Joomla! Cash: Money-making weapons for your Joomla! website

Joomla! Cash Money-making weapons for your Joomla! website

Brandon Dawson Tom Canavan

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Joomla! Cash Copyright © 2007 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, co-author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Special thanks to Tom Canavan for giving permission to use portions of his book—"Dodging the Bullets— A Disaster Preparation Guide for Joomla! based Websites". Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: October 2007

Production Reference: 1191007

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 978-1-847191-40-3 www.packtpub.com

Cover Image by Damian Carvill ([email protected])

Credits Author Brandon Dawson Co-Author Tom Canavan Reviewers Tom Canavan

Project Manager Abhijeet Deobhakta Project Coordinator Sagara Naik Indexer Hemangini Bari

Niko Kotiniemi Proofreader Senior Acquisition Editor

Chris Smith

David Barnes Production Coordinator Development Editor Mithil Kulkarni Technical Editor Akshara Aware Editorial Manager Dipali Chittar

Manjiri Nadkarni Shantanu Zagade Cover Designer Shantanu Zagade

About the Author Brandon Dawson is a 29 year old website developer from Lancaster, Ohio in

the United States. He has completed Joomla! projects for clients ranging from major corporate clients, such as Apple Incorporated, to small local businesses. He maintains a business website at www.athenainternet.com. He enjoys building websites, hiking, cycling, and spending time with his fiancée and their son, Augdin. He is also a huge movie buff and spent his college years operating a small local movie theatre. He frequents the Joomla support forums, and maintains his personal websites at www.joomlawarrior.com and www.brandondawson.org.

About the Co-author Tom Canavan has practically grown up with the Computer industry. He started his career out of college doing component-level repair of barcode readers. From there he moved into a computer systems maintenance position supporting proprietary minis, mainframes, PCs, and networks with a major defense firm. Later he moved to AST Research and then to Dell Computer Corporation where he worked as a Sr. Systems Consultant working with Fortune-500 customers. He has over twenty-three years of work experience on all facets of computing, networking, and customer problem solving. He has a degree in Robotics and Numerical control from Grayson County College. He is the co-host of a successful Podcast about Joomla! known as JoomlaJabber.com. He is the author of "Dodging the Bullets—a disaster preparation guide for Joomla! based websites".

About the Reviewers Tom Canavan has practically grown up with the Computer industry. He started

his career out of college doing component-level repair of barcode readers. From there he moved into a computer systems maintenance position supporting proprietary minis, mainframes, PCs, and networks with a major defense firm. Later he moved to AST Research and then to Dell Computer Corporation where he worked as a Sr. Systems Consultant working with Fortune-500 customers. He has over twenty-three years of work experience on all facets of computing, networking, and customer problem solving. He has a degree in Robotics and Numerical control from Grayson County College. He is the co-host of a successful Podcast about Joomla! known as JoomlaJabber.com. He is the author of "Dodging the Bullets—a disaster preparation guide for Joomla! based websites".

Niko Kotiniemi has a background service sector, Union and Unemployment Fund related work as well as the travel sector. In 2004 he turned his lifelong computer hobby to into a living, starting with custom web projects and open-source CMS systems. Since the very beginning of his computer related professional career he has worked with Mambo and later with Joomla. In 2006, at the age of 30 he decided to obtain the academic qualifications and entered the Software Engineering studies at the Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia, Information Technology department.

During the course of his studies he is constantly working on different web-projects to both finance his studies as well as out of professional interest. Most of his free time is spent with his family as well as in studying new trends and technologies and ways in which they can be integrated to real-life situations such as those faced by private entrepreneurs and small companies. Currently his main technological interests lie in Joomla, wiki’s, all of the Google labs products, Ajax, Gadgets/Widgets, databases and specialized websites for niche groups. You can reach him through his personal website http://www.kotiniemi.fi or through e-mail: [email protected].

Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1: Welcome Warriors!

Business is a War—You Must be Prepared to be a Warrior! Hype versus Reality—the Internet What went Wrong? The Way of the Warrior Mind Your P's Product Place Some Advantages Some Disadvantages

Price Promotion The Forgotten P—People Summary

Chapter 2: Creating a Marketing Plan

Why have Marketing Plans? Creating a Marketing Plan Elements of Your Marketing Plan The Warrior's Strategic Objectives Evaluate, Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome The Warrior's Tactics Objective 1—Direct Revenue Generation Affiliate Marketing Goods, Goods, Goods Information is Power Objective 2—Traffic Generation Keyword-Rich Copywriting

1 5

6 6 6 7 7 8 8

9 9

9 10 10 11

13

13 13 14 15 15 18 19 20 20 20 21 21

Table of Contents

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Sitemap Submission RSS Syndication or Really Simple Syndication Free! Free! Free! Objective 3—Visitor and Traffic Analysis Objective 4—Behavior and Conversion Analysis Objective 5—Competitive Analysis "Know Thy Enemy" Objective 6—Bringing it All back Home Summary

Chapter 3: Generating Traffic

21 21 22 22 22 24 26 28 28

29

What is SEO? Structural Optimization

Items That Search Engines Look for in Your Site's Content External Views of Your Site by Search Engines

29 30

30 31

Optimizing META Data Title Optimization Content Optimization Keyword Research and Optimization Website Structure and Organization Internal Linking and Navigation Using a robots.txt File Using Image ALT and TITLE Tags Promotional Optimization Link Popularity Link Anchors Choosing Relevant Link Partners

31 32 32 33 34 34 35 36 36 36 37 38

Lock 'n' Load—Using SEO in Joomla! Using Joomla's Core SEO

39 39

Installing and Configuring OpenSEF

40

Determining Link Relevancy Don't Go There–Links to be Avoided at All Costs Competitive Analysis

What is .htaccess? Copying htaccess.txt to .htaccess Are we Done Yet? Installing Tip for Using OpenSEF Using the Sitