What I really like about Seattle Consultant’s website is the use of lots of different module types. Jaime pulls in photo slideshows, service and article lists, vMarketing listings, floor plans, and more to populate his site with different kinds of content. While no website is ever complete (as any good webmaster knows), the Seattle Consultant site feels sufficiently full of information, as though I could go there and find everything that I came for.

Jaime also structured his site well. Take the homepage for instance: it includes an “About Us” section with a slideshow, another slideshow that displays properties the firm has successfully marketed, a map of their location, and testimonials from their clients. It’s a lot of content, but the page is so thoughtfully laid out that it doesn’t feel cluttered or overwhelming in the least.

Excellent work, Jaime and the Seattle Consultant team!

Real estate agents and brokers looking for a new website solution can give their web presence a boost by switching to vSites. vFlyer’s new website service is easy to use and, more importantly, makes it easy to update a website on an ongoing basis. Contact us at sales [at] vflyer dot com or (800) 594-5930 ext. 2 if you want to learn more about how vSites could help your business.

Treetop Sales is a manufactured homes dealer hailing from Kissimmee, Florida. Naturally, the website focuses on the homes available for sale today. Whereas last week’s featured site employed an inline frame to reference a listing inventory hosted elsewhere, Anthony, who already has all of his homes on vMarketing, made good use of the Listings Module in his website. The Listings Module automatically draws flyers from your vMarketing account and seamlessly displays them on your website. Click the thumbnail image for a property that appeals to you, and a detail page appears—complete with Flash slide show, contact form, and all the listing details.

One of the reasons we love this site is that Anthony has put lots of effort into each of his vMarketing listings—especially when it comes to the listing photos. The result is a website with a ton of rich, high-quality content, much of it imported from the corresponding vMarketing account.

Rounding out the site are a concise About Us page, a Services page highlighting the buyer and seller services Treetop offers, and a Contact page with an embedded Google Map. In the left-hand column, and displaying on all site pages, are a nice pair of client testimonials and Treetop’s hours of operation. The header and footer, also appearing on each page, hold key facts like company name, slogan, address, and phone number. In case you were wondering, this site uses the “Winsett – Beachfront” theme.

All in all, it’s a squeaky-clean, elegant site that shows off the power and simplicity of the vSites platform as well as the listings and services of a fantastic small business.

There a few features of vSites that Steve has put to good use in his website.  First of all, he’s chosen the “Broadmore – Lounge” vTheme, a real-estate theme with smooth menu styling and a bold splash image.  Steve then used the vSites Theme Editor to change the color scheme to a sharp light blue, and set the header font color to white.

On the homepage, the “column divider” module is used to create four columns side-by-side.  In each of these columns, picture modules have been inserted advertising the four main sections of Steve’s site – listings, seller info, mortgage calculator, and contact info.  These picture modules are all linked to the appropriate pages of the site.

On the “Listings” page, Steve has used iframes to embed his property inventory.  Since his inventory is already entered and managed elsewhere, the iframe is a quick and easy way to incorporate these existing webpages into the vSite.  It’s like a page within a page.

Finally, Steve makes good use of drop-down menus.  The “Listings” menu item, for example, has five different categories that pop up below.  Sub menus like this are easy to create—just customize your menu module and indent one menu item beneath another to create a sub menu.

All in all, it’s a snappy website that has a lot of content but doesn’t lose its clean, professional look.  Well done, Steve!

The background image looks like the type of pattern you might find on the walls of grandma’s house, but the fresh colors lend a modern feel to the whole affair.  And as with any good advertisement, this flyer is chock-full of professional photographs showing off the property in its best light.

Speaking of the listing photos, can anybody spot the famous movie character voiced by Tom Hanks in this flyer?  He appears in three of the images, and he’s wearing a hat.  View the full flyer, and all of its photos, here: http://ryanhanson.vflyer.com/home/flyer/home/47284001

Thanks to eGreen Realty for a top-notch custom theme!

I was accepted into the summer program in early April, and soon found a few minutes to throw together a “Sublets & Temporary” rental flyer. I entered my address, wrote a brief description, and laid out the pricing. I didn’t have any photos available, but I published it anyway, planning to add pictures later.

As a “sublets and temporary” flyer, the ad was syndicated automatically to Oodle, Vast, HotPads, Trulia, eBay Classifieds, and OLX. Now as fantastic as these partner sites are, the main reason I created the vFlyer listing was for an attractive Craigslist post.  Considering the incredible volume of traffic that Craigslist gets, I imagined I would get most of my leads from there

A few days later, however, before I’d had a chance to upload photos or post the flyer to Craigslist, I received the first of these leads. A teacher from Valencia was headed to San Francisco for the summer. The dates didn’t match up perfectly, but he was very interested in the room.

As we corresponded—and I tried to ascertain if this was the right person to fill my room—more leads came trickling in, mostly from HotPads, but some from eBay Classifieds, Trulia, and Backpage.com as well. In all, my flyer’s landing page was visited by 130 different people in the first 26 days after it was published. Out of those views, seven different people emailed me for more information.

Page visits by source for my flyer

In the end, I reached an agreement with the gentleman from Spain, and I unpublished the flyer from our partner sites. I think I’ve found the perfect person to take my room, and I spent all of five minutes advertising the apartment. Now that’s web marketing made easy.

When it comes to capturing leads, two contacts are better than one. Nobody likes getting sent to voicemail; now, with two phone numbers, email addresses and faces on each flyer, prospects are twice as likely to reach a live person. Co-listing agents, we heard you! You can now feature both agents equally across your vFlyer account. In addition to name and number, include your email address, profile photo, and member association logo—all the details you need to share with potential clients.

And now, the all-new social media toolbar. In today’s industry, social media has become fundamental to successful online marketing. At vFlyer we’re committed to empowering users in this new space, and the social media toolbar does just that. Are you active on popular online networks like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube? Show off your social media savvy with recognizable icons linking directly to your various profiles, and automatically displayed across your vFlyer account. Drive traffic to your blog, convert prospects into fans, and let your clients and prospects get to know you a little better.

For more information and instructions on both new features, please take a look at our help center.

This is just the first of a series of enhancements coming to the vFlyer service in 2011, and we hope you’ll find the new features useful. Thanks to all of our fantastic users who continue to come up with great ways to improve our service—please keep the feedback coming!

Through a phone-call with a member of our design team, Matt laid out some content he wanted included in the theme – his brokerage logo, his contact info, and his slogan: “Go ahead, I’m listening… More than buying and selling homes.”. For colors, Matt referenced his brokerage website that sports the blue and black of Coldwell Banker.

Our design team took it from there – developing a logo-like display of Matt’s name, breaking the slogan into two overlapping speech bubbles, and carrying through the blues from Matt’s website. The theme was rounded out with a simple black, white, and gray scheme. The result, I think, is quite pleasing – and a testament to the power of creativity and collaboration. Matt’s flyers now have a unique, professional look, and a brand that truly reflects his business.

If you’re looking to brand your business better, our design team can help. Many thanks to Matt for the great theme, and until next week, happy theming!

He and Bob Stewart discuss Jay’s award-winning blog-turned-brokerage.  Below are some of my favorite quotes (I paraphrase):

“Real Estate is a personal business – people pick agents because they like them.  Use your blog to let people know who you are, learn about you, and decide whether or not they like you.”

“You’ve got to have a really good home search on your blog.  If you don’t have it, you’re missing out.”

Asked why he thinks Inman picked him as one of the 100 most influential leaders of the real estate community:

“It all boils down to internet presence- I am all over the internet – it’s hard to miss me online.  Inman recognizes that.”

“I don’t often say completely stupid things.”

“Real estate is emotional.  Selling a home or buying a home is one of the most emotional things people will ever do.”

Advice for bloggers:

“Blogging and social media is hard work – it’s not some magic pill that will make you successful – it’s a (lot) of work.  The most important thing is being consistent, and it takes time.  Start your blog today, don’t expect your phone to ring tomorrow.”

“Write something every 2-3 days for 6 months to a year before you can expect results.”

“You don’t have to blog your brains out every day at the computer.  Block out some time – take 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon, write a couple of posts, and schedule them to post (automatically) – maybe on Tuesday and Thursday.”

“In today’s market, you should be prospecting 2 hours a day.  I spend those 2 hours on my blog.  Apply yourself consistently, and understand it’s going to take time and work.”

“If you hate doing something, bottom line is you won’t be doing it, so find something you like and do that.” (This applies to your blog – people respond when they sense you care about what you’re writing)

“Write how you speak – imagine yourself talking to a client, and write out that conversation.”

“The more you do it, the better you get, the easier it gets.”

Jay surveyed his readers last year, and he was blown away to find:

“readers liked most the posts that had nothing to do with real estate.”

And finally:

“Colt McCoy is a freakin’ winner – that kid has been a winner since he played peewee football.” (Jay is a from Austin, and a fan of the Texas Longhorns)

Active Rain has weekly computer-side chats like these.  You can listen to the entire conversation here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/activebob/2011/01/07/rain-radio-computerside-chat-with-phoenix-real-estate-guy-jay-thompson

One way to quickly gain broad exposure is through syndication, or the automatic distribution of a listing to multiple websites.  vFlyer is one of a number of online services that automatically submits listings to online marketplaces and classifieds sites.  In this post, we’ll break down the various sites to which we syndicate and give you an idea of the exposure our platform can yield.

vFlyer partner site traffic in millions of viewers each month:*

1. Google Maps 35.8
2. Indeed 12.6
3. Yahoo! Real Estate 6.4
4. Zillow 5.1
5. Trulia 4.1
6. Simply Hired 4.0
7. Oodle 3.9
8. eBay Classifieds 3.7
9. Backpage 2.8
10. AOL Real Estate 1.4
11. FrontDoor 1.4
12. OLX 1.2
13. Vast 0.9
14. HotPads 0.9
15. Geebo 0.25
16. Cyberhomes 0.12
17. Jobalot 0.11

*Traffic data from Compete.com. Compete compiles data from a panel of over 2 million consumers – read about their methodology here.

You might be asking yourself, why are vFlyer listings showing up on Google Maps? About a year ago, real estate and rental listings submitted to Google Base were integrated into Google Maps as part of the retiring of Google Base’s search interface.  So while vFlyer continues to send a data feed to Google Base, housing listings now appear on Google Maps. There’s even a separate real estate search option in Maps that allows you to find real estate and rentals in a particular area.

Second on the list with a whopping 12 million unique views per month is the job site Indeed, a job “aggregator” site that, unlike some large job boards (e.g., Monster.com), has recently enjoyed tremendous growth.  An emphasis on search engine optimization has allowed Indeed to capture a huge amount of traffic straight from Google, and for vFlyer users looking to hire, this is good news… indeed.

Getting back to real estate, let’s have a look at the top five real estate-specific sites on the list.  Yahoo! Real Estate comes in first with 6.4 million viewers, Zillow is second with 5.1 million, Trulia third with 4.1 million, AOL Real Estate fourth with 1.4 million, and FrontDoor fifth with 1.4 million.

With the exception of AOL Real Estate, all of these sites show overall growth in the year 2010, with Trulia up 1.17 million unique views per month, and Yahoo! Real Estate up 1.16 million compared to this month last year.  These are companies that, despite a poor housing market, have continued to gain traffic by improving their portals and enabling online consumers with more information.  With Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow recently teaming up, Yahoo! Real Estate has gotten a nice boost in listings, and Zillow has become an absolute must for syndication.  Combined, traffic on these two sites challenges Realtor.com, the longtime leader in the space.

Let’s now take a look at some of the broader online marketplaces and classifieds sites to which vFlyer syndicates: Oodle, with 3.9 million unique views per month, eBay Classifieds (3.7 million), Backpage (2.8 million), OLX (1.2 million), and Vast (0.9 million).

Check out eBay Classifieds (shown in red), with a stratospheric jump of over 3.6 million monthly visits in the past year.  As many vFlyer users will recall, this site used to be known as Kijiji.  While the name remains in Canada, Kijiji USA was rebranded as eBay Classifieds at the end of March.  This seems to have been an effective move by eBay (note the difference between March and April), and with a parent site (eBay.com) ranked #22 worldwide by Alexa, there’s reason to believe eBay Classifieds will continue to grow in the near future.

To put this all in perspective, let’s look at Craigslist.  With nearly 60 million visitors last month, Craigslist is the undisputed king of classifieds sites.  This should come as no surprise to most of you, but the magnitude of difference between traffic on a top real estate site like Trulia and Craigslist is quite staggering.  Just for fun, let’s throw in Facebook and Twitter as well.

These are three of the top 10 sites in the US (according to Alexa): Facebook at #1, Twitter at #9, and Craigslist at #10. To answer the question I posed earlier, these are now the most important places to establish oneself online.  But let’s not discount the other classifieds sites we reviewed.  Diligent Craigslist posting and staying on top of the social media game take a big chunk out of one’s marketing resources (read: time).  Syndication is the proverbial low-hanging fruit of online marketing.  While these sites alone may not generate the number of leads you might get from posting regularly to Craigslist, they still account for a huge amount of online traffic; having your listings syndicated to them by vFlyer allows you to “pluck the fruit”, and leaves you time to focus on building your audience through Facebook, Twitter, and your blog.

I’ll finish with another question: what role does listing syndication play in your online marketing?  And are there any other classifieds sites that you’d like vFlyer to syndicate to?  (Sorry, Craigslist is not an option.)

Having great-looking web content and appealing, recognizable branding is essential for establishing a strong web presence and driving leads these days. Bringing on an experienced designer like Cherie to design and create a website for you, in addition to a vFlyer custom theme to match, is a great way to accomplish this. If you’re interested, talk to friends and associates to see if they can refer any designers to you, or check classifieds sites like Craigslist for web designers. Or drop Cherie a line!

Are you a real estate agent or broker? See how vFlyer can help you build a strong brand online.