Happy Friday! Our custom theme of the week comes from CAM Marketing, a graphic and web design firm in Chester, Virginia. They created this theme for Shockoe Commons, an apartment community in Richmond. What a great custom theme! The colors are bright, fun, and modern, the header image makes creative use of the space, and all the design elements work well together. CAM has created really nice custom themes for its other clients as well.

Bravo, CAM! Keep those killer custom themes coming!

If you have a vFlyer account and you haven’t yet created a custom theme, I encourage you to give it a try this weekend. You can create a custom theme in literally 5 minutes, and it will give you access to features of the vFlyer service that you couldn’t access before. Here’s a video to get you started.

We’ll be back next Friday with another Custom Theme of the Week, so if you’ve created or seen a custom theme and think it should be featured, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com.

We believe that it is important to promote yourself and your listings with branded market content. vFlyer has a highly customizable Theme Editor for creating custom, branded themes and a library of 25 leading real estate broker themes. These custom themes can enhance the marketing content used for single property sites, Account Profiles, Craigslist flyers, print flyers and more. Thousands of members each month are creating themes. That hasn’t stopped some of our members from asking for special broker themes for their brokerage. While we would love to create themes for all brokers, that isn’t a realistic possibility at this point. For that reason, we decided to stage a contest to select the next 10 broker themes for the library.

It’s simple: log in to vFlyer, enter your broker’s name in the Feedback application, and click Send. Also, be sure to ask other agents in your office to vote as well. We will tally the votes at the end of September and will have the new broker themes available in mid-October.

You may have noticed that we’ve been quiet on the blogging front over the last few weeks, but it’s not been for lack of activity or (as much as we might wish) extended Fourth of July holidays. Rather, we’ve been busy at work on some important infrastructure upgrades that have made and will continue to make our application and content produced with it significantly faster.

In a nutshell, these upgrades include:

• the integration with a content delivery network, which results in faster image load times
• added memory, resulting in better and faster site performance
• the enhancement of our software caching layer to dramatically shrink response time, resulting in faster load times of Flyers and single property websites

What this all means is that it will be easier for you both to create vFlyers and other marketing content and impress potential customers with your brilliant, fast-loading Flyers. It has been proven that faster loading pages leads to a greater number of page views.

With regard to the content delivery network, it takes effect on new and existing Flyers automatically. However, it isn’t updated automatically on Craigslist content. If you haven’t republished a flyer in the last few weeks and are using the Craigslist HTML, please republish to take advantage of the faster imaging loading. 

Finally, kudos to the Development Team for their great work on the infrastructure improvements.

Today, vFlyer implemented a new feature of the Flyers page: the ability to add a label to each Flyer in your account. A label is simply a tag for a Flyer that is visible only to you (in other words, it doesn’t affect the Flyers themeselves). It means that, instead of having to remember which title corresponds with which listing, you can assign a unique identifier to each Flyer that only shows on the Flyers page in your account, making it easier to access a specific listing. For instance, if you are a leasing manager, it might be tough to remember which of your Flyers has the title, “Out of this world savings await you at the Casa Grande!” But you could label this Flyer “Casa Grande Apt 100E“, a much more easily recallable name.

To add a label to a Flyer, on your Flyers page, click the pencil icon next to the Flyer you want to label, then type a label in the field provided and click outside the field. You can always change a label after you’ve added it as well. This feature was requested by several vFlyer members and most recently by Charity Hisle of Benson Media. Thanks and keep the suggestions coming.

This week’s custom theme comes to us from Otto Calta with Coldwell Banker Terrequity Realty in Toronto. What I really like about this theme is that it demonstrates how easy it can be to create a great-looking branded theme by taking a logo, uploading it as a header image, and then matching the header background color to the logo (see the second image below). The green/white/gray palette of the theme is really well-integrated with the look of the ThinkTorontoHomes.com logo.

For a fantastic example of a broker website, you should also check out ThinkTorontoHomes.com, the website of Otto and his team.

