There is a new face in the Austin Personal Training scene, and he happens to be my brother. Brian Morris just finished his certification from PFTA here in Austin. He will soon be starting as a personal trainer on some lucky gym’s staff, but is also looking for clients.

Most personal trainers are all about finding the young people looking to prepare for bikini season, but Brian is hoping to reach people of all levels of life and fitness. We come from a family with a history of obesity, so Brian and I both know adversity when it comes to weight loss. He is even working with our mom right now. She has gone through a gastric bypass and thyroid cancer, making for an interesting combination of fitness and nutritional needs. No situation is too difficult with someone this dedicated to a healthier life for everyone.

For example, he wants to reach the baby boomers that want a better quality of life, not a beach body. Keeping up with grandchildren and traveling the world (that hike up St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is 1000+ steps!) are their goals.

I am very excited about this new part of Brian’s life because I can not only aide in this new venture, but it’s awesome to see him this excited about his career. Brian really does love helping people with their fitness goals. He has been telling me every week for the past 9 weeks about what he is learning in class and helping me change my habits for the better. (yes Brian, intervals are what I need to do, I’m working on it)

So as promised, if you are in Austin, and always wanted to work with a personal trainer, let me know. I’ll get you the hook up. *wink wink, nudge nudge*

A New Austin Personal Trainer is a post from: Kate Morris

Background

I am not a tools type of search engine marketer. Well, in terms of PPC bid management tools. I love Raven Tools and SEOmoz and some of the newer PPC tools like WordStream. (Yes, some of those are affiliate links)

There are some tools developers in the PPC space that I keep hearing about but have never seen. For the most part I don’t have the clients that are large enough for them. But seeing as there are some new awesome tools, I’ve been more open to requests from tool developers in the PPC space.

The LiveBall Approach

I got an email from Kristina Allen at Ion Interactive on February 15th asking me to review a press release about their most recent developments. Normally these requests are dry when coming from PR people, but Kristina got it right. The title of the email was Leprechauns, Lattes and LiveBall. She got immediate bonus points for originality and attention grabbing.

Her email not only got my attention, but Kristina, whom I had never met, had taken the time to read my site and understand me. She talked about my SEM Cereals post and asked nicely if I’d look at the release. She kept things light and informal.

Girl should get a raise just for that.

LiveBall

I had heard of Ion Interactive, but had no idea what they did. I wanted to help, but I can’t talk about something I know nothing about. Within 24 hours they had a demo setup and were sending me everything I needed to review their tool. The CEO was even present for the demo to answer my questions. So thanks to Justin Talerico and Megan Leap for answering all of my questions.

And just to make it clear, they are not paying me to write a good review. I am highly critical of unnecessary tools and will tell you the way it is. But I do need to tell my readers that they did send me a copy of their book, Honest Seduction. (Warning: affiliate link) I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list now.

LiveBall Review

LiveBall is a landing page optimization tool that is hosted on the Ion servers. Basically they setup an environment on their servers in which marketing people can create landing pages to test in an easy interface. LiveBall is hosting on a dedicated IP address for each customer. The pages created by their system are cross browser friendly (I asked) and while are hosted on their domain, they are pointed at a subdomain on your root domain.

The team there aids in building themes based around your current site layout. So they start the account for you by coding everything to look like your site. Testing these pages allows you to keep the same look and feel as the rest of your site. Your marketing managers can add and subtract elements to test through their easy WYSIWYG editor.

One feature I loved is that the LiveBall system gives you image galleries to choose stock images to test. Right now they are organized into six categories including Active Life, Business People, Healthcare, Higher Education, Leisure People, and Meanings. I’ve done testing, and it can get expensive to buy all the images you need for pages that you might not even keep!

The greatest thing? All of the pages created are SEO compliant. (That’s what their release was about) You can use the canonical tag to point the search engines at the “real” version, or add a “noindex” if you don’t want these pages in the index. You can add in your own tracking code, but they have built in tracking as well to help aide in decision making about the best landing page possible. And the system passes query strings so that you can track what you need to for your system as well as collecting important keyword information.

Overall Thoughts

This is something I would recommend to a company that has a marketing department and needs a way to test landing pages on the fly without interrupting the IT and web development side. Ion makes it clear that this system is built with marketers in mind, not necessarily code-minded people. It’s simple and easy to use, but also builds nice code on the back end.

What a company can learn in this system can be pushed to web development once conclusions are drawn. LiveBall and Ion have no issue with their clients taking the information and code developed in the system and putting into use on the whole site, I made sure to ask. Most companies will want to take what is learned and use it on the whole site back on the home server.

In talking with their team they understand that landing page optimization is not just for PPC. That is why they released the SEO compliant features. They know that testing is not a one time thing, and over time even the best campaigns can use some optimization. You never know when one change to a page can result in a 10% increase in conversion rates.

LiveBall Review is a post from: Kate Morris