vFlyer Blog

vFlyer has introduced capabilities for vFlyer Starter members and above to add search and sort functions to their Account Profiles. What this means is that you now have the option of enabling viewers of your Account Profile (the web page that displays links to all your active vFlyer listings as well as your contact information, your photo and logo, a description of your business, and links to other websites) to search within particular categories of listings and sort listings by price, title, or date created. If you have multiple categories of listings such as For Sale and For Rent, this also means that end users can choose to filter to see the listings for just one of them.

We also introduced the option of setting the number of listings displayed per page (which used to only be five) at 5, 10, 20, 50, or all listings on one page.

To add search and sort functions and set the pagination of your Account Profile, click the Account tab, then click the Settings link. There you’ll see new options for showing search and sort and setting the number of listings per page. Once you’ve made changes to your Account Profile settings, click Update.

What’s significant about these enhancements? Well, in a nutshell, they make your Account Profile, already a useful marketing tool, immensely more useful to both you and the viewers of it by allowing for a more customizable display of listings and making it easier for viewers of it to find listings that fit their needs.

We expect that these changes will increase the number of vFlyer members who embed their Account Profiles in their websites. To put your Account Profile on your website, you (or whoever manages the website) will need to use an iframe to do so. An iframe is an HTML tag that inserts one web page into another and displays it in a frame. To embed your Account Profile using an iframe, follow these steps:

1. Copy the URL of your Account Profile. You can access the URL by clicking the Post Flyer tab from the Flyer Editor or the Post your Flyer quickly & easily link from your Flyer Dashboard. The URL will be labeled “Link to your Gallery.”

2. Open the HTML file for your website.

3. Copy and paste this code:

<iframe src=”Account Profile URL&Prime height=”1000&Prime width=”900&Prime></iframe>

Where “Account Profile URL” is, replace the text inside the “” with the URL of your Account Profile and leave the quotation marks. Paste this code where you want the Account Profile to appear on the page. Depending on how large you want the Account Profile to appear on the page, you can adjust the height and width dimensions accordingly.

We’ve gotten a number of requests from our members over the last few months for information about vFlyer Agency Edition, so I wanted to write a post that explains what vFlyer Agency Edition is and how it can benefit vFlyer users.

vFlyer Agency Edition is an account configuration that allows real estate agencies, property management companies, marketing firms, and other organizations that require multiple accounts to create and assign sub-accounts, which are essentially normal vFlyer accounts that are under the management of a main account. The manager and any assistants of the main account can access all sub-accounts via a drop-down list and have the power to assign these sub-accounts to to others so that they can create, edit, and publish content in them. Those assigned to sub-accounts will only have access to the sub-account to which they are assigned.

The main benefits of vFlyer Agency Edition in these scenarios are:

1. You can assign sub-accounts to your employees, team members, or clients for less than what it would cost to set up stand-alone vFlyer accounts for each of them.

2. As the account manager, you have the ability to coordinate and oversee the content in each sub-account so that, for instance, you could have all the sub-accounts use a custom branded Flyer theme you created in the main account to maintain consistency across your company’s or organization’s listings.

vFlyer Agency Edition is ideal for:

1. Real Estate Agencies and Broker Offices
2. Auto Dealership Groups
3. Property Management Companies
4. Mortgage Brokers advertising Realtor listings
5. Marketing and Graphic Design Firms

vFlyer Agency Edition is also a great tool for individual vFlyer members and small companies who have different categories of listings that they want to keep separate from each other. For instance, if you are a Realtor marketing properties in different locations, or properties both for sale and for rent, you could create a sub-account for each that you could access from your main account. Not only does this allow you to manage your listings more easily, it also gives you a separate Account Profile for each sub-account so that viewers of each Account Profile only see the listings you want them to see.

vFlyer Agency Edition is available to vFlyer Premium and vFlyer Professional members.

There is no additional charge for unassigned sub-accounts, which share the Flyer allocation of the main account. In other words, if you have a vFlyer Professional account and you create four sub-accounts, those four sub-accounts as well as the main account all pull from the same allocation of 125 available Active Flyers.

Assigned sub-accounts, on the other hand, have their own allocation of Flyers and are charged based on this allocation. The main account manager can specify the subscription plan associate with each sub-account. Typically, the sub-accounts are discounted at 20% off the normal subscription price. The manager of the main account can specify whether the main account is billed for assigned sub-accounts or the individual sub-account user is billed directly for his or her sub-account.

