August 22, 2009 by David.

We may be moving into a place that doesn’t have broadband availability from any land sources so I’ve started checking out satellite and all satellite providers have comparatively low bandwidth caps, so I thought I should start monitoring my usage. I came across Net Meter by Hoo Technology on CNet’s site. It is $20 after a 30 day free trial. I am finding it simple to install and use and it has very informative reports - just what I was looking for. Here’s how CNet describes it:

“Net Meter monitors network traffic through all network connections on the computer it’s installed on, and displays real-time graphical and numerical downloading and uploading speeds. The software supports to display transfer rates of multiple network connections at the same time. It also logs network traffic and provides daily, weekly, monthly, and summary traffic reports. And start days of week and month are customizable. The program allows you to setup a notification to get an alert when you exceed a certain amount of bandwidth usage. And, traffic stopwatch enables you to test bandwidth speed of connections. You can also record transfer rates of connections. Net Meter works with the majority network connections including phone modems, DSL, cable modem, LAN, satellite, wireless, and VPN.”

I also tried a free bandwidth monitor from CNet on my laptop but it is like a toy compared to Net Meter.

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August 12, 2009 by David.

For $3.00/user/month myOneLogin will allow others to sign into many applications using your password but not seeing what it is. When you want to end their access, you just delete their myOneLogin account and access is immediately removed from all programs you set them up to access. By extension, this means you can set up “single sign-on” so each person only has one password to remember. Pretty slick. There is a free trial too. 

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January 5, 2009 by David.

It took almost two years and nine months for the first 100 .com domain names to be registered. Check out the story at PCWorld.

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January 1, 2009 by David.

Gina Schreck posts some decent videos about hot technologies, particularly ones which can be utilized by speakers and business people for communication, efficiency, and promoting. Check out her Gettin’ Geeky videos. She has a casual presentation style as she goes through the basics and explains where a technology can be put to use.

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September 4, 2008 by David.

Today I started work re-developing a website for a client that has an existing site on Yahoo. I’ve used 1and1.com as my website host for years and have been very happy with it. One of the things I do is have one account host multiple sites. In otherwords, DaveDrive.com, RamV10.com, MissSharlet.com, etc all are on one account. In fact, I have 19 domain names pointing to 12 websites.

Enter the new client with Yahoo. I’m looking all over in their Yahoo account and not finding any method of setting up the destination directory for a given domain name. In fact, I’m not even finding a way to register a second domain name for the account (she wants a second new site developed also). Finally I called Yahoo support and was politely told that he understood what I wanted but “Yahoo doesn’t do that.” EVERY domain name requires a separate account.

Let’s see, that means her two domain names would cost over twenty bucks per month. With 1and1.com it costs 4.99 per month - and the two domain names are registered for free! Plus, if in the future she wants to add more domain names or sites, it will only cost seven bucks per year per domain name. Now that is more like it!

I’ve used that “home” account for about five years and am still only using a fraction of the maximum of the disk space, number of eMails, download bandwidth, etc.

What I want to know is how does Yahoo get away with screwing people like that?

Long live 1and1.com.

If you want to get an account with 1and1 and you are in the mood to donate a month of free hosting to me, kindly click the little blue “hosted by 1and1″ button on the left side of this page. I have yet to find a hosting company that matches their hosting or domain registration prices - and I am even happy with their level service.

Now, that said, you have to understand one thing. You can’t have it all. There is NO business where you can have the lowest price without giving up something somewhere else. No company can afford to charge the lowest price and at the same time give instant high-quality customer service, the most extensive add-ins, the most sophisticated eMail system, etc, etc.

Myself, after five years with them I am happy with the customer service I’ve been provided by 1and1 and the other aspects of 1and1 - considering the price I’m paying. To get the lowest price I’m willing to live with the fact that they aren’t the easiest to get ahold of (thanks, but nearly everything I can solve myself), the most sophisticated eMail system (I use Outlook anyway), or that not every person on their help desk is “the best.” They have to cut somewhere to give those lowest prices and for me their balance of price and service and performance are ideal.

So don’t whine to me if they aren’t at the same time giving the highest level in every other aspect. My client cut their monthly costs to 1/5 of what Yahoo would have charged for domain registration after the 1st signup, they now pay 1/2 of what they would have for two websites, and as they add more domain names (for misspellings, etc) they will save 80% of the cost for each and every domain name registration. Not one of my clients have ever come back to me and complained once for anything to do with 1and1. In my books that is a fabulous deal.

