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.