This week’s vFlyer of Week comes from Craigslist! The folks at the Villages has a great idea when they create and posted their vFlyer on Craigslist – include a Internet Special Coupon! Using incentives for renting apartments is a great idea. According to industry experts, a growing number of rental properties are using Internet coupons as an inducement, another great idea that can be tied into your flyer!

Earlier this week, I talked about the email delivery options available to vFlyer users. Some of you have probably noticed the Send SMS link right next to the Send Email link.

This link allows you to text message a mobile link to your flyer, a link to your gallery or the summary and address of a flyer via SMS (Short Message Service). Text messaging is a feature that is currently available on most mobile phones and in fact, seventy six percent (76%) of those who own a cellphone say they have utilized texting.

Sending a mobile link to flyer is extremely easy. As long as you are a subscriber (vFlyer Starter or above), you should be able too click on Send SMS to enter the text messaging screen. Simply enter the mobile phone number of the recipient, a short message as well as your name and number and then select what to include in the message. You can also send an text message (or an email) from a mobile device even if you are away from a computer! vFlyer Mobile – the mobile version of flyer (http://www.vflyer.com/mobile), allows you to send links to your flyer via SMS (See example) directly from an Internet-enabled phone!

So when does sending a text message make sense? There are a couple of scenarios that come to mind in which text messaging your flyer makes sense:

• If a prospective customer is on their way to a property, listing or an open house and would like to receive more information (such as directions or address)
• Sending yourself a link to one of your own listings allows you the have the information at your finger tips
• Giving tech-savvy customers the option of receiving information via text messaging (SMS) and also demonstrates your tech-savvy

The value of a service like vFlyer is pretty obvious to most seller (or listing) agents, but it is not always obvious to buyer’s agents how they can use the service to promote their business. I recently got an email from Jim Litter who asks, “Do you have examples of how buyer’s agents can use your product?” After spending time talking with buyer’s agents that currently use our service as well as doing some informal research using Linkedin Answers, Trulia Voices and Activerain’s Q&A, I was able to compile some useful marketing resources on how buyer’s agents can promote themselves in general as well as through a service such as ours.

The 2006 NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers sheds some interesting light on how the Realtor® selection process works. According to the report, referrals where the #1 source of leads for Realtors®! In fact:

• 44 percent of buyers were referred by a friend, neighbor or relative
• 11 percent used an agent from a previous transaction
• 7 percent found an agent on the Internet
• 7 percent met at an open house
• 6 percent saw contact information on a “for sale” sign

Based on this information, most of which was supported by the input I got directly from agents responding to my questions, the following are some marketing “best practices” for buyer’s agents.

• Keep a List of Database of Previous Clients. Keep your database up to date and communicate with your contacts on a regular basis. Make sure you are “top of mind” when it comes to Realtors® to ensure a steady flow of referrals. You can do this by regularly sending them flyers, newsletters and other communication and encouraging them to forward your flyers on to their friends, or simply calling them to check in.
• Market yourself on the Internet. This serves two purposes, one is to get new clients. The other, however, is to simply demonstrate your Internet-savvy! A 2004 study by the NAR indicated that 75 percent of consumers expect their agent to be Internet-savvy! Good online marketing and an online presence are great ways to demonstrate your savvy-ness to prospects. Send them to your website. Make sure to have links to other Internet marketing activity you may be involved in such as your vFlyer Gallery, your blogs or social networking profiles. Also consider online advertising!
• Host an Open House. Depending on your firm’s policies, it is fairly common practice for a buyer’s agent to host an open house. Some processes are more formal than others. In some firms, a listing agents with more than one open house or who simply doesn’t want to work on a weekend will send out an email looking for volunteers. Technically, the agent hosting the open house is really not a “buyer’s agent” until they snag a buyer, but that’s the whole point of the exercise!

The next question is how vFlyer can help buyer’s agent accomplish some of these marketing objectives? Here are some suggestions on how you can maximize our service to put the aforementioned marketing recommendation to best practice:

1. Create a Flyer Promoting Yourself as a Buyer’s Agent and Publish It
   Be sure to include information about yourself, your photo, your contact info and company info. When you publish it, your vFlyer is automatically distributed, but you an also cut and paste the HTML on Craigslist (which as a Real Estate Services section), your blog (Activerain, i.e.) or a social networking site. Here are some examples from one of my previous posts. More..
2. Email your Flyer to Your Contact Database
   You can email your flyer, a PDF version of your flyer, or a link to your flyer to your database of contacts (lenders, family, associations, i.e.), prospects and past clients. Ask them to forward it on to anyone they know who may be in the market for a home. Remember that 44% of leads come from referrals! More…
3. Mail out your Flyer to Your Contact Database
   Not everyone has an email address, but even if they do, many people are hesitant about giving it out. You probably have a list of contacts whose mailing addresses you have. I did an informative post in the past about generating PDF versions of your flyer, printing them, and mailing them out! Include more than one copy so recipients can pass them on. Consider using a customized stamp to add a personal touch and get a better response rate! More..
4. Post your Flyer on Local Bulletin Boards
   There are usually a number of local bulletin boards that allow small local businesses (aka Realtors) to promote their services. Some national coffee and restaurant chains (Starbucks, Le Boulanger, i.e.) are usually very good about allowing flyers. I suggest asking the manager for permission first but personally I have never been turned down! Local gyms, grocery stores and public centers may also have bulletin boards that can be used by the public or members for this purpose. Avoid posting flyers on public or private property without permission as this is sure to get you in trouble.
5. Take copies of your Flyer to An Open House
   Try and host a Open House for a list agent. Different firms and listing agents have different policies but as I mentioned above, figure out how the system works, network aggressively and host as many open houses as you can! When hosting an open house, consider bringing flyers with your contact information with you. Take the initiative and be creative – Mario Pindeo (Intero Real Estate Services) writes “I always make up flyers with my name on it, and put up my personalized open house signs!”
6. Always Follow Up on Your Leads
   This sounds like a no brainer but you would be surprised how many consumers complain that agents simply do not get back to them! One frustrated consumer on Trulia Voices wrote “ANSWER YOUR EMAILS! You may win a customer!” Obviously, Realtors are almost always busy but buyer’s agents must develop a discipline for following up on all their leads. Consider getting a mobile phone that allows you to check email remotely when you are way from your computer. Include alternative means of contacting you such as a phone number on your flyers – perhaps even a click-to-call service. vFlyer routes all your contact requests to your existing email address so you don’t have to look in more than one place for them. More…

Hopefully you will find some of these best practices helpful! Please feel free to share additional tips both general and even specific to our service on how buyer’s agents can more effectively market themselves and their services.

Email has always been a great way for users to promote their vFlyers. If you click on a flyer you will notice a Email and SMS tab that allows you to distribute flyers via email or text messaging (SMS). The Email tab allows you to import contacts from such popular email services as AOL, MSN Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook and Outlook Express. You can also enter email addresses manually or cut and paste from another application such as Constant Contact, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.

When emailing flyers, you have a number of options. You can include the flyer itself (HTML), a PDF version of the flyer, a link to the flyer or a mobile link to the flyer. If you want to preview what an email is going to look like, simply send yourself a copy!

We often get asked what are the differences for subscribers and non-subscribers when it comes to email delivery. Non-subscribers (vFlyer Personal) can only send a maximum of 10 emails at a time, while subscribers can send as many as 100 emails per mailing. Also email sent from a non-subscribers account have a vFlyer branded banner at the top, while those from subscriber accounts do not.

This week’s vFlyer of the Week comes from eBay Motors! Traci Manders of Indianola, Iowa, is auctioning her 1999 Jeep Wrangler on eBay! Yesterday, I think it was bid up to $3,900 and today its up to $5,100 after 8 bidders have placed 20 bids! There are 3 more days left so you can expect it to get bid up significantly right before the auction closes! Kudos to Traci for her use of vFlyer on eBay Motors!