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April 28, 2008 by David.

Did you know the pen you are using is “analog?” Well, once a digital pen arrives on the scene, your trusty old pen suddenly becomes analog. Mobile Digital Scribe from IOGEAR works as a normal pen, but also is tracked by a small device you can clip to your paper pad and then upload to your computer. While not pressure sensitive, it does track position, so you can do something like a trace of a picture and upload it.

The OCR software that comes with it doesn’t perform all that accurately, so for now it may not be the best way to get your handwritten document directly into Word. I don’t know if it can be a front-end for other OCR software, however.

Check out PC Magazine Senior Editor Tim Moynihan’ video review.

List $130. Amazon has it for just over a hundred bucks - and free two day shipping if you are an Amazon Prime member.

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March 12, 2008 by David.

We had our first DVD sale this week on Amazon! Sharlet and Arlene have 8 DVD’s they’ve finished (with me doing the filming, editing & production), with 7 more at least half completed. A couple weeks ago we decided to sell them on Amazon via their CreateSpace.com. The first DVD we posted was Age Proof Your Brain.

You upload your artwork (DVD case insert and DVD disk face), send them a DVD ready for duplicating, do a little on-line setup such as product description, etc, and they will burn, print, and mail a copy whenever anyone orders it. Very cool. You can even skip the artwork and just give them plain text to print if you prefer.

You will make a higher percentage of profit on DVD’s that sell through CreatSpace.com than you do through Amazon.com, but my guess is that you’ll sell more through Amazon.

The only thing I wish CreateSpace would do differently is to allow computer files to be included on the DVDs. I like to put the PowerPoint presentations Sharlet and Arlene use in their talks on the DVDs so someone can print them out and follow along if they want, but that isn’t an option with CreateSpace. I’ll continue to include them on the DVDs I burn for backroom sales at speaking events or direct orders when someone calls our 800 number (800-379-5017) - a little extra bonus for those sales venues.

Yesterday I mailed off the second DVD to CreateSpace and today I should have the third ready to send them. Not having to worry about order fulfillment, processing credit cards (let alone the liability of having credit card information), or having a merchant account is absolutely great.

If you have books, CDs, or DVDs you want to sell, you should check out CreateSpace.com.

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November 7, 2007 by David.

Previously I posted a review of Mailloop 7.0by IMC. That was when I first started using it. Well, what with how much I’m moving around right now, I need an autoresponder that resides on a server somewhere rather than my own PC. Between that need and my continued frustrations with the product, I took up a new search. Frankly, I did a more thorough search this time and found some interesting stuff. This post discusses Mailloop, GetResponse, Constant Contact, and Aweber.

I ended up signing up with GetResponse. I can’t believe the difference in products. It is like comparing a sophisticated (and functioning!) professionally developed software package to some high school kid’s school project. Really.

Here are some of the high points on why GetResponse is far better than Mailloop:

