How-To

Monetizing your Joomla site

Written by Sudhi | 31 May 2009

You are most likely reading this article because you run a blog or website powered by Joomla! This site strives to find helpful, useful and cool Joomla! information, and we thought it appropriate to talk about monetizing your Joomla! sites. So here is a roundup of ways to monetize your Joomla! site with some critique of each method.

Affiliate Programs

Web Hosting

Web hosting affiliate programs pay high dollar commissions, typically around $100 per signup. Higher level accounts pay even more, sometimes $300. These companies offer hosting tuned to the needs of a Joomla! site:

Commercial Joomla Extenions

A number of commercial Joomla extension developers offer affiliate programs. JomSocial is one example - they pay 30% of each sale out to affiliates.

Commercial Joomla Templates

All the major commercial joomla template providers offer an affiliate program. They typically pay around 30% of each sale as well.

Traffic Programs

CPM Advertising

There are a number of services that let you sell CPM (Cost per Thousand) impressions. You will need to find the right price point for your advertising. Too high and you turn off potential advertisers. Too low and you leave money on the table.

It also helps to know as much as possible about your readership. Begin with Google Analytics or another high quality statistics service, then move on to some simple polling of readers. Advertisers will want to know how your readership breaks down in terms of gender, household income, age, profession, education level, and other metrics. This information is important because when an advertiser is purchasing impressions instead of clicks, they are paying to build their brand. Their brand is usually targeted towards a very specific group or groups of people.

Click Programs

Google

The ubiquitous Google ads are the most common form of this type of advertising. That they are everywhere is both a good and bad thing. People trust Google ads, knowing they are typically not SPAM (depending on your definition). However because they are everywhere, people realize your site is not necessarily popular just because you placed Adsense ads on it.

Blogads.com

Another option among hundreds of alternatives. Also, consider looking into vertical market ad programs. For example, TBOJ might use a Joomla Ads program that caters to Joomla users.

General Sponsorship Programs

One of the methods TBOJ.com utilizes is selling sponsorships directly to advertisers. Building relationships with other Joomla! professionals is a great way to sell advertising space because they want to both support you, and increase business. If you have a personal connection with an advertiser, you will sell more advertising - it's that simple.

Tips

Use a combination of the options outlined above. There's no rule saying you can only use one mode of advertising.
Test and tweak. Figure out which methods are pulling in the most profit and utilize them more. Experiment with different formats (text links, images, flash, etc.) in different locations on your site. The Google Analytics site overlay provides an easy-to-interpret site overlay of where people click.
Don't over do it. Too many ads can turn off readers.
Be respectful of your readers. There is a common belief that the more you can camouflage ads to match your content (same text color, size, font), the more clicks you will get. But "tricking" readers into clicking an ad only drives down advertising rates for everyone because advertisers need to buy more ad impressions per quality conversion.

Other Resources:

40 Affiliate Programs

Joomla tutorial source

Written by Sudhi | 21 May 2009

Joomladin is relatively new in the Joomla! community. They offer some great tutorials on module development and on setting up Joomla with Ubuntu. The tutorials are paired with some helpful, free modules and videos to help the process Expect more tutorials and extensions from Joomladin as Victor posts pretty regularly. Check them out.

Workaround: The Section-Category Limitation

Written by Sudhi | 18 May 2009

One major fault of Joomla! is the lack of flexibility with the whole section/category situation. In Wordpress the administrator can create unlimited levels of content by creating subcategories. For example, I can break my content down in the following manner:

Interests > Food > Fruits > Apples

While Joomla! only lets you create a section, then categories within the section. So how can you get around this? Use the incredibly flexible menu functionality of Joomla. You can create unlimited levels in menu items, which can point to any section or category. So the breakdown of content above could still look (to the end-user) like 4 hierarchical levels, they would actually be four categories within one section. The above content might actually look like this in the back end:

Section (Interests) > Food
Section (Interests) > Fruits
Section (Interests) > Apples
Voila!

5 ways to promote your content (that work)

Written by Sudhi | 08 May 2009

You work really hard to create original, valuable content (right?). It's a shame if nobody ever sees that content because it's not promoted. These are our 5 favorite methods of promoting content.

Ping! Besides being fun to say, "ping" is a valuable concept for letting web services know you've updated. Think of it as a gentle nudge to say "hey, come check us out!" Pingomatic.com is a great, free, fast service to use. There are also several extensions that will automatically ping services when you post a new article.
Twit Also fun to say, twitting is a great way to bring visitors to your site. If your tweets are interesting and fun, they can make your followers aware of new content on your site. As you post regularly, you will gain more followers as well - which increases the pool from which you can draw traffic.
Joomocracy is user-generated Joomla news that is voted upon by the community. We submit all news to Joomocracy. We would love to see an extensions that automatically submits news to Joomocracy.
Social Media Rocks. Capitalize on any social media relationships or groups you are a part of. Linkedin is a great tool for publicizing content. TheBestofJoomla.com collaborates with the biggest Joomla! group on Linkedin. With over 1800 members, we are able to send new post updates to the entire group.
Guest Blogging. Guest blogging is a great way to promote your content while building good relationships. Everyone benefits. They get free content, you get publicity. We have guest blogged on sites such as SmashingMagazine.com, Mashable.com and Alledia.com. You can even guest-blog on this site - learn more.

5 places to get free images for your blog

Written by Sudhi | 29 April 2009

We have always preached having quality, unique content for your site. And this is still true, but if you don't have some nice, high-res supporting images your content may be hard to sift through. Here is a list of free images sources. Enjoy!

FreeRangeStock.com

Just signup for a free account and you can start downloading large quality images for both commercial and individual projects.
Visit

Wikimedia Commons

In the spirit of Wikipedia, this site is a collection of user-contributed art and media. They are all freely distributed and usable by anyone.

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid-for artists but by volunteers.

Visit

The Stock Exchange

This site is another repository of free media. However be careful to read the license agreement. Some images are not allowed to be used in a logo or another specific commercial purpose. Also, they superbly integrate their commercial images selection so that can be tricky to get around.
Visit

Smashing Magazine

The Smashing Magazine is one of our favorites. They have "Friday Freebies" as well as sporadically released free but commercial quality icons and themes. The focus here is on quality, not quantity.
Visit

Photogen

Photogen offers completely free images for your unlimited use. There are ads throughout but quality images make it worth sifting through the junk.
Visit