Excellent work, Amanda!

Creating a great-looking custom theme can be super-easy with vFlyer’s Theme Editor. Take a few minutes to watch this video tutorial on how to make one, and then create your own!

The moment you sign up for a vFlyer account, you are instantly given a live, stand-alone website called an Account Profile. This page serves as your listing inventory, displaying links to all of your published vFlyer listings in real time and making it easier to cross-sell your listings to prospective customers. For many vFlyer users, the Account Profile becomes their website, and there are several things that users can do to optimize their Account Profiles:

• adding contact information, a photo, company logo, a description of the business, and (for business subscribers) links to external sites
• applying a custom theme to it (again, only for business subscribers). This is especially effective if you have a custom branded theme such as this one.
• adding search and sort functionality, which enables prospective customers to more easily find listings that fit their criteria
• mapping a domain name to it, made easy through our Domain Plus service

Your Account Profile is, by default, also integrated into your flyers through the “More Listings” or “View Other Flyers” link, another reason to make it look sharp.

So that’s the skinny on the Account Profile. If you want a more detailed tutorial on how to set it up, here’s a new video we added a couple weeks ago:

Setting Up Your Account Profile

The GCC’s custom theme matches the branding on its website perfectly. I love their logo and the font they chose for the header text. Also, using different shades of green is a nice touch (and fitting!).

As I’ve said before, branding is key in online marketing. vFlyer’s Theme Editor provides an easy and effective way to incorporate your branding into your listings. Try creating your own branded theme today, or contact us and we can have our in-house designer create one for you.

Here’s how it works:

Static FBML creates a new tab on your Page that accepts and renders HTML code. Once the application is installed, you’ll be able to post HTML code directly to your Facebook Page. To use this tool, go to the Static FBML Facebook Page and click the “Add to My Page” link to install the app. Copy and paste the HTML code for your flyer; I recommend using the “Blog” format, available when you use a custom theme on your flyer. You can give your new tab a title, like “Just listed”. Visitors to your page who click on this new tab will find the HTML code you entered automatically rendered – in this case, into a full-color, professionally formatted flyer.

There are myriad uses for this little application – you can add multiple “FBML” boxes to your Page to highlight your hottest listings, or devote a single Page to each listing, as suggested by Ross Hair. Whatever your approach, we’d love to hear about it; comment below or drop us a line at support@vflyer.com, and let us know how Facebook works for you as a marketing tool.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

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.