• You can allow the subscriber to select whether they want eMail, web page, or RSS feed delivery. (Granted, I haven’t tested this feature yet, but it is “supposed” to work.)
• The subscriber can click a link and get the next eMail immediately if they want to. Say you have a five part mini-course and you have a person who really likes your stuff. Why make them wait? Take advantage of their interest by allowing them to speed up the sequence if they want. (This one I have tested and it is slick.)
• You can copy previous campaigns to build new ones. Mailloop you have to start every campaign, autoresponder, newsletter, etc from scratch. Very handy to have.
• Both products allow custom fields to be added to web signup forms. Mailloop, however, requires you know Perl scripting and how to build HTML webforms. GetResponse you just fill in a field name and it takes care of everything. Couldn’t be simpler.
• Mailloop can’t do popups or pop-overs; GetResponse can. Granted, I hate them and don’t ever expect to use them, but it is one more missing Mailloop feature.
• GetResponse’s subscriber management is much more sophisticated and automated, plus you don’t have to do all the manual purges and combines that Mailloop makes you do. Unsubscriptions are automated. Mailloop they are automated to an extent, but you still end up with a lot more manual functions dealing with unsubscribe requests in Mailloop.
• GetResponse allows you to track if someone clicks through and/or bought an item. This tracking feature also allows you to automatically move someone to a new campaign if they bought something. Mailloop can’t do any tracking. If you don’t want someone who bought a product to keep receiving eMails promoting it, you have to manually track and move that person yourself using cumbersome tools and procedures.
• When you are building eMails, GetResponse has a button to copy from HTML to text or visa versa. In addition, you can click a button and it will automatically wrap text to a given line length - a process you have to do manually, line by line, in Mailloop. Well, after you manually did a copy and paste between the messages.
• There are over 150 nice templates to use in GetResponse. Mailloop has a couple dozen, basically color variations on about three layouts, plus they GetResponse’s templates are much more sophisticated.
• Mailloop can fill in field from a file, like put in a person’s name for you automatically. The trouble is Mailloop doesn’t have a default value when a field is blank, so if the first name is missing you end up with something like “Dear,”. Not only can the field be blank because it wasn’t filled in by the subscriber, one of the methods of processing subscription requests does not fill in the field values other than the eMail address (below you can find another bug that absolutely nothing gets filled in - a blank record is created). GetResponse allows you to specify a default value so for a blank first name you get something like “Dear Friend,”.
• Mailloop doesn’t break add proper upper/lower case to name fields if it isn’t entered that way. GetResponse does.
• Mailloop can’t handle a subscriber who wants back into a newsletter after they have unsubscribed. Ok, I do exaggerate a tad. Technically you can take out an eMail that has unsubscribed to a newsletter. You have to dig until you find one of the many .csv files that contains the eMail for that campaign and take it out with a text editor or Excel. Like the average user is going to do that - even if he or she did have the knowledge to do it (no, Mailloop doesn’t explain any of this file manipulation - you are completely on your own). GetResponse just allows someone to say they want to sign up again and that is that. You don’t have to do anything.
• This point is something that, granted, really needs an ASP model like GetResponse to be able to do, but I really like that to unsubscribe a person is taken to a webpage instead of sending an eMail. From the webpage they can choose from all the campaigns they want to unsubscribe from. Plus, Mailloop will only unsubscribe the eMail address the person is sending their request from. Not everyone sends an unsubscribe request from the eMail your crap is going to. Myself, I signup under eMails that only receive, via a forward, so would have to set up an account in Outlook just to send an eMail to unsubscribe. The harder you make it to unsubscribe the more likely you are to get spam complaints.
• A problem I have encountered with Mailloop is that it sometimes looses track of what message to send and sends ones it already sent.  For instance, I’ve had numerous times where in a five message sequence, it resent eMails two through five when it was supposed to send the fifth. One point where it should have sent out four messages, it sent fifteen. Not a good way to avoid spam complaints. So far in my testing and live accounts in GetResponse I haven’t encountered a similar problem.
• I got GetResponse up and working the first day I used it. Spent maybe six hours going through the tutorials and setting up my first auto-responder campaign - which worked flawlessly the first time I tested it, by the way. Mailloop I have spent days and days trying to get to work. It didn’t help that there are bugs and I had to figure out workarounds to get it to function at all, but even if there weren’t bugs, it still would have been substantially more time involved setting it up.

Now, here is the REAL item that FLUNKS Mailloop (in case the above wasn’t enough). It can’t do double opt-in from a webform. Yes, I know all their literature says it can. The software is built to do it. However, it has a bug in the webform that is supplied that doesn’t fill in the subscriber’s “from” eMail. Mailloop needs that field to process a double opt-in.

My IMC mentor put me at the “top” of the Mailloop support queue (which meant it took a mere seven days for them to contact me). I explained the problem and my work around that I used so at least I could subscribe someone without double opt-in and he told me that was exactly what I needed to do, that the software just “didn’t” fill in the from eMail address and that I shouldn’t expect it to. He didn’t care that therefore the double opt-in feature couldn’t work. Here is a quote from one of his eMails:

“The program is advertised in the sales copy to have double optin features, but it doesn’t work with setting up a custom rule to collect opt-ins from a webform unfortunately. We would like to add this functionality in the program at a future date and it’s on the list of things to do for sure.”

After several eMails, I did get an explanation of how I could change the webform to fill in the “from” field, with the caveat that would disable Mailloop’s rule processing function since the eMail address was no longer in the body of the eMail.

This one issue alone is enough for me and I’d think most other people to reject Mailloop if they they knew about it.

If you pre-purchase the maintenance (which you definitely should do if you get Mailloop), Mailloop will set you back roughly five hundred bucks. GetResponse plans start at $18/month (for 10,000 subscribers). That means I could have used GetResponse for over two year before it cost me more (well, unless I go over 10,000 subscribers - a nice problem to have…).

