The Hive serves real clients to bolster the success of those organizations while using the work as curriculum to train students.

During their normal class time, Hive students presented the work they have worked on for their clients since the Hive kicked off in January.  Designing info graphics, creating color pallets, posting promotional videos, their experience working with a content management system and conducting interviews were just a few executed items the students discussed in their presentations. The students are expected to deliver completed projects to their clients in May.  Check out the Herald’s article on The Hive and the students’ presentations.  For more information go to hiveu.me.

Content Marketing is Internet Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing is critical for your Internet Marketing Strategy to succeed on the Web. Revenflo believes that the web is content in all of it’s various forms, Articles, Research, Blogging, Video, Social Media, etc. Each Internet Marketing Strategy needs to center around your message and what the consumer of that message is seeking.

Take a listen as Jason Broadwater, founder of Revenflo, sheds some light on the subject. Revenflo is an industry leading Internet Marketing Company based in Rock Hill, SC which serves the Charlotte, NC Metro area. For further information please use our contact page and let us know about your new project. Click on video to learn more!

Content Management Options for Your Business

Content Management Systems (CMS) allow businesses and organizations to custom build their web content. The RevenFlo Web Team utilizes Open Source Management Systems like WordPress and Drupal to create fluid web content that is easily managed.

Open Source Technology is a work horse for making your website more dynamic and engaging while simultaneously creating a strong Internet Marketing presence. Click on video to learn more!

1. Blogging

Don’t sneer; sure the word “blog” might be the most overused word of the decade (it’s right up there with “innovative”), but it’s become essential for getting known on the web. By channeling your industry knowledge into a stream of posts on a Blogger, WordPress, or personal (see #4) blog, you’re sharing valuable content with potential readers, and are given the chance to add your own social commentary on the matter. What are the best and worst aspects of your industry? What are some of the behind-the-scenes aspects that the everyday person might not have anticipated? These are great ways to peak interest and start the ball rolling!

2. Technorati

Technorati.com is the key hub of much of the blogosphere, home to what some affectionately refer to as the bloggerati (think glitterati among bloggers). The best way to use it is to seek out other blogs within your field, and start contributing as a commenter. If you have a lot to offer, consider contacting the blog author to do a guest post. At the very least, be sure to include a back-link to your own site in your comments. If people like what you have to say, they might stop by your site to hear more.

3. LinkedIn Answers

This is an area that is hit or miss depending on the strength of your LinkedIn network. The goal is to seek out questions in your desired area, and provide exceptional answers. Merely posting a reply isn’t enough here: your goal is to be rated the “Best” answer by the questioner to gain what LinkedIn refers to as ‘expertise points.’ The more you have, the better you’re perceived.

4. Personal Domains

Your name is your first personal brand. If you haven’t snagged it already, go to GoDaddy.com and grab it! Seriously, at $10 per year, it’s a low price to have control over a domain with your name (or some portion/combination) in it. Add on a minimal hosting account, and you’re looking at $60 a year max for the chance to build whatever you like. It can be as simple or complex as you want. Regardless, you should park it today before a less-qualified doppelganger does.

5. Twitter

“Save the cheerleader, save the world.” When it comes to Twitter, it’s more like “Own the Twitter name, own the search.” If you establish control over @<word>, you will come up first in the search results for that word. Google loves fresh content, and Twitter is as fresh as they come! Just remember: think before you tweet. An off-color comment might be missed offline, but with Twitter there are several services that archive everything that gets said. Tweeter Beware.

As with everything online, you get out what you put in. 1 hour or 10 hours a week, it’s up to you. Just remember, the web will respond accordingly.  If you have questions, we’re here to help.  Just call or comment.  Remember~We Are Your Web Team!