To learn more about vFlyer Agency Edition, send us an email at sales@vflyer.com.

We’re excited to announce that you can now search for Flyers in your vFlyer account by title, price, street address, city, state, and zip code! This new search feature will hopefully make locating individual Flyers much easier, especially for those of you with dozens of listings to manage.

On your Flyers page, you’ll now see a Search Options link. Clicking this link will bring up a search field and a drop-down menu where you can select the search criteria (whether you want to search by title, price, etc.). You can also specify whether you want to search all of your listings or just active, draft, or expired listings.

Happy Searching!

Check Out These Custom Branded Flyers! It’s been a little over a week now since the release of our new Theme Editor and it’s been really fun to see all the great custom Flyer themes that our members have created in that time. In this post, we’ve decided to share with you some of the spectacular branded themes we’ve seen. Take a look:

Stacey Wilson at George & Co., Realtors

Leonardo Pareja at Express Realty Services LLC 

Urbane Apartments

Patrick and Julie Essig at Vine Property Group

This branded header was designed by graphic designer Anna Hatcher

Matt Jerome at Minnesota Rental Houses

Aren’t they cool? The great thing about the new Theme Editor is that it opens up the possibilities for customizing the design of your Flyers and makes putting your branding front and center on your Flyers easier than ever, as these examples show.

As I wrote last week, vFlyer Starter members and above can upload custom header images to the Theme Editor, create custom themes with them, and use those custom themes in their Flyers. It’s a fantastic new feature that makes the vFlyer service even more valuable to anyone who wants to distinguish his or her online marketing content from the rest.

Finally, I also want to mention that, with our introduction of over 25 new real estate broker themes, we’ve seen a large number of our members create Flyers using these themes. We love a little competition here and there so we’ve been keeping track of how many of each broker theme have been used by our members. The leader? Alain Pinel Real Estate, followed by RE/MAX, Keller Williams, Coldwell Banker, and Century 21. Congratulations to Alain Pinel! Now we’ll see if one of the other brokers can take the top spot in the next week…

Earlier this week, vFlyer launched its new Theme Editor, which allows vFlyer business subscribers not only to customize the colors, fonts, and background patterns of their Flyers but, more importantly, to upload custom branded header images to them. In other words, any vFlyer Starter member or above can add his or her branding to the Flyers in the account… at no extra cost! This is a huge benefit to all you vFlyer business subscribers because it allows you to personalize your Flyers and streamline them with your websites and other marketing content in a way that wasn’t possible before.

In addition to the option of uploading a custom header image, you can also choose from over 25 new broker themes including ERA, GMAC Real Estate, Realty Executives, EXIT Realty, Long & Foster, and many others, or create a text header in the Theme Editor. Also, these 25+ broker themes are themselves customizable, so you can change them to your liking as well.

To create a custom header image, all you need is an image editing program on your computer, whether it be PhotoShop, MS Paint, or another program. What a number of our members are doing is taking a screen shot of their websites, cropping the portion of the image they want to use in the header, and then adjusting the image dimensions. The ideal dimensions of custom headers are 754 x 82 pixels. In your custom header, you can include your logo, a photograph of yourself, graphics from your website… you name it. If you aren’t able to create your own custom header image (or you want a professional designer to do it for you), you could have a graphic designer do it or alternately, vFlyer could create one for you for just $99 through the end of November. Here is an example of one that we created to match this member’s website.

We are really excited about the new Theme Editor because it makes vFlyer immensely more valuable to our users, giving you all expanded capabilities to customize your Flyers. If you try out the Theme Editor and have some comments about it, let us know! You can email your comments to support@vflyer.com. And if you’re especially proud of a custom theme you created, we’d love to see it! Feel free to send a link to a Flyer that uses the custom theme.

As in many industries, increasing numbers of auto shoppers are beginning their searches online instead of at the lot. What this means for auto dealers (particularly independent dealers who don’t have all the resources of a dealership group) is 1) you better have a website, and 2) you better be marketing your vehicles effectively on your website. An obvious way to do this is to put your vehicle inventory on your website so that visitors to the site can view photos and get information about each vehicle you are selling. There are companies sprouting up every year whose sole function is to provide auto dealers with an inventory of their vehicles for their websites. If you’re a vFlyer member, however, you should know that you already have an inventory built into your vFlyer account! Your vFlyer Account Profile effectively serves as a vehicle inventory website as it displays all your active listings, with a link to each Flyer, a thumbnail photo, and summary information about each vehicle.

If you haven’t set up your vFlyer Account Profile, you should do that right now (or at least immediately after you finish reading this post). Your Account Profile is a valuable marketing tool where you can display your contact information, a description of your business, your photo and logo, and (if you are a vFlyer business subscriber) links to other relevant websites. Also, if you’re a business subscriber, you can choose from a number of design themes for your Account Profile (including custom Flyer themes that you’ve created). So you see, if you are an auto dealer, simply by having a vFlyer account, publishing Flyers in it, and setting up your Account Profile, you have a vehicle inventory to utilize on your website!

vFlyer member Elton Rosales of KD Auto Sales in New Braunfels, Texas utilized his vFlyer Account Profile as a vehicle inventory on his website. Click here to see.

To put your Account Profile on your website, you (or whoever manages the website) will need to use an iframe to do so. An iframe is an HTML tag that inserts one web page into another and displays it in a frame. To embed your Account Profile using an iframe, follow these steps:

1. Copy the URL of your Account Profile. You can access the URL by clicking the Post Flyer tab from the Flyer Editor or the Post your Flyer quickly & easily link from your Flyer Dashboard. The URL will be labeled “Link to your Gallery.”

2. Open the HTML file for your website.

3. Copy and paste this code:

<iframe src=”Account Profile URL&Prime height=”1000&Prime width=”900&Prime></iframe>

Where Account Profile URL is, replace the text inside the quotation marks with the URL of your Account Profile (and leave the quotation marks). Paste this tag where you want the Account Profile to appear on the page. Depending on how large you want the Account Profile to appear on the page, you can adjust the height and width dimensions accordingly. You can also set the height and width by percentages instead of pixelage (e.g., “90%”).

If you use your vFlyer Account Profile as a vehicle inventory on your website, send a link to the page to support@vflyer.com. We would love to see it!

By popular demand, we’ve introduced a new Print Flyer function on all vFlyer landing pages. This allows viewers of any vFlyer to print a simplified version of the Flyer with the title, summary information, main photo and up to four gallery photos, location information, map, contact information, and photo and logos. This means that if you’re a real estate agent and a potential buyer finds one of your vFlyers through one of our partner marketplaces such as Trulia, that person can simply click the Print Flyer link instead of having to try to print the landing page itself (which isn’t set up to be printed) or (dare I say) write down the necessary information for the listing. In other words, this new Print Flyer link makes your vFlyer landing pages that much more functional and valuable to both you and the viewers of your vFlyers. And isn’t that the whole idea?

Here’s an example of the new print version:

Our members have always been excited about our Widgets because they’re an easy and effective way to increase traffic to their Profile and Listings, but we realized that there was room for improvement. In the prior release, Widgets could either display all of your active listings or just one of them. So we decided enough is enough and, a few weeks ago, rolled out some major enhancements to our Widgets. Now, when you create a Widget, you can:

In other words, we’ve given you more control over the content of your vFlyer Widgets. For example, if you wanted to highlight your listings from a particular subdivision, you could create a Widget that displayed just those listings. Or, if you had both rental and for sale listings in the same account, you could create a separate Widget for each. Or, if you wanted to include a non-vFlyer web page in one of your Widgets, you could do that too.

Creating a List allows you to decide which listings to show in a particular widget. A List works in the same way as a music playlist; you choose the items for the list, just as you would choose the songs for a playlist. When you create a Multi-item Widget, you simply choose the List you want to use for that Widget.

To include content not hosted by vFlyer in a Widget, use a Teaser. A Teaser is an enhanced link designed for use in vFlyer Widgets. Each Teaser requires a title and a URL, where the link in the Teaser will take viewers. Additionally, you can add a price and summary information and upload photos to your Teasers. You can then add Teasers to your Lists just as you would add Flyers.

We’re thrilled to be allowing our users to integrate externally-hosted web content into their Widgets and decide which of their Flyers and Teasers to put in their widgets. We hope that you all take advantage of these great new features!

We had a fantastic time exhibiting at Inman Real Estate Connect last week. The show gave us a chance to share with real estate agents and brokers, technology managers, and other attendees all about the benefits of using vFlyer and gave us the opportunity to catch up with some longtime vFlyer members and meet other members for the first time. vFlyer members who stopped by our booth included:

Also, the winner of our vFlyer Basic Annual Subscription Giveaway was vFlyer member Tom Plant of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Wildomar, CA. Congratulations Tom!

Thanks to all of you for stopping by and saying hello!

Also, our very own Oliver Muoto was a panelist on a panel discussion titled, “The Hottest Productivity Tools.” Way to represent, Oliver!

The Inman show is a great chance to learn about, discuss, and debate the most important trends in real estate technology and marketing. We’re delighted to have had the opportunity to participate in the conference again and look forward to future Inman Real Estate Connects.

We’re very excited to be exhibiting at Inman News Real Estate Connect 2008 here in San Francisco this week. We had a great time there last year and are looking forward to “RE-connecting” (sorry, I couldn’t resist) with our partners, our friends at Inman News, and our members! We’ll have a booth set up in the main exhibition hall on Wednesday and Thursday - if you are at the show, stop by and say hello! Or, if you are going to be around but don’t think you’ll make it to our booth, send an email to inmanconnect@vflyer.com letting us know and perhaps we can figure out a time to chat.

For more news and information on Inman Real Estate Connect 2008, visit Inman Connect.

We are excited to announce the addition of FrontDoor as a syndication partner for Residential for Sale Listings. FrontDoor is the newly-launched and highly anticipated real estate website of HGTV, the television network that gave us House Hunters and Designed to Sell. Following the lead of those shows, FrontDoor takes a comprehensive approach toward the buying and selling of a house.  In addition to listing millions of properties for sale around the country, it provides useful, accessible tips to sellers about raising home values, home staging, and other topics, and to buyers about what to look for when shopping for a house. 

We recently added the real estate marketplace CyberHomes as a syndication partner site, which means that real estate for sale listings can now be automatically submitted there! This is great news, as this website is a rising stars in the world of online real estate marketplaces. CyberHomes (which is the exclusive provider of real estate listings to AOL) offers detailed information and statistics on homes for sale, neighborhoods, and metro areas around the country as well as market trends. It also provides useful reference material for buyers and sellers of homes. Be sure to update and republish listings to take advantage of this new service benefit.

We recently completed an extensive review of all the widgets we offer and made a number of changes and fixes that improve the look and performance of the Flash version of those widgets. The Flash version (as opposed to the Javascript version, which we also generate for each widget) is the one most compatible with the largest number of websites. Changes we made include a streamlining of the contact information and photo and logos on Basic Gallery and Basic Flyer widgets; the removal of Price and Location labels when those fields have no values in them; a better display of summary information for each listing; improved alignment of the widget title and flyer titles on the vertical Recent Listings widget; and improvement of the scrolling function on the premium Sliding Gallery widget. Here are a few examples:

Widgets are an effective and (best of all) easy way to create more exposure of your listings because you can easily embed the HTML code for the widget in your website, blog, and/or social network profile.  These improvements we made should give vFlyer users all the more incentive to configure widgets and put them on those sites!

Many of you have probably noticed changes to your vFlyer account homepage since Thursday morning. We did an overhaul of the account homepage and made it into a dashboard where you can access the Craigslist HTML for any of your flyers, email and print any of your flyers, access the HTML for any widgets you’ve created, and more. You can think of your account homepage as a kind of “mission control” for your vFlyer account, which is how it should be! Now you no longer need to go through multiple steps to get the Craigslist HTML for a flyer, track the activity of a flyer, or do other flyer-related tasks - it’s all right in front of you when you log in to your account.

We hope this makes using vFlyer even easier. If you have feedback for us on the new dashboard, let us know.

If you’ve ever had your unsaved work on a flyer lost because your session expired while you were writing a long description, then you know how frustrating it can be. That’s why we recently introduced an autosave feature in the Flyer Editor and Photo Editor that automatically saves any work you’ve done on a flyer after 29 minutes of inactivity (or activity only in the description field). It’s still a good idea to click the Save Draft button every ten minutes or so in case you encounter a network problem or some other error, but the autosave feature provides added security against losing work you’ve done. 

Note: The autosave feature only applies to the Flyer Editor and Photo Editor.