I also wanted to use this opportunity again to point out that vFlyer now supports Canadian listings. If you are an agent or broker in Canada, you can include the full address of your listings as well as the price in Canadian dollars.

I can’t stress enough the importance of getting your brand out there on the web. It’s the one thing that will distinguish your ads from your competitors’, and it lends a high degree of professionalism to your online listings. So create a vFlyer custom theme this weekend! For a useful introduction, take a look at this series of short video tutorials on our website.

We’ll be back next Friday with another Custom Theme of the Week, so if you’ve created or seen a custom theme and think it should be spotlighted, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com.

Yesterday we made two additions to our arsenal of vFlyer Listing Widgets: a 100-pixel wide and a 200-pixel wide auto-scrolling multi-item Widget. Unfortunately, these images are not animated.

The two new Widgets give our users more and better options for integrating their vFlyer content into their websites, blogs, and social networks. The new Widgets are especially useful in blogs, where often the sidebar is the default location of widgets and other components. In particular, bloggers on ActiveRain should find the new narrow scrolling Widgets quite valuable.

Also, the new Widgets don’t include vFlyer branding on them, which makes it even better to incorporate them into your website, social network profile or blog.

The new Widgets are part of our line of Premium Widgets available only to vFlyer business subscribers. If you have a vFlyer Personal account and are interested in upgrading your account to take advantage of the new Widgets, you can do so by clicking here.

To preview these widgets, click to the vFlyer Widget Library.  Scroll down to the Scrolling 100px and Scrolling 200px widgets.

On a related note, we will be adding a new series of short video tutorials on vFlyer Widgets soon. We hope that with the introduction of the scrolling sidebar Widgets and new video tutorials, we see lots of fantastic vFlyer Widgets out there this summer!

This week’s custom theme comes to us from Vranas Properties in Chicago. They did a fantastic job integrating their logo into the theme, and I love the color palette they use. It looks as though it were created by a professional web designer! That’s what’s so great about vFlyer’s Theme Editor: it makes it very easy for any vFlyer member to create professional, branded marketing content without having to hire a designer to do it for you. (Although I should mention we have seen some amazing custom themes created for our members by graphic designers.)

Any vFlyer business subscriber can create a branded custom theme and use it in his or her Flyers and Account Profile. If you haven’t created a custom theme yet, now’s the time to try it! For a useful introduction to creating and using custom themes, take a look at this series of short video tutorials on our website.

We’ll be back next Friday with another Custom Theme of the Week, so if you’ve created or seen a custom theme and think it should be spotlighted, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com.

As the nation is preoccupied by the continuing economic crisis, the nomination of the first Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court justice, and the (diminishing) prospect of a LeBron-Kobe matchup in the NBA Finals, I wanted take a moment to fill you in on an exciting new development at vFlyer: the automatic posting of U.S. listings to Kijiji.com for vFlyer business subscribers. Now when you publish a Flyer in a real estate, rentals, or autos category, you can have it posted to Kijiji automatically. The best part is, this happens almost instantly in the case of Housing. In other words, in the time it takes you to go from your vFlyer account after you’ve published a Flyer to Kijiji, it will probably be posted there already. (Note: we’ve noticed a delay for auto listings, so it may take up to 24 hours for vehicles. Some delays may occur for real estate or rentals.)

This is great news for vFlyer members as Kijiji is fast becoming one of the leading classifieds websites in the country. Kijiji (which means “village” in Swahili) is owned by eBay and has already established itself as the top classifieds site in Canada; it’s now looking to do the same in the U.S. We’re thrilled to be one of the first syndication providers to offer automatic submission to Kijiji and look forward to helping the site grow even faster. And our business subscribers will benefit most from having their listings reach an even wider audience. So everybody wins!

If you are a vFlyer business subscriber, you can enable automatic submission of your real estate, rentals, and auto listings to Kijiji by clicking the Update Syndication Settings link on your account homepage, checking the box labeled Kijiji, and clicking Update. For Flyers that you’ve already published, you will need to re-publish them in order to have them posted to Kijiji.

Again, we’re thrilled to add this feature to the vFlyer service. If you have questions or feedback for us about it, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com!