Using WordPress to Build your Business Website

The ever-versatile WordPress Website technology continually proves to be one of the smartest tools every small business should have as part of their Internet Marketing Strategy and SEO plan. Primarily a Content Management System (CMS), WordPress’s flexibility allows a small business owner to build an effective, robust Website Design that is very affordable. Not only does WordPress allow you to easily add, edit, delete information, it enables visitors to leave comments, questions, compliments, etc. —- vital elements for today’s business survival!

Using WordPress for a Small Business Website is not a new concept. Its simple setup, wide variety of available templates and the amazing amount of SEO components you can employ make it a logical choice. If you’re not convinced by now that it makes good sense to use WordPress for your small business website, here are 8 more reasons to consider:

Top 8 Reasons WordPress will Change your Small Business Website

1. WordPress is an efficient and reliable technology that can be downloaded and deployed on a cost effective budget, the technology is free, then you can spend your Internet Marketing budget on more important items like web design, content creation and SEO work so people can find your website on Google.

2. Content is king and WordPress allows you to develop a work flow for posting content that doesn’t require a Web Developer every time you want to publish an article, change out a widget or remove a picture that is no longer relevant. At Revenflo we feel its important that you learn to fish, then we can go fishing together.

3. Setting up a Self-hosted WordPress site can be done in a fraction of the time and money that enterprise level Content Management Systems take and still provide you with a very rich set of features that are completely controllable by someone that doesn’t have their masters in computer programming. Revenflo provides the technical knowledge for deploying the WordPress technology onto your own domain, designing a custom theme and connecting it all.

4. Anywhere, anytime functionality — You can make content changes to your website from your office computer, laptop while you’re on the go or even from your web-enabled cell phone. You will be amazed at the flexibility of this system, and Web Developers are creating new apps everyday for the i-phone, blackberry, etc. This kind of stuff just gets us excited.

5. Search Engines can generally take up to 3 months to index a traditional site. With WordPress, the SEO structure is partially built in the core of the system, which Google, Yahoo and Bing love. This structure is crucial, just like a good foundation for a house, if the foundation is faulty then the whole house is compromised. WordPress also has several plug-ins that help a company like Revenflo Web Team optimize your site to steadily climb up in SEO rankings.

6. Adding plug-ins allow you to add more functionality to your website. Using a single plug-in, you can add Google Analytics to get tracking data for your entire website whereas with a traditional website, you have to add code to every single page to get tracking data. Other WordPress plug-ins include the ability to add WordPress e-commerce or membership functionality.

7. WordPress has built-in interactive functionality for your clients/visitors to leave comments, suggestions and other critical feedback, this really hits to the heart of the Web 2.0 Internet Marketing phenomenon. Think about Social Media, everyone has been trained to leave comments and provide feedback. Now you can have your personal platform for interaction with your clients. You can even plug WordPress into your social networks and allow people to experience you in whatever medium they chose.

8. Not only can WordPress be used to “run” your Website Design, it is also our favorite blogging tool. WordPress offers two options for publishing content. Pages and Posts. Pages communicate your more static content (ie about page, contact page) while Posts are used in a more fluid way to produce content for a variety of categories. These are great options that come preset within WordPress but customization is only limited by your imagination and budget.

Just remember… don’t think that if you use WordPress to build your site, it will magically generate its own content by your thoughts or appear #1 in Google because you thought of a catchy title tag. You have to use the system by adding content, responding to comments, questions, and building SEO juice. Basically adding value in the same way you do in physical relationships.  It may take a little bit of time, but the investment will reap tremendous returns!

How do you like using your WordPress Website?
Whats does your sphere respond to?  Take a moment to share your WordPress experience or question with us.

