I am please to announce that we are now offering free bi-weekly Webinars for our members. The vFlyer Marketing Service is chock full of features and marketing tools, many of which our users are making good use of. That said, there are probably several that you aren’t aware of. For instance, have you utilized the email flyer list tool, allowing you to send a set of up to 7 listings in one email? Or did you know that you can choose the theme for your Account Profile? We want to do everything we can to help our members optimize their marketing efforts, and our hope is that the Webinars will help achieve this.

We will hold two 30-minute Webinars per week. In general, one will be a general overview of how to use the vFlyer service and the other will focus on a specific feature of the service. The first Webinar will be on Tuesday, March 30, at 11:00 am PDT and will be a general overview. Sign-up for Webinar.

I believe that these Webinars will be informative and hopefully fun. If you have questions about the Webinar program, please let us know by contacting support@vflyer.com.

Our custom theme of the week comes from Stacie Linka at Big Bear Cabins, a vacation rental company in Big Bear Lake, California. Big Bear Cabins has a stellar website and a well-defined brand that fits perfectly with the Big Bear Lake setting. Stacie’s theme nicely matches the website and works well with the excellent cabin photos she includes in her flyers.

In vacation rentals, you’re selling not just a short stay in a house but the whole idea of a place, and Big Bear Cabins’s theme helps convey the sense of the rustic comfort of Big Bear Lake. Nicely done, Stacie!

As the holidays are almost upon us, I’ll be highlighting some seasonal and holiday themed flyers in next week’s post. If you have a winter or holiday theme that you want showcased, feel free send it to us at support@vflyer.com.

While this post is coming a few days later than usual, I say better late than never. With that, I’m happy to announce that last week’s custom theme of the week goes to Tasha Moss at Urban Omaha in Omaha, Nebraska. Tasha has created a brand for her company that is fantastic. One look at Urban Omaha’s website shows you this. Tasha’s theme uses the same look and feel as her website and fits perfectly the type of listings she specializes in: modern, upmarket condos, lofts, and townhouses in downtown Omaha. And I love the simplicity of her header image: just the company logo, phone number, and website addess (in other words, the really important stuff).

If you’re interested in getting your own custom branded theme, vFlyer can help! We have in-house designers who can create a custom theme for you based on your specifications. If interested, simply email support@vflyer.com. The regular price for this service is $149. There is a special through the end of the 2009 for just $99.

We’ll be back this coming Friday with another Custom Theme of the Week, so if you’ve created or seen a custom theme and think it should be spotlighted, by all means, let us know!

I’m excited to announce that vFlyer members can now post links to their Flyers to Facebook right from their vFlyer accounts! It couldn’t be easier – after you publish or re-publish a Flyer, on the Publish Successful page, you’ll see a link labeled Share on Facebook. Click this link and you’ll be taken to your Facebook account; if you’re not already logged in, you’ll be prompted to do so. Once in your account, you’ll see a link to your Flyer and a thumbnail of the main photo posted to your profile. It’s about the easiest way to get your listing content onto Facebook available.

Here is how it will look on Facebook

Don’t forget that you can post your vFlyer Widgets to Facebook from your vFlyer account, also quite easily. To do this, once you’ve created a Widget in your vFlyer account, click the Post to button and select Facebook. You’ll then be prompted to log into your Facebook account if you’re not already logged in. And then you’re done! Your Widget is posted to your Facebook profile. It’s just that easy.

Here is how it will look on Facebook

This is another service enhancement suggested by one of our members. Keep the suggestions coming.

Many of you have no doubt seen this already, but We recently redesigned the logged-in homepage to make it cleaner and easier to navigate. We changed the Flyer and Widget Dashboards so that they’re both accessible within the same frame via different tabs and added an Image Dashboard where you can easily upload images and access images you’ve already uploaded and enhanced using our Watermark Plus image enhancement program. In addition, we added a News Feed to give you updates on what’s new with vFlyer and a feedback widget so that you can send us your questions, comments, and suggestions right from your account.

We hope these changes make your experience of using vFlyer even better. If you have comments about the new logged-in home layout, feel free to send us a message through the feedback widget!

I am pleased to announced the first of many service releases to support members outside the U.S. This release focuses on the needs of Canadian members. First, we added support for Canadian addresses and currency. Second, we added support for automatic submission of Canadian listings to Backpage.com and Vast.com. We expect to add more partner sites for Canadian listings in the coming months. Third, we updated our registration process to enable Canadian users to enter their postal code and timezone so that we can provide traffic reports and display times on your listings accurately. I am certain that we will receive more suggestions from our new and existing Canadian members. Thanks in advance.

Here is an example of one of the first published flyers with the new Canadian support:

After many late nights over the last week, we completed our latest round of computer system upgrades. The biggest part of the recent upgrade was the addition of a new storage server. This new storage server will enable us to add storage as needed without having to reboot our servers. Now that this is behind us, we can be focused on adding support for more Marketplaces, more Widgets, and other cool marketing tools.

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!

Earlier this week, vFlyer launched its new Theme Editor, which allows vFlyer business subscribers not only to customize the colors, fonts, and background patterns of their Flyers but, more importantly, to upload custom branded header images to them. In other words, any vFlyer Starter member or above can add his or her branding to the Flyers in the account… at no extra cost! This is a huge benefit to all you vFlyer business subscribers because it allows you to personalize your Flyers and streamline them with your websites and other marketing content in a way that wasn’t possible before.

In addition to the option of uploading a custom header image, you can also choose from over 25 new broker themes including ERA, GMAC Real Estate, Realty Executives, EXIT Realty, Long & Foster, and many others, or create a text header in the Theme Editor. Also, these 25+ broker themes are themselves customizable, so you can change them to your liking as well.

To create a custom header image, all you need is an image editing program on your computer, whether it be PhotoShop, MS Paint, or another program. What a number of our members are doing is taking a screen shot of their websites, cropping the portion of the image they want to use in the header, and then adjusting the image dimensions. The ideal dimensions of custom headers are 754 x 82 pixels. In your custom header, you can include your logo, a photograph of yourself, graphics from your website… you name it. If you aren’t able to create your own custom header image (or you want a professional designer to do it for you), you could have a graphic designer do it or alternately, vFlyer could create one for you for just $99 through the end of November. Here is an example of one that we created to match this member’s website.

We are really excited about the new Theme Editor because it makes vFlyer immensely more valuable to our users, giving you all expanded capabilities to customize your Flyers. If you try out the Theme Editor and have some comments about it, let us know! You can email your comments to support@vflyer.com. And if you’re especially proud of a custom theme you created, we’d love to see it! Feel free to send a link to a Flyer that uses the custom theme.

As in many industries, increasing numbers of auto shoppers are beginning their searches online instead of at the lot. What this means for auto dealers (particularly independent dealers who don’t have all the resources of a dealership group) is 1) you better have a website, and 2) you better be marketing your vehicles effectively on your website. An obvious way to do this is to put your vehicle inventory on your website so that visitors to the site can view photos and get information about each vehicle you are selling. There are companies sprouting up every year whose sole function is to provide auto dealers with an inventory of their vehicles for their websites. If you’re a vFlyer member, however, you should know that you already have an inventory built into your vFlyer account! Your vFlyer Account Profile effectively serves as a vehicle inventory website as it displays all your active listings, with a link to each Flyer, a thumbnail photo, and summary information about each vehicle.

If you haven’t set up your vFlyer Account Profile, you should do that right now (or at least immediately after you finish reading this post). Your Account Profile is a valuable marketing tool where you can display your contact information, a description of your business, your photo and logo, and (if you are a vFlyer business subscriber) links to other relevant websites. Also, if you’re a business subscriber, you can choose from a number of design themes for your Account Profile (including custom Flyer themes that you’ve created). So you see, if you are an auto dealer, simply by having a vFlyer account, publishing Flyers in it, and setting up your Account Profile, you have a vehicle inventory to utilize on your website!

vFlyer member Elton Rosales of KD Auto Sales in New Braunfels, Texas utilized his vFlyer Account Profile as a vehicle inventory on his website. Click here to see.