As we have written before, eBay has great support for vFlyer HTML templates! You can use flyers for placing classified ads or auctions on the site and you can find users using vFlyers to sell computers, clothing, electronics, cars, real estate, and even land on eBay, eBay Motors, eBay Real Estate and eBay Shops!

Previous eBay Related Posts:

• Selling Homes on eBay - Part II
• Selling Homes using eBay
• Widgets on eBay
• How to Post on eBay
• more…

Thanks to both organizations for the great coverage!

With the 2008 elections looming, grassroots events and political activity is on the rise! Supporters of both Republian and Democratic candidates are taking to the Internet to create awareness and mobilize their base. Events are another product category supported by vFlyer and we are seeing new and creative ways people are using events to promote political candidates! Last week Aaron mentioned some of the political association logos we recently added to vFlyer. Our goal was to empower political groups and organizations to promote local political events, fundraisers and other activities (Meetups, i.e.)!

Here is an example of a political event flyer for a local event in Silicon Valley for democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama.

So if you are involved in grassroots campaigning for any of the Democratic, Republican or Independent candidates, consider using vFlyer to promote your event – after all we’re an entirely nonpartisan platform!

A recent trend we have started to notice is real estate professionals using vFlyer to create essentially single property flyers! 10894olinda.vflyer.com 1324se187thave.vflyer.com 14526villagewaydrive.vflyer.com sanramon78lonepinecourt.vflyer.com Another great and inexpensive way to put vFlyer to work for your property! The has been a lot of talk in the past about single property sites. Personally we are big believers in the concept and would love to get your input on how many people currently use or are considering using single property sites and flyers. Joel Burslem’s recently wrote a great post titled Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes? that examines some of the potential benefits of the approach. Stay tuned for more on the subject!

Added 8/23/2007:
Single Property Sites - Dispelling the Myths and Embracing the Benefits!

A growing number of vFlyer users are using their Watermark Plus images in their flyers to achieve great results! We designed Watermark Plus to work well both as a stand-alone service for enhancing and merchandising images as well as in combination with flyers as part of our vFlyer platform!

As a result we made it very simple to combine the two. To add Watermark Plus images to a new or existing flyer, go to the Photographs section. Next, add a main or gallery photo. Then select Image Gallery as the source and pick an enhanced image from the drop down list.

Here are a couple more examples of how users are combining the two unique services together:

• New 4 br/2.5 bath Country Estate in the Sierra Foothills!
• WANT THIS HOME? USE ME AND YOU WILL PROBABLY GET IT
• 1-Unit of Duplex available in the lovely Laurel District
• GOLDEN OAKS CONDO WITH A PEAK OF THE OCEAN
• 1290 Chuckwagon Drive, Sacramento Ca. 95834
• 2003 Mitsubishi Lancer ES Sedan 4D

Recently I talked about online real estate search marketing trends. One of the question that comes up when talking about search marketing is the actual Cost per Click (CPC) – the price the advertiser pays when a user clicks on their keyword ad! A couple of weeks ago I played around with the Google Traffic Estimator to get a sense of what good real estate keywords cost and to get a sense of what people were searching for and what advertisers were bidding on. We regularly testing search-based PPC (pay-per-click) advertising both internally and on behalf of large clients and routinely run these types of tests. After entering a set of obvious (and generic) real estate search terms, the Google Traffic Estimator was able to tell me the following:

The most expensive estimated average CPC was in the $2.60 to $3.25 per click range for the keywords “real estate agent”. Pricey – perhaps, but the choice of keywords makes sense given 18% of consumers find their real estate agent online!

REDUCING THE COST OF SEARCH MARKETING
Obviously the trick is to figure out how to get the most clicks for the lowest CPC. So justing the estimator I decided to try a couple of different strategies to see if I could reduce cost and maximize traffic.

Location Based Targeting
Google Adwords allows you to target location by country, state, zip code and even address! You can specify an address and select the number of miles around your point of interest you would like to target your ads! If you are a Realtor you probably focus on a specific region so this makes a lot of sense. I narrowed down my search to try and reduce the price by targeting just a 60 mile radius from the center of Huntsville, AL (where my wife is from). The cost, however, remained pretty much the same and estimated traffic was extremely low. It estimated 0 – 1 hits (very low) at $2.26 - $3.06.

Refining your Keywords
Next I tried another strategy. I decided to refine my list of keywords, so instead of “Real Estate Agent”, I tried “Real Estate Agent Huntsville”. The logic is simple. Most people are looking for a Realtor SOMEWHERE – that SOMEWHERE is usually the city or zipcode they are located in or want to move to! This technique proved a little more successful. It estimated 13 - 16 hits (good) at

$1.89 - $2.58 (much cheaper).

More Keyword Combinations
I went on to try more keyword combinations to come up with the following estimates:

Based on these numbers, it looks like it is possible with some experimentation to limit your Cost Per Click to less than $1.50, which seems like a pretty reasonable target.

CONCLUSIONS
My exploration of search marketing has gotten a great response so far. We have had dozens and dozens of comments from folks using and not using Google Adwords and other keyword marketing solutions! Based on finds so far, I think its safe to come to the following conclusions:

• A majority of respondents are investing in organic vs. paid sources of traffic generation
• Search Marketing in real estate seems to work. In addition to generally available statistics on the number of Realtors using search marketing as well as empirical (non-scientific) evidence based on my conversations with real estate professionals
• There is a learning curve associated with search marketing. More needs to be done to educate Realtors about the process, the tools (landing pages), the techniques (monitoring, tracking) and the return on investment (ROI) analysis
• There are a number of great tools that can help estimate cost (Google Traffic Estimator), suggest keywords, creating landing pages (vFlyer), monitor results and more

The next couple of search marketing posts will examine the following topics so be on the lookout (you can receive these by email if you subscribe to the feed):

• The great debate surrounding organic vs. paid
• A how-to primer on getting started with search marketing
• Great tools you can use to maximize Google Adwords

Related Posts

• Using vFlyer with Google Adwords
• Online Real Estate Advertising - Are You Doing Any?

Since we launched vFlyer in October of last year, users have been using vFlyer to create landing pages for their Google Adword campaigns.

In online marketing speak (see Wikipedia), a landing page is a specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking a link on a keyword search ad (on Google, Yahoo, Live or another search engine). The landing page showcases product or service content that the ad is trying to promote. A landing page can be any page – it can be a page on your website, a flyer or your gallery!

Here are a couple of reasons you may want to consider using vFlyer to build your landing pages:

• A vFlyer is really a stand-alone micro website complete with a contact reply form, forwarding and tracking capability – everything you need to convert, capture and track leads! If you were to build your own landing page on your own website you would need to add a tracking system, lead response form and good looking HTML templates – vFlyer comes with all of these!
• vFlyers are easy and inexpensive to create! Online sellers want to save time and money! You can sign up and use vFlyer Personal for FREE! You can create and publish your first flyer in a couple of minutes and voila! – you have a landing page, with its own unique URL! You don’t need to learn HTML or FTP files to your website to launch a landing page!
• vFlyer is packed with landing page enhancing features. You probably didn’t know, but vFlyer gives you the ability to create more effective landing pages by allowing you to incorporate many of the recommendations, tips and tricks and other suggestions from online marketing experts (things like a unique URLs, the ability highlight important messages, checking spelling, minimizing navigation i.e.). I will cover these in more detail in a future post.
• Reuse your vFlyer! You already have a vFlyer so reuse it! The goal of vFlyer was to create something once that online sellers could use multiple times in many different ways – saving them the effort of recreating or reposting information about their product or service.
• vFlyer is a complete and flexible solution! vFlyer’s editor makes it easy to enter and generate error-free and well organized product or service information. vFlyer’s templates make your landing page attractive and customizable. vFlyer’s contract reply form captures the buyer’s information. vFlyer’s reporting tells you now much traffic you received, from where, and how many people responded. The ability to clone and modifying flyers makes it easy to test landing pages (send 50% of the traffic to one flyer and 50% of the traffic to another flyer and see which ones does best).
• Most categories are covered! With over 40 plus categories, vFlyer has a template for promoting and selling most products (real estate, auto, electronic, furniture, pets, i.e.), and services (general, commercial, computer, therapeutic, i.e.).

I will cover the landing page building aspects of vFlyer in more detail in future posts but here are some related previous posts:

• Online Real Estate Advertising - Are You Doing Any?

vFlyer allows you to include not only your company logo and photo but also you member association logo as well. A member association logo tells potential buyers what professional organizations or groups you are associated with and gives a little “professional color” to your flyer. Here are a couple of examples of what these look like on your published flyer:

We recently expanded this list to include political parties (Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians) as well. Selecting your membership logo is simple. Simple go to the Account tab, click on Photos and Logos and then select one!

Check it out. You can let people know about your membership in one of the following groups or organizations:

• American Massage Therapy Association
• National Automobile Dealers Association
• National Associations of Realtors
• Society for Human Resource Management
• National Independent Automobile Dealers Association
• Democratic Party
• Republican Party
• Libertarian Party

If your group or organization is missing from the list, let us know, and well try and add it. Just send us an email to: blog@vflyer.com

There are many ways to use flyers to promote your business and your listing! In addition to the obvious (listing homes, real estate and cars for sale, i.e.), you can also also use flyers to simply promote yourself or your business (category: services » general services), and business events or open houses (category: events » event). This week’s vFlyers of the Week are great examples real estate professionals promoting THEMSELVES online. After all, 18% of consumers found their agent online and 75% of consumers expect their agent to be Internet savvy. vFlyer is a great way to show your Internet Savvy!

Thanks to David J. White of South Bay Broker and Jim & Kathie Overman of RE Realty Experts for showing us the way!

Since the launch of Watermark Plus, the quality and number of images enhanced and merchandised by the service has been on the rise! This week’s images are a great example of the quality photos users are uploading and enhancing! If you haven’t tried Watermark Plus, try it today. You don’t even have to register to use it.

According to the Borrell Associates, online real estate ad spending is expected to grow from $2 billion in 2006 to $3 billion by 2010, rising from a 17.7% share of all real estate ad spending to 32.1%. The report puts this in context by saying:

The research firm found that while 77% of real estate buyers use the Internet for home searches, just 15% of the 535 agents surveyed place ad dollars there! Believe it or not, however, real estate agents still lead the local search advertising pack! Search ads for individual local agents have jumped from 17.5% of local search ads in 2004, to 23.9% in 2005, to 49.6% of listings on keyword searches across 10 different cities!

According to figures from Google, 41% of real estate agents use search marketing now – a number a seems very high, and and additional 33% will begin using search marketing in the next 12 months. Google even has a set of research resources and a tips page aimed at realtors.

Recently I decided to put local keyword search to the test and did searches on keywords like “Real Estate Agent Menlo Park” and “Real Estate Agent San Diego”. I clicked on various ads (please forgive me) and actually called up a number of agents! Here are some of my findings:

• Ad results usually considered of local realtors, national real estate sites (justlisted.com, californiamoves.com), and individual properties. It was usually obvious from the title and URL which was which
• Almost all the local realtors I spoke to said that advertising on Google search advertising was working very well for them
• Interestingly (but not surprisingly), quite a view agents were using Google adwords to promote individual properties (See example below)
• Google gave preference to local ads in cases it couldn’t find ads that matched my specific keywords

EXAMPLES:

In spite of the great research numbers and what look like positive results, a lot of the realtors we know don’t fully understand or haven’t seriously looked at search marketing. This week and in the weeks to come, we’ll take a closer look at search marketing (and Google Adwords in particular) and hopefully shed some light on how online sellers like you can use it to grow your business – or at least better understand it.

We would love to hear from those who have tried search marketing and get your opinions! Let us know if you are part of the 41% of real estate agents using search marketing and if so, how search marketing is working for you!