Before closing, let me point out one other considerable shortcoming of another eMail campaign program. Constant Contact does not have ANY autoresponder features. If all you want is to key in eMail addresses for a newsletter, it works fine and is a nice product, but if you want people to fill in a webform and automatically get something back, it won’t do it. I saw a number of large companies that send me stuff use them so I signed up for their free trial and that was when I realized it didn’t autorespond. I just assumed any large eMail campaign company would. At least they have a simple trial subscription. Gotta give them credit for that. They don’t even ask for a charge card.

One other plus for Constant Contact is you can bundle a survey package with your eMail campaigns.  A nice feature, but I plan to use SurveyMonkey.com.

This post probably sounds like I’m trying to “sell” GetResponse. That actually isn’t my intent. Now that I have used both packages I am able to directly contrast the two and there certainly is plenty to contrast! So, in the order of fairness, here are some of my concerns with GetResponse:

In my research I did encounter one person who complained that once they signed up for GetResponse their eMail account got tons of junk eMail. My experience doesn’t back that up. First, I haven’t gotten any junk eMail. There are a few things you should pay attention to, however. First is, entering your eMail on the home page signs you up to get promotional eMails. You just have to pay attention. I did that by mistake but then immediately requested to be unsubscribed and was dropped before any eMails started coming. Second, when you do sign up for their service, you have the option to get promotional eMails or not. Again, pay attention.

When you sign up for GetResponse, they have a “risk free” two weeks. That means you can get a full refund within two weeks. It doesn’t mean you get to try the service without paying for two weeks. Did I mention, “Pay Attention”?

You can have your own custom landing pages that subscribers are sent to after various actions they take or you can use the default GetResponse page. Those pages have a fair amount of ads on them for other people trying to build subscriber lists. However, you can easily defeat this even if you don’t want to build your own landing pages by checking a box that disables advertisements. When I first saw the ads I was a little miffed, but then I found the box to eliminate them - now that I’m ok with. If you don’t care, they have an additional revenue stream, but if you don’t want it you can easily and quickly defeat it. If only more companies would have business practices like that.

You can load your own eMail addresses into GetResponse either manually or with an upload. However, you can’t add those addresses unless you also send those people another eMail asking them to confirm their subscription. There are check boxes to choose whether or not to send confirmations to adds, but anything I tried you get an error message forcing you to send confirmations. I realize this is a way for GetResponse to protect their name from spam, but it sure is inconvenient for an “honest” person who already has a list with another provider that has had double opt-in already done.

While personally I have only tried three eMail automation software packages, I do think GetResponse is in the top couple. From my research, it seems that at the price point and feature list I’m looking for, GetResponse and Aweber appear to be the top two contenders. I decided to go with GetResponse for two reasons. One is that GetResponse has two features Aweber doesn’t that I really liked (the first two bullet points at the beginning of this post), and second, I read enough bad press on Aweber’s ethics that I wasn’t real anxious to jump on their bandwagon.

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October 22, 2007 by David.

PC World has a nice write-up on how to spot eMail scams.  Having a good sense of disbelief and a few basic cautions will save you time and again.

eBay and PayPal have pages dedicated to helping you identify the whether an eMail purporting to be from them is fraudulent, things like how they put your name in the eMail and the layout of known scams.  The are also very responsive if you eMail them asking if something you received is legit.

If you are active on the Internet at all, you need to have multiple eMail accounts.  A minimum of three in my book.  Use one for known & trusted business, like your banks and PayPal.  Pay attention to what the “to” eMail is when you receive eMail.  Not only will you have a permanent eMail address you won’t have to change with these accounts, you can quickly tell if a message “from” eBay but it isn’t the account you use with them.

Have a second for “trash.”  You know, when you have to sign up for something you are pretty sure you don’t want to hear from again but have to supply an eMail address.  Check it occasionally and when you start getting a lot of trash, just kill it and make a new one.

Third, have an account for your usual eMail communications - your friends and associates.  You know eventually this will pick up spam because there is always someone who sens eMail to a group and exposes them all the addresses (instead of using blind copy) and eventually that will get in the hands of the wrong person.  However, this won’t soak up spam real fast and so you might change the account every year or two to keep it clean.

You might have a fourth if you are forced to use only one specific address from work.  That is a hassle because you don’t have a way to rotate it to keep it clean so just guard it carefully.  I even went so far as creating business cards with the company logo (the actually created them for me) with the “junk” business eMail.  I’d carry both cards and only give the permanent eMail to trusted insiders, giving away the junk eMail to everyone else.

Ok, that’s five accounts, but this system has worked well for me, especially since you can forward eMails and thus I only have to check one or two places.  Also, most good eMail packages will pull from multiple addresses.  For instance, Outlook will pull from as many mailboxes as you’d like and then you can add a display colum to show the “to” address to easily track which ones you want to open.

To get those accounts is really easy even if your personal eMail is xyz@comcast.net and your can’t-change-it-and-break-the-standard business eMail.  The easiest and cheapest way is to use hotmail, yahoo, or the like for alternate addresses.  However, to get a more official looking eMail, create a domain name just for eMail if you have to.  Heck, for six bucks per year for the URL and four bucks per month you can have your own domain name with more eMail addresses than you can possibly use from 1and1.com - well worth the cost if you care about spam.  Besides, who wouldn’t rather have yourname@CoolURL.com instead of name456@hotmail.com?  I’ve used 1and1 hosting service for years and it is one of the very cheapest out there for both hosting and domain name registration.  You will find their products very robust and well featured.  Click the 1and1.com link in the side bar to check them out!

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October 16, 2007 by David.

Included with the Adobe Master Collection package is a training DVD. I am blown away by both the quality and the quantity. There are many hours covering the many products included in the Master Collection. It is nicely “chunked down” to topics. There is a variety of presenters but nearly all do a stellar job of walking one through the topic.

In case that wasn’t enough, there is also a free month subscription to on-line training at Lynda.com. They go into a lot more depth and breadth than the single DVD from Adobe, and of course cover a lot more than just Adobe’s products. Between the two resources I got a great start on using the software. I’ll continue my Lynda.com subscription. After all, $25/month is like buying one book (or in some cases, half a book). The educators on the Adobe DVD are also on Lynda.com but are not duplicates so the two mesh well.

This beats going to a standard school hands down. Both college classes and business education (such as New Horizons) are way too slow for me. Both have to progress at the lowest common denominator and I find the majority of time is wasted on material I already know or is just moving WAY slower than it needs to.

Maybe my prior experience with video education was just a run of below standard material, but I am amazed at the concise usefulness of Adobe & Lynda’s videos. Since the training is so succinct, one can move at the pace he or she wants. The presenter just gets right to the point and lays it out. For material that is completely new to me, I replay short sections as I’m going along until I get it, but the end result is MUCH faster than sitting in a classroom setting.

These training videos have made me a believer and, furthermore, will allow me to get so much more out of the software. My biggest concern in ordering this suite was there would be so much to learn and going to a class of any type would take so long and cost so much I wouldn’t get nearly the use out of it that I could have. I’m not worried about that anymore! 

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October 1, 2007 by David.

Google sky is a very cool app, but check out PC World’s collection of space images. Spectacular!

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September 1, 2007 by David.

With not much surfing to find internet marketing education, one will come across Internet Marketing Center (IMC) and their “Insider’s Secrets” course by Corey Rudl. They have a large following and are a primary push behind those “long” web pages you see selling one item, complete with testimonials and screen after screen rolling down through all the reasons you will live an unfulfilled life if you don’t immediately pay up.

Well, that isn’t all bad. It has been proven to work and to work quite well. When we wanted to start selling on the Internet we took the advice of a friend who had gone through IMC’s mentoring program and signed up. Frankly, I wish we’d done more of our own research.

Don’t get me wrong. We have learned a lot. However, for us the costs outweighed the benefits. Along the way we’ve also gained a perspective that few seem willing to share about IMC and their Insider’s Secrets course.

First and foremost, IMC’s mentoring program is designed with one way of doing things and if your business model doesn’t fit that, you will find it difficult to get your money’s worth. You can’t buy the manual separately. It is part of a mentoring program.  You buy eight one hour phone calls which will be every two weeks (you can buy more, but don’t - add later if you find you need it). It is also best suited for a person who knows very little about computers and the Internet. In fact, they actively discourage what an average webmaster will want to do with a website. 

The business model they teach works like this:

1. First find what interests you, hobbies etc.
2. Take that theme, say golf or dogs, and do WordTracker searches until you find search strings that a lot of people are searching for but finding few sites.
3. Build a one page site that sells the heck out of that one item (with a liberal use of superlatives).

Step 1 doesn’t take a lot of time, but a lot of effort is poured into the second step. IMC does a good job of teaching you how to ferret out search strings. In addition, a lot of effort is put into the  sales copy on the third step. If what works for your business model is selling the heck out of one item, they will do a great job walking you through the process.

However, if you have already chosen a product, or several related products, and want to sell it on the Internet, you will find IMC difficult to get a full value from. This is the position we found ourselves in. Before signing up, we explained how we had a particular set of products we wanted to sell but they did not tell us that didn’t fit their mold. We have gone through two mentors with them and both are at a bit of a loss to help us and keep trying to steer us away from what we are selling to find a new, single product to sell.

They cover some SEO (search engine optimization) but make much more of an emphasis on pay-per-click than “organic” SEO. There will also be some coverage of a shopping cart and merchant account, but not much as when you sell one item on one page you don’t need a very sophisticated system.

Now, I understand that if I want to sell six watches that there is plenty of proof that if I make a single page for each, I will sell more than a page with all six, but that isn’t our issue. We want to use the Internet as one of many marketing strategies, not the main, and certainly not limit ourselves to Internet as a singular strategy.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out Wordtracker, you owe it to yourself if you have any kind of website and care about figuring out what search terms are most likely to attract visitors. Its information is very valuable, but don’t depend on it 100%. When I compare search string results in Wordtracker to search strings I use to see how my own sites fare, Wordtracker doesn’t always correlate.

When you sign up for IMC mentoring, you will receive two sizable binders. The information in those binders is excellent and if one were able to separately purchase those binders, I would recommend them quite highly. They give a lot of sources to get your job done, although there is a significant amount of pushing their own related products (particularly Mailloop - click here for my Mailloop review) or feeding you through links that will give them a commission. Ok, that is how one makes bucks on the Internet so I can’t bitch about that too loudly, I’m just one of those guys that prefers an honest evaluation of a product instead of one biased so the author gets a cut of the action.

IMC sees eMail lists as a primary means of attracting traffic and spends a substantial amount of time on how to attract customers to a site (through key words, etc) where you can offer them something to get them to sign up for your newsletter or such, from which you can then leverage selling.

In fact, signing up for IMC’s newsletter isn’t a bad idea.  If you get their newsletter, along with a few others such as Early to Rise, and Michael Masterson, you will soon have a pretty good picture of what IMC teaches in their mentoring course (like, for free, man).

Incidentally, Michael Masterson sells an excellent copywriting course that we found well worth every cent. It is called “Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting” (and, yes, this link is yet another example of long copy on the web). Although it is angled more toward hardcopy, its principles still apply well to the web. I recommend it if you want to learn the skills of copywriting and I consider it substantially superior to the section on copywriting within the IMC course.  It is also almost 1/20th the price of the IMC course and, while it doesn’t include mentoring, it does include sending in assignments and getting real feedback.

Here is an example site of how IMC will teach you to write. Take a good look at it. It may work well for your purposes. It may not. What it does do is sell products well, whether a person “likes” it or not. The question is whether what you have to sell can be put into that kind of a format.

I most certainly would not tell someone to never sign up with IMC. I hope, however, I have given enough of a picture of what they offer to enable you to make a good evaluation whether this is an approach that fits well within your business model or if you are better off pursuing an alternative.

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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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June 5, 2007 by David.

I googled “easy button” to get an image to add to the post about the easy button but two clicks into the search I found something much more interesting, a hack to the easy button where you can record and play back any message you want. Pretty fun stuff.  That lead to kipkay.com which has numerious hack videos, from converting a 9v battery to an AAA battery to changing traffic lights, to quick chilling your Coke.  Check it out.  Fun stuff, indeed.

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January 11, 2007 by David.

I’ve used a couple web hosts and I like 1and1.com ALOT.  Their hosting prices are very cheap and what you get is better than the average host.  Like five bucks a month for 50 gig and 1000 eMail addresses - more than I could ever use.  Domain names are as cheap as you’ll find anywhere: six bucks a year for .com.  I have over 20 domain names and over a half dozen websites all under one account.  This blog is a freeby with the account, too.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have exactly two complaints, but neither critical enough to get me to consider another host.  1) Their on-line eMail system is slow and overly basic, but since 99% of my eMail use is Outlook, that is a minor inconvenience when I travel only. 2) I wish their site statistics showed the search strings surfers use to find the site.

If you want exceptional value for your money, 1and1 is your host.  To learn more, click the blue button on the bottom of the side bar.

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