February 27, 2008
As some of you know, when you create a flyer on vFlyer, the service automatically generates a Printable version of the flyer. This flyer is in PDF format. Thus, it is easy to print attractive copies for your Open Houses. We are pleased that thousands of members are using this feature. That said, the vFlyer Team is currently working on new layout options for printable flyers. We would love to talk with some of you that have time to share your thoughts on what is important in the design of Residential Real Estate Flyers.If you have time and interest to chat for 5 to 10 minutes, email us at print@vflyer.com with contact information or reply to this post. Thanks.
February 26, 2008
I have written about the flexibility of vFlyer many times! With our support for custom attributes and fields you can use vFlyer to pretty much sell anything! The other day I noticed a company using vFlyer to sell cargo containers of all things! Their vFlyers do a great job of promoting 20’ and 40’ cargo containers for Safe & Secured Storage! You can pick up a container for as little as $1,950 and have it shipped overnight by FedEx! I wonder what it costs to FedEx a forty foot cargo container these days?
As I mentioned in my round up of new partners, vFlyer now syndicates real estate listings to the very popular real estate site Zillow. Many of you know Zillow as the home real estate valuation service. The idea is simple, You type in the address of a property and find out its Zestimate, an approximation of a home’s market value!
Last year Zillow announced they are going to begin accepting listings from real estate professionals and essentially entered into the real estate classified ad marketplace business! The move made a lot of sense given that 50% of their 4 million monthly visitors are in the market to buy or sell a house. Their syndication service has been up and alive for several months and Zillow has done a great job of integrating agent and broker listings into their search results.
For vFlyer users, syndicating to Zillow is easy! I previously talked about how you can add Zillow and other new real estate partners to your list of available marketplaces. Simply create a flyer (or edit an existing one), add Zillow to the list of marketplaces you automatically want your listing syndicated to, click the publish or re-publish button and you are done! You have put in your full days work and you can go home and wait for the phone to ring!
Example:
Here is an example of what a vFlyer that has been syndicated to Zillow looks like:
February 24, 2008
vFlyer now automatically syndicates to partner Backpage.com. In the past, users could cut and page HTML templates directly into Backpage.com, but now, thanks to a new a partnership with Backpage.com, the process is automated!
Now flyers in the real estate, vehicles, services, general merchandise, and jobs listings can automatically be syndicated to Backpage.com.
Simply click the Enable Partner Sites link in Automatic Submissions section of Edit Flyer to enable Backpage syndication.
February 22, 2008
Michael Friedenberg of Frank Howard Allen Realtors uses the new premium flyer layout to market the Perfect Small Farm! I like Michael’s choice of layout and I like the “completeness” of his flyers including a great photo, large galleries, and a good company logo!
February 20, 2008
Most users have noticed by now that we have updated our home page to better reflect the growing range of business verticals that vFlyer serves! Our goals was to provide users in specific verticals such as real estate, automotive and recruiting or human resources understand how vFlyer meets their special and unique set of needs. In each market, prospective users can see how specific vFlyer services such as marketplace distribution, widgets, mobile access, image enhancing and PDF generation can help them better promote their products and services online. We hope you find our new cross-matrix approach intuitive and useful and we would love to hear your feedback!
February 19, 2008
This week’s Watermark Plus image of the week comes from John Baker of the Lithia Internet Sales Center. Like other Internet-savvy auto dealership marketers, John uses Watermark Plus to add sales information to images that could help take them off the lot! It’s no surprise that Watermark Plus is so popular with auto dealers! Image merchandising has been used by auto dealers in automotive classified advertising magazines such as AutoTrader, Trade Magazine, Dupont Registry and Zoom Photo Ads. Watermark Plus takes the process online and allows car dealers to merchandise photos for free in a few simple clicks and then use them in online classifieds!
February 15, 2008
This week’s vFlyer of the Week for a 2005 Honda Accord EX Sedan comes from the very web savvy vFlyer professional subscriber Sonny Baird at Anderson Honda direct. Sonny’s use of the new premium flyer layout really set’s all of his listings apart! Sonny’s elegant use of vFlyer also set’s him apart from other auto dealers when it comes to online marketing!
Some real estate agents have put Watermark Plus to particularly good use! By simply combining the photo of their property being listed with their own personal photo and an eye-catching message (Just Listed, Price Reduced, i.e.), they can make their property photos really stand out!
February 14, 2008
A growing number of subscribers are using the new premium flyer layout! There are a handful of examples of the new layout available as part of the vFlyer Starter, Basic, Premium and Professional subscriptions:
Compare these to the standard layout to see the difference!
If you are subscriber, simply preview your flyer and select Premium layout while in Preview mode:
This new premium layout applies only to the landing page for your flyer. The standard layout will continue to be used for Craigslist postings, Email, and Print/PDF.
You can upgrade today to take advantage of this new premium layout option!
February 13, 2008
Many of you asked for a better way to manage the contact requests that you receive from vFlyer. As I mentioned in my previous post on email and privacy, vFlyer gives you ability to receive contact requests as an alternative, or in addition, to direct email correspondence!
Some of you may have noticed that we now allow you to access contact requests from the Home page (once you have logged in). This feature is actually very important for accounts that are actively managed by more than one person! Since the new collaborative features of vFlyer give subscribers multi-user and multi-account support, more and more accounts now are being accessed by multiple user!
February 12, 2008
Some users prefer not to announce their email to the rest of the world! One of the benefits of using vFlyer has been the ability to ‘hide’ your email address on your flyers and use a contact reply form instead. Because we value our user’s privacy, we have always given users control of what information they want to include on flyers!
Contact Reply Form
We have always had a option that allows users to have prospective buyers use the contact reply form as an alternative to email. You can decide whether to include a Contact Reply Form or show your email address in the Contact Information section of Edit Flyer:
Anonymous Email and Partners
As I mentioned in some of my previous posts, a small number of vFlyer partners (Zillow for example) asks for your email address as part of your listing submission. Because our policy is to never give out a user’s email address (even to partners) without their expressed permission, users must give vFlyer explicit permission. As a added privacy measure users can decide to hide your email address by giving partners an anonymous email address or alias automatically generated by vFlyer for each of your flyers! You can select this option under Submission Settings in the Automatic Submission section of your flyer.
Tags: Email, Privacy
February 11, 2008
Yesterday, I mentioned we added Zillow, OLX and Geebo to our list of distribution partners. I forgot to mention that we are also syndicating Residential for Sale listings to Hotpads. Those familiar with Hotpads probably remember that last year the company launched For Sale listings, in addition to the Rental Listings they have traditionally been known for!
February 10, 2008
 |
The National Automotive Dealers Association (NADA) annual convention comes to San Francisco this week! The NADA was founded in 1917 and today represents more than 19,700 new car and truck dealers, both domestic and international, with more than 43,000 separate franchises!
With more and more auto dealers embracing vFlyer as part of their online marketing efforts, the vFlyer teams has been meeting with both existing and perspective customers and partners in San Francisco. Automobiles are the second largest product category on vFlyer as auto dealers are becoming more and more Internet savvy! The Internet marketing teams at auto dealers like Anderson Honda, CarSmith, Escobar Motors, Romi Motors, are great examples of this new Internet-savvy breed of auto dealers! Many dealers are using the flyers on Craigslist, Ebay, and other sites. In addition, they appreciate the automatic submission of their ads to other marketplaces such as Google base. |
In December/January we welcome our newest distribution partners! These include Zillow (Real Estate), OLX (All) and Geebo (All). Now your flyers can automatically be publish to these partner’s online marketplaces by simply selecting them in the Automatic Submissions section of your flyer!
Real estate users who wish to publish to Zillow will need to click Submission Settings and give vFlyer permission to provide your email address to this partner. At vFlyer we respect our user’s privacy and NEVER give out your email address to partner without your expressed permission. A small number of vFlyer partners ask for email address as part of their submission process, the Submission Settings page allows you decide which partner you want to share your email address with.
We cover some of our new partners in more detail in future posts. Also be on the watch out for more new syndication partners!
|
|
asperling @ 4:49 pm 
omuoto @ 3:18 pm 