WordPress Login

Go to your WordPress Login and enter your password and login info

To write a post:

1. Click the Posts tab on the upper left hand side of your dashboard.
2. Click the Add New Sub Tab
3. Start writing/pasting your post; it is most effective to have your information together prior to going logging into the dashboard.
4. Once you have completed the actual content of the post there are key actions that need to be included:
   1. Select a category; located on the bottom right hand side of the screen.  You can post to multiple categories (a press release could double as a blog, etc).
   2. Add tags- it is crucial to add tags to all of your postings to boost SEO.  You may have saved Tags that you can use and you can add more as well.  The POST TAGS section is on the left hand side as well, above the CATEGORY section.
5. Review your document to make sure the content was entered properly, all heading sizes have been set per your website standard, spell check, etc.
6. Go to the right hand side of your screen and click on PUBLISH when posting is ready to go live.
7. Go to your website and review the posting- check to make sure it was assigned to the proper categories, the title and headings are sized consistently, no spelling errors, correct font has been used etc.

Suggestions and Guidelines:

The title of your post:

You can use any words or phrases. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hypens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the post like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid.” WordPress will clean it up for the link to the post, called the post-slug.

Preview button

Allows you to view the post before officially publishing it.

Publish box

Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Published, Pending Review, and Draft. A Published status means the post has been published on your blog for all to see. Pending Review means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication. Draft means the post has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update post or Publish button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all posts organized by status by going to Posts > Edit). To schedule a post for publication on a future time or date, click “Edit” in the Publish area next to the words “Publish immediately”. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.

Publish box

Visibility – This determines how your post appears to the world. Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site)

Save

Allows you to save your post as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Posts – Edit in the menu bar, then select your post from the list.

Publish

Publishes your post on the site; you can edit the time when the post is published by clicking the Edit link above the Publish button and specifying the time you want the post to be published. By default, at the time the post is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the post within the database.

Post Tags

Refers to micro-categories for your blog, similar to including index entries for a page. Posts with similar tags are linked together when a user clicks one of the tags. Tags have to be enabled with the right code in your theme for them to appear in your post. Add new tags to the post by typing the tag into the box and clicking “Add”.

Excerpt

A summary or brief teaser of your posts featured on the front page of your site as well as on the category, archives, and search non-single post pages. Note that the Excerpt does not usually appear by default. It only appears in your post if you have changed the index.php template file to display the Excerpt instead of the full Content of a post. If so, WordPress will automatically use the first 55 words of your post as the Excerpt or up until the use of the More Quicktag mark. If you use an Explicit Excerpt, this will be used no matter what.

Send Trackbacks

A way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks. No other action is necessary. For those blogs that don’t recognize pingbacks, you can send a trackback to the blog by entering the website address(es) in this box, separating each one by a space.

Custom Fields

Custom_Fields offer a way to add information to your site. In conjunction with extra code in your template files or plugins,  Custom Fields can modify the way a post is displayed. These are primarily used by plugins, but you can manually edit that information in this section.

Discussion

Options to enable interactivity and notification of your posts. This section hosts two check boxes: Allow Comments on this post and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this post. If Allowing Comments is unchecked, no one can post comments to this particular post. If Allowing Pings is unchecked, no one can post pingbacks or trackbacks to this particular post.

Password Protect This Post

To password protect a post, click Edit next to Visibility in the Publish area to the top right, then click Password Protected, click OK, and enter a password. Then click OK. Note – Editor and Admin users can see password protected or private posts in the edit view without knowing the password.

Best Practices For Posting

You can say or show the world anything you like on your WordPress site. Here are some tips you need to know to help you write your posts in WordPress.

Use Paragraphs

No one likes to read writing that never pauses for a line break. To break your writing up into paragraphs, use double spaces between your paragraphs. WordPress will automatically detect these and insert <p> HTML paragraph tags into your writing.

Using Headings

If you are writing long posts, break up the sections by using headings, small titles to highlight a change of subject. In HTML, headings are set by the use of h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on. By default, most WordPress Themes use the first, second, and sometimes third heading levels within the site. You can use h4 to set your own headings.  Simply type in:

<h4>Subtitle of Section</h4>

with double lines before and after and WordPress will make that title a headline in your post. To style the heading, add it to your style.css style sheet file

Spell Check and Proof

There are spell check Plugins available, but even those can’t check for everything. Some serious writers will write their posts in a text editor with spell check, check all the spelling and proof it thoroughly before copying and pasting into WordPress.

