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.

DotHomes is a real estate search engine with European roots. It is the first consumer-facing product of BytePlay, a London-based search technology company. The site is unique in that it lets consumers quickly search for real estate across multiple countries including the United Kingdom, South Africa and most recently the United States. Although it may be new to some Americans, dotHomes has a huge following overseas. It has the largest database of estate agent listings in South Africa and the second largest in the United Kingdom. We applaud dotHomes on their move into the US market and are happy to have them as a distribution partner! vFlyer users can syndicate their real estate listings to dotHomes by simply selected them as destination marketplace in the Automatic Submissions section of their flyers.

Tags: Real+Estate, Realtors, dotHomes, vFlyer

Yesterday I mentioned that we recently added Yahoo! Real Estate to our line up of distribution/syndication partners! What I forgot to mention was we also recently added dotHomes, a new real estate search engine to that list! I will feature both partners in upcoming days/weeks for those unfamiliar with these two real estate marketplaces! We should also be announcing additional distribution partners in the weeks to come!

Tags: real+estate

vFlyer now syndicates your Residential For Sale and Rental Property listings to Yahoo! Classifieds (Yahoo! Real Estate).

Adding Yahoo! to your list of automatically syndicated marketplaces is easy! Simply click Enable Partner Sites (located in the Automatic Submission area of your vFlyer) to select Yahoo! and other new distribution partners such as Zillow, HotPads, and Backpage. Once you have added new partners they will continue to appear under Automatic Submission.

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:

• vFlyer: $129,900 3 Bdrm, Updated Cape Cod
• Zillow Listing: 506 W James St Columbus, WI 53925, Map View

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.

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

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!

Drew Meyers of Zillow was kind enough to invite me to do a podcast about vFlyer, the thinking behind the 62th edition of the carnival of real estate and corporate blogging in general, one of my favorite topics. You can listen to the by podcast by clicking the icon below.

Job Openings are one of the top five product category on vFlyer! Both employers and recruiters are using vFlyer to push job openings to vertical job search engines like SimplyHired, Indeed and Jobalot as well a horizontal players like Google Base, Vast, Oodle and Edgeio. vFlyer templates can also be used to post jobs on Craigslist!

vFlyer allows you to take advantage of trends such as increased direct employer posting, the growth in the number of vertical job search engines, and candidates increased reliance on the Internet as part of their job search. Because vFlyer automatically exposes your job openings to the leading free classified ad marketplaces, we save you time and energy and increase the size of your pool of potential candidates. Here are some job opening examples in various market segments:

Other Job Trends:
Recent reports state that over 50% of recruiters surveyed said that they either currently use or intended in the future to use online social networking as a method of recruiting candidates that’s why it’s a good idea for recruiters (and employers) to post their vFlyers (or links to the vFlyers or gallery) on social networks like MySpace, ActiveRain, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.

Finding great people becomes even more important in industries such as real estate that are going through challenging periods. Recruiter Mya Borgman of The People Link makes a great point when she says:

A growing number of brokers and lenders are using vFlyer not only for listing property and promoting services but also to announce job openings.

Technorati Tags: Jobs, vFlyer

We have talked about how to use vFlyer on social networking sites like MySpace in the past and a growing number of vFlyer users are posting flyers on both social and business networking sites like MySpace and ActiveRain! This trend is true for sales professionals such as Realtors. According to recent marketing report by Inman, 31% of agents are getting involved with social networking websites. The folks at Sonoma County Real Estate and Investments definitely understand the power of social media marketing are one of many active vFlyer posters on MySpace and this week’s flyer comes from their blog.

Related Posts:

• Marketing on MySpace with vFlyer
• Grammy-Nominee Stacie Orrico using vFlyer?!

Technorati Tags: MySpace, vFlyerbebofacebook friendstertagworldtagworldrealestatereal estateutubeactiverain

Last Monday (July 30) at Lulu’s Restaurant in San Francisco, CA, on the eve of the Real Estate Connect show, a small group of us had another informal Real Estate 2.0 Dinner. We had the first of these dinners in February of this year, and I thought it would be a good idea to hold another dinner with folks in town for conference.

In attendance were Jared Morgenstern, one of the folks responsible for Facebook’s marketplace, Keith Teare – the co-founder and CEO of Edgeio, Joel Burslem – who is responsible for social media marketing at Inman News and brains behind the Future of Real Estate Marketing, Michael Yang – the General Manager of Yahoo! Real Estate and Erik Hersman – VP of Marketing at eppraisal.com and editor of one of my favorite blogs Realty Thoughts and of course myself! We all had a great time (thanks Erik for the photo) and it was good catching up with folks and making some new contacts. Special thanks go to Keith Teare who decided to pick up our entire tab! I have known Keith since 1997 and have always appreciated his vision and generosity – Kudos to Edgeio!

Technorati Tags: ConnectSF, vFlyerEdgeioFacebookYahooRealEstate

A couple of minutes ago, registration on our site really picked up! What generally is a slow day (Friday) suddenly was looking like the best day of the week! Aaron, my co-founder, called me to try and figure out why. We were both at Blog Connect this week but were back in the office and on the road getting ready for the release of Domain Plus, our domain hosting and single property site services coming out next week!

After a little bit of searching we found out that Inman News has just selected us as the Most Innovative Web Service of the year, along with a host of other great companies! We would like to thank the folks at Inman News for this distinction and for recognizing our efforts to provide a cost-effective, innovative and robust world-class marketing and distribution platform for real estate professionals and online sellers! We also thank our many users for their support! Inman News writes:

The complete list of winners included:

• Innovator of the Year: The craigslist community
• Most Innovative Brokerage or Franchise: Coldwell Banker
• Most Innovative Blog: Mortgage Fraud Blog
• Most Innovative Web Service: vFlyer
• Most Innovative Technology: AltosCharts widget
• Most Innovative Media Site: ActiveRain

We would like to congratulate the other winners, especially ActiveRain, which is one of the greatest real estates communities around, our friends at Altos Research and my old friend Craig Newmark at Craigslist. We would also recognize the other nominees we know, who in their own right are very deserving companies – 3 Oceans Real Estate, Real Estate Tomato, Transparent Real Estate, Trulia and Zillow to name a few!

Technorati Tag: ConnectSF

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…

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?