It’s very hard to get my attention. There are 3,000,000 things I could be doing right this very minute, and I need to be reasonably convinced (Tyler Cowen style) that what I’m reading is the best possible thing I could be reading right now.

Getting my attention with a bulk email is exceptionally hard, especially when your generic newsletter is right below an email from a close friend detailing her upcoming trip to Lithuania and right above an email from a new client with an exciting, challenging new efficiency conundrum for me to solve.

Ryan Lee is a long-time fitness professional with an impressive portfolio of membership services and sites geared to people who want to get in [better] shape. All that said, Ryan is doing something very, very right, and if you are trying to reach a large audience, you should do what he does:

1. His emails are short, like a Seth Godin post.
2. He’s honest. If you’re not in shape, it’s because you’ve been lazy, not because McDonald’s hides secret hypnotic messages in its radio commercials. However, at the same time, he’s encouraging — after all, you can choose to *not* be lazy any more and get in great shape.
3. He makes sense. I have a fitness background, and whenever I hear people talk about their new low-carb diet or how they’re taking a new weight loss supplement, I want to scream and hit them a book on Nutrition and Weight Loss 101. Most people hawking fitness products do it by playing on weaknesses, lying, and furthering myths. From what I’ve seen, Ryan makes a serious effort to dispel these myths and builds his programs on what really works.
4. He’s not always selling something. Sometimes he’ll send a quick note about an experience he had on an airline, or to share a story about something one of his daughters did. Over time, I have found myself caring just as much about what Ryan is up to as I do about my favorite bloggers in other fields.
5. He’s human. Ryan has been doing a lot of videos lately, and it’s clear he isn’t reading from a professionally-written script. I love this. It makes him approachable and makes his videos more interesting to watch, and it follows, to learn from.
6. He stands by his guarantees. I’ve been working on my own information products and was curious to see what Ryan’s physical materials were like, so I signed up for his “Millionaire Workout” program. The information was great for someone unfamiliar with the Internet, but far too basic for me (as I expected), so I canceled (as I had planned). No hassle, and I even got a nice personal note back. That makes me confident in any future purchases I may make.

This post was inspired by Chris Brogan’s “Example of a Great PR Pitch.” If you know someone who’s “doing it right,” give them some credit!

While I may question their dedication to their motto (”Do no evil”) at times, on the whole Google provides a suite of very useful products for an extremely low price: free. Hard to argue with that, especially when GMail rocks my world.

Google really needs to work on its support documentation and sales copy, as I wouldn’t be writing this blog post if their services and their limitations had been expressed clearly. (Hey Google — I know a great writer you can hire!)

You can port all of your existing POP/IMAP accounts into your free GMail account. You can also send from any email address, provided you have access to it in order to click the link in their confirmation notice. Great. What they don’t tell you is that every header on every outgoing message will then include this line:

From: yourusername@gmail.com On Behalf Of Your Name (theemailyouthoughtyousentfrom@yourdomain.com)

This isn’t hiding in the extended headers somewhere… this is right there for everyone using Outlook and other mail programs to see. It’s to protect against spammers using the service, but mostly, it’s annoying. It’s also not mentioned anywhere, except in user forums where fellow GMailers explained that you can avoid this by paying $50/year to signup for Google Apps for your Domain.

I finally fork over my $50, only to discover mid-process that they limit the number of domain aliases you can use. (I have 24 separate domains + misspellings of some of those domains.) I think I got to #13 when I was greeted by a mean little red sentence informing me I surpassed this undisclosed limit. Obnoxious!

I also kept getting a mysterious “temporary 502″ error when I tried to access various pages:

Temporary Error (502)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes.

Mind you this error persisted for three days, not a few minutes.

Two emails back and forth with support later, I got zero help. They kept reminding me to change my MX records. Yea, that’s what I’m going to do, send my MX records your way when you can’t explain why half my clicks result in an error message.

I’m sure I could pay $50/year/per domain to avoid this problem, and then port those 24 accounts into another GMail account, but I don’t feel like paying $1200/year for the privilege.

In the end, I deleted my Google Apps account, ported all my domains through a single Fusemail.com account (on the suggestion of my new hero, PickledOnion), and continue to check via free GMail via POP. I also continue to get the annoying “On behalf of” header line, which will continue to piss me off.

Google, you’re doing something wrong if I cancel my paid account for your free service. Something to chew on.

We’re about to publish our first ebook and want to make sure the page layout does the content justice.

This means we’re on the hunt for simple, attractive, easy-to-read ebook designs for inspiration. I thought I’d share my favorites below.

(I don’t know how long the links are going to be live, so I included a screenshot to use as general idea.)

Do you have an ebook to suggest? Please share in the comments!

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