Use Joomla! to Explode Your Affiliate Income

Joomla is a content management system, similar to WordPress. The primary difference is that Joomla has a lot more built-in features & functionality.

With Joomla’s Extensions, you can turn your site into a social network, membership site, and more in minutes. If you’re looking for a new tool to increase your leads and sales, Joomla just might be the right solution.

The WordPress Alternative
Many affiliates avoid Joomla because it’s more difficult to learn than WordPress, and doesn’t seem to provide great built-in SEO. In reality, Joomla can actually provide equal or greater SEO results if utilized correctly.

There are also many SEO extensions available, such as SH404SEF, that give you granular control over your SEO and rival anything WordPress has to offer. While Joomla does have a bit of a steeper learning curve, there are a ton of tutorial websites available for beginners to help you get up and running fairly quickly.

Modules Make Split Testing Easy
Joomla has an awesome feature called modules, which are content blocks of code, widgets, or applications.

Modules can be placed in multiple preset locations, anywhere in your template. You can create multiple modules that display ad banners or affiliate links and place them virtually anywhere on your site.

The beauty of modules is that they are conditional. You can display them according to section, category, and/or by user state (registered user or guest). This basically provides built-in split testing!

Complete Editorial Control
Joomla provides complete editorial control. You can assign users to user-groups, such as authors, editors, publishers, etc., with ease.

Think of the possibilities: you could install and launch multiple niche content sites, set up unlimited ad modules, and have them display conditionally according to their author, category and/or section.

Also, Joomla enables you to display one set of ads for registered users and another set for guests. Your imagination can run wild with the number of different scenarios you could run to maximize your click-through rates.

List Building & Email Marketing
Administrative account management is built into the core of Joomla. The benefit here is that you’ll always have immediate access to your entire database of users. Joomla’s built-in “mass email” tool can send email blasts to all your users, in plain text or HTML.

You can also target by user groups, such as authors, editors, publishers, etc. It’s a great tool for marketing & connecting with your community – with their permission of course.

Endless Possibilities
Joomla has some affiliate-friendly extensions, including JomSocial, which lets you turn your Joomla site into a full-featured social network, and JoomFish, a tool that enables you to natively translate your site into almost any language.

Used together, they are great tools for targeting by interest or demographics, and for generating additional international traffic.

Joomla is an indispensable tool in my affiliate arsenal and if you give it a shot I’m sure it will be for you as well!

Michael Wayne is a blogger (MikeWayne.com), affiliate marketer, and President of MediaCraft Marketing, LLC.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 11 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/29057000/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-11
FeedFront issue 11 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2010/07