Update: Monday, June 8, 2009 – This marketplace partnership is referenced in our recent service announcement.

Earlier this week, we implemented the vFlyer Account Scoring System that shows you how well you are utilizing the wide range of features and capabilities in your vFlyer account.

You’ll now see a percentage in the top right section of your account homepage; this is your Account Score. Clicking the link labeled Improve your Account Score allows you to see which capabilities you are taking advantage and which ones you’re not. This provides a guide for taking advantage of more capabilities and thus improving the effectiveness of your marketing.

Our hope is that the new scoring system helps our members get even better results. We want to see lots of 100% scores! If you get your score up to 100%, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com.

I also wanted to share that we introduce a new marketing page that provides some of the benefits of the Agency Edition of the vFlyer service. Please take a look when you have time.

We want to announce the launch of a new feature of the vFlyer service called vFlyer Backpack. It’s a “bookmarklet” that can be stored in your web browser as a bookmark or hyperlink. vFlyer Backpack allows you to “carry” your marketing content with you wherever you go on the web. For instance, if you’re posting a Flyer to ActiveRain, now you can just go to ActiveRain and, once you’re on the blog posting page, open vFlyer Backpack from your browser, select the flyer and then drag and drop (or copy and paste) the HTML to the posting form. It is much easier than having two browser windows open.

vFlyer Backpack is also valuable for posting Flyers to Craigslist, Backpage, eBay, blog sites, and other websites.

Here’s a link to some instructions and demos for installing and using vFlyer Backpack: Click here.

We’re very excited about this new feature and hope it helps you post your marketing content on the web more quickly and easily. If you have questions or feedback about vFlyer Backpack, contact us at support@vflyer.com.

We were excited this morning to learn that Sally Forster Jones of Coldwell Banker Previews International in Beverly Hills was selected as the co-listing agent for late television producer Aaron Spelling’s mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Beverly Hills. This is significant because Mr. Spelling’s house is currently the most expensive on the U.S. market, up for grabs at a whopping $150 million! According to the Associated Press, it’s the largest home in Los Angeles County at 56,500 square feet and sits on a more than 4.6-acre lot. It’s estimated that there are over 100 bedrooms in the house.

Apparently Mr. Spelling’s widow used her dog Madison to help her pick the best real estate agent for the task of selling the house. She had the dog brought into the room each time she met a candidate agent and watched how the dog reacted. According to reports, if Madison didn’t like an agent, Spelling crossed the agent off the list. Sounds like Jones passed the Madison test with flying colors!

Sally Forster Jones is a top producer for Coldwell Banker with over 30 years of experience in the business. At one time or another she has been involved in just about every aspect of real estate sales, from property management to development to owning her own brokerage. She is listed in Who’s Who in American Real Estate, representing the top 1% of the top 1% of all agents nationally. And on top of all that, she has created a very nice branded theme using the vFlyer Theme Editor!

On a related note, as my name is Aaron Sperling, occasionally people confuse me with Aaron Spelling, so I feel an extra special connection to this listing. Now if I just had that $150 million…

We’re proud to have a vFlyer member gain such a prestigious listing. Congratulations Sally!

Alain Pinel may not be the biggest brokerage, but their agents apparently believe in the value of branded marketing content. They have recently catapulted into the lead in terms of using one of the vFlyer Custom Broker themes for their online marketing content. Rounding out the top 3 are RE/MAX and Allen Tate.

Many agents are going one step further. They are uploading custom header and background images and then updating the colors to match their header image. These are not only producing stunning results, but also they often match the branding on our member’s website.

I am very excited to be attending and exhibiting at the Triple Play Real Estate Conference in Atlantic City, NJ on December 9-10, 2008. This provides a great opportunity to meet members of the vFlyer community.  I hope that you will stop by our booth, #1043, and say hello. We look forward to hearing from you on how we can better support your marketing efforts in 2009 and beyond. Also, we will be highlighting several terrific design themes created by our members with the new vFlyer Theme Editor. One of my current favorites is a Climb Real Estate Group theme.

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!