify directly if you desire).  What I do have a problem with is quite a bit of the database is .csv files broken up into little fragments.  For instance, your statistics on the newsletters you’ve sent out are in several small .csv files.  While a program may operate fine with a bunch of small fragmented text files, it does speak volumes about the quality and effort - and probably knowledge - of the so-called programmers writing it.  In addition, I noticed that the newsletters I’d deleted were still in the fragmented files.  This means when you delete something, the first record in the chain is deleted but subsequent links in the chain are left proliferating as garbage on your system.
• – The system is a little buggy.  Granted no software in existance is without bugs, but this software has more bugs than I think it should, but not surprising given the sloppy database work that is done.
• – I hit a problem where the bottom item in the list of mail processing rules wouldn’t move up when the move up button was clicked.  I tried deleting it and the item above it and recreating them but that didn’t help.  Later I deleted nearly every rule and created new ones (including the offending one) and then all rules would move up and down as they were supposed to.
• – If you process a unsubscribe request, the program will automatically delete it from your list (and add it to a master unsubscribe list if you so desire).  The gotcha is if that same eMail address wants to re-subscribe.  Their example newsletters say if you unsubscribe and later want to resubscribe, just sent a new request.  I tried that and it didn’t remove the eMail address from the unsubscribe list.  I did find the .csv file it was in and manually deleted it (which if you do be aware that unless you update other statistics those numbers will be out of sync unless you also update those manually).
• – When you click on the minimize button you always get an informational message telling you that the program will continue running (duh) and if you want to use it to double click on it.  You have to click OK to finish the minimizing operation and you do not have the option of supressing the message so you will always have two clicks every time you minimize.  After the second click, it then does that shrinking thing to the bar but immediately removes itself.  To open it back up, you have to right click (not double click) and choose open from the icon in the bar on the right side.  Not a big deal and certainly doesn’t inhibit the programs operation, but is yet another odd nuisance.
• – Double clicking on a line item doesn’t open it, something that is standard in windows products.
• – When you edit newsletters you (usually but not always) have to click on the drop down box to add a merge field whether you want to add one or not.  You can’t just click on the text box where the example text is and edit it.  I find every once in a while I have to go click on the data field box while I’m editing because I’ve been locked out again.  Just another odd particularity that one can work around, but was pretty frustrating the first time I encountered it - editing one minute and then being locked out the next and finally stumbling on something that would allow editing again.
• – That long list of merge fields shown on IMC’s site is not what you are given in the product.  Yes, you can build that into the “database” (.csv) files if you like, but that will be up to you - and it will be up to you to fill all of that data in unless you also have the programming skills to make a long fill-in form on your website (not recommended if you want to maximize your subscribers).
• – You may want to load this program on an old PC that you can just leave running all the time, whether you and your laptop are traveling or whatever.  Since it is a program that resides on your hardware instead of some off-site service provider, if your PC isn’t running no mail is going out or being responded to.  Not necessarily a bad thing, but just be aware.
• – Probably the biggest limitation you are going to find is that if you want to send eMail to a large list, your eMail host will probably be a bottleneck.  For instance, my eMail host (1and1.com) will not allow more than 99 messages to be sent per hour.  For a list of only 1,000, I’d take 11 hours to process.  Fortunately, the software allows you to throttle outgoing eMail to the hourly or daily maximum limits you have, but can you imagine how long it would take me to sent out 10,000?  Over four days!  By the time I get much over a thousand subscribers, I’ll have to find a new solution.  The ideal solution would be to have your own eMail server, something that is out of reach of the skills of most who will be using Mailloop 7.
• – The newsletter templates that come with the system are very basic, something that anyone with a knowledge of HTML tables can easily recreate.  Useful if you don’t have that knowledge, but would have been nice to have links between the page index and the article headers already done (for those who aren’t acquainted with that which is obviously the target market for these templates) and some fancier header bars and stuff.  The fancy example templates shown on the IMC site are not anywhere close to the basic stuff you are given with the software.
• – The process Mailloop 7 gives you to install an online signup is very basic.  You are given one example to use and it is larger than most will want (it isn’t the one shown on IMC’s site).  I tried modifying the table it is set in and that messed it up, but I don’t claim to be a perl or HTML expert.  It will pass the eMail and first/last name, but will not fill in the date.  It puts “submitted” in the date field.  They are very clear that even if you pay the $200 installation support you are on your own to make this work.
• – I have been unable to get the newsletter double opt-in process or any of the subscribe or unsubscribe functions within the newsletter tab to operate, in spite of completely deleting and creating numerous newsletters.  The newsletter mailings work as intended and fortunately you can also make newsletter subscribe and unsubscribe happen through the mail rules tab, but that removes some nice functionality in the newsletter section, including the double opt-in, something I’d like but for now am living without.
• – If you transgress spam regulations your account can be cut off until you prove your innocence (such as when someone claims you spamed them when you have proof they double opted in).  Be aware that if you are using Mailloop with your personal eMail provider, this means you will also have your personal eMail cut off.  You may want to create a separate account just for your Mailloop activity.  There is also an option to use IMC but I don’t know what is involved with that and the documentation makes it clear they would rather you not use that service from them. 
• – Mailloop 7 does keep track of bounced and invalid eMail addresses.  It doesn’t keep track of the number of eMails opened or any kind of stats that would require embeded code.

Bottom line?  Mailloop 7 Professional may be just the ticket for your needs - or it may not.  Hopefully the above will help you decide that.  Would I give it my “highest recommendation”?  Hardly.  In spite of frustrations and misrepresentations, for me it is a useful stop on my way to something bigger and better when more subscribers warrent it.

11/07/07 UPDATE: After using Mailloop for several months, I have switched to GetResponse. For the reasons why click here.

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