Think before you post

Ranting on a blog is commonplace today; take a moment and think about what you are writing. Remember, once it is out there, it can be seen by many and crawled by search engines; and taking things back is harder once it is public. Take a moment to read what you’ve written before hitting the Publish button. When you are ready, share it with the world.

Write about what you like

You’ve heard this a thousand times before and it sounds cliche, but it is true. If you force yourself to write something that you don’t really enjoy, it will show. Perhaps you might not have a specific theme for writing when you just start, but that’s ok; you will become more focused later. Just enjoy the experience and write what you like.

Write frequently

Write as frequently as you can, may be even more than twice a day, but don’t let quantity get in the way of quality. Your viewers come for content, don’t give them useless stuff.

Don’t use too much slang

Not all the readers will be from your part of the world so make sure people can understand easily.

Don’t hide your emotions

Tempting as it might be, don’t hide your real emotions. After all that is what a blog is about. If you want, you can stay anonymous and voice your feelings on whatever you are passionate about. You might have strong views on various subjects but let your readers know your passion. What is passion worth if you can’t even share it? You’ll actually love the discussions it can lead to. The discussions will broaden your own thinking and you might end up making some really good friends.

Consider your readers

Consider your audience and what website content will be the most compelling and relevant to them.

Make use of comments

Comments let people share their ideas. Sometimes, they might not be good, but you can ask such people to shut up. Most of the times, they will and if they don’t you can delete their comments. Blogging like real life, can be both fun and not so fun at times. Be prepared. Also, give people a place to contact you in private if they want to write to you.

Don’t play too safe

Talk about the real you/industry that you are involved in. Readers aren’t impressed by how big your house is, which cool club you belong to, or what the weather is in your hometown. Don’t be a bore and put a long post on how you fixed the leaking tap in minutes. Readers don’t care about braggers, they care about the real you–how you feel, what gets you excited, why you are the person you are. But if achievements are all that you can talk about, you will bore your readers. Use pictures and videos; they make the pages colorful and viewers get to see a little of your part of the world. They feel connected.

Keep writing

Don’t stop blogging. If you don’t have anything to write about, chances are, you are still holding back. Let loose. Perhaps surf more blogs and maybe you’ll get an idea. You can write about your friends, complain about your boss, or simply rant about what’s gone wrong. Yet if nothing else works, just write a review on the latest movie, book, or product

Save your posts

Save your posts before you press the publish button. Anything can happen with your computer or with an Internet connection. You don’t need to lose your post.

Don’t forget…..

Just a heads up- submit any questions if you are having a problem and we will be happy to help.  Feel free to comment if you have anything to add.  Thanks!

About Miller Homes

Miller Classic Homes builds quality homes from the $220’s to the $450’s.  The quality of their timeless homes is inspired by and overseen by celebrated custom home builder Shannon Miller of SE Miller Custom Homes.  They apply Shannon’s sound principles and dedication to quality to more affordable homes.  The Miller hallmark is a functional design of enduring beauty and value.

Currently, Miller Classic Homes builds in two communities:

• Village of Baxter (Fort Mill, SC)
• Lake Carolina (Columbia, SC)

Nature of the Solution

MyMillerClassicHome.com. Miller Classic Homes builds homes in Village of Baxter in Fort Mill, SC, and in Lake Carolina, SC.  The site is built in a content management system that will allow the Miller Classic team to keep the public up to date on current listings, as well as provide relevant information about the areas of Village of Baxter in Fort Mill, SC, and Lake Carolina in Columbia, SC.  The WordPress technology allows for the staff to make updates and changes with ease.  The Web 2.0 design has a clean and current look that consumers respond to.  The site is easily navigable and intuitive for web visitors.

Summary

RevenFlo will provide training for administrative staff on how to use WordPress and make changes to the site.  We are available for ongoing maintenance and look forward to their continued growth and success.