To put your Account Profile on your website, you (or whoever manages the website) will need to use an iframe to do so. An iframe is an HTML tag that inserts one web page into another and displays it in a frame. To embed your Account Profile using an iframe, follow these steps:

1. Copy the URL of your Account Profile. You can access the URL by clicking the Post Flyer tab from the Flyer Editor or the Post your Flyer quickly & easily link from your Flyer Dashboard. The URL will be labeled “Link to your Gallery.”

2. Open the HTML file for your website.

3. Copy and paste this code:

<iframe src=”Account Profile URL&Prime height=”1000&Prime width=”900&Prime></iframe>

Where Account Profile URL is, replace the text inside the quotation marks with the URL of your Account Profile (and leave the quotation marks). Paste this tag where you want the Account Profile to appear on the page. Depending on how large you want the Account Profile to appear on the page, you can adjust the height and width dimensions accordingly. You can also set the height and width by percentages instead of pixelage (e.g., “90%”).

If you use your vFlyer Account Profile as a vehicle inventory on your website, send a link to the page to support@vflyer.com. We would love to see it!

Our members have always been excited about our Widgets because they’re an easy and effective way to increase traffic to their Profile and Listings, but we realized that there was room for improvement. In the prior release, Widgets could either display all of your active listings or just one of them. So we decided enough is enough and, a few weeks ago, rolled out some major enhancements to our Widgets. Now, when you create a Widget, you can:

In other words, we’ve given you more control over the content of your vFlyer Widgets. For example, if you wanted to highlight your listings from a particular subdivision, you could create a Widget that displayed just those listings. Or, if you had both rental and for sale listings in the same account, you could create a separate Widget for each. Or, if you wanted to include a non-vFlyer web page in one of your Widgets, you could do that too.

Creating a List allows you to decide which listings to show in a particular widget. A List works in the same way as a music playlist; you choose the items for the list, just as you would choose the songs for a playlist. When you create a Multi-item Widget, you simply choose the List you want to use for that Widget.

To include content not hosted by vFlyer in a Widget, use a Teaser. A Teaser is an enhanced link designed for use in vFlyer Widgets. Each Teaser requires a title and a URL, where the link in the Teaser will take viewers. Additionally, you can add a price and summary information and upload photos to your Teasers. You can then add Teasers to your Lists just as you would add Flyers.

We’re thrilled to be allowing our users to integrate externally-hosted web content into their Widgets and decide which of their Flyers and Teasers to put in their widgets. We hope that you all take advantage of these great new features!

We recently added the real estate marketplace CyberHomes as a syndication partner site, which means that real estate for sale listings can now be automatically submitted there! This is great news, as this website is a rising stars in the world of online real estate marketplaces. CyberHomes (which is the exclusive provider of real estate listings to AOL) offers detailed information and statistics on homes for sale, neighborhoods, and metro areas around the country as well as market trends. It also provides useful reference material for buyers and sellers of homes. Be sure to update and republish listings to take advantage of this new service benefit.

We recently completed an extensive review of all the widgets we offer and made a number of changes and fixes that improve the look and performance of the Flash version of those widgets. The Flash version (as opposed to the Javascript version, which we also generate for each widget) is the one most compatible with the largest number of websites. Changes we made include a streamlining of the contact information and photo and logos on Basic Gallery and Basic Flyer widgets; the removal of Price and Location labels when those fields have no values in them; a better display of summary information for each listing; improved alignment of the widget title and flyer titles on the vertical Recent Listings widget; and improvement of the scrolling function on the premium Sliding Gallery widget. Here are a few examples:

Widgets are an effective and (best of all) easy way to create more exposure of your listings because you can easily embed the HTML code for the widget in your website, blog, and/or social network profile.  These improvements we made should give vFlyer users all the more incentive to configure widgets and put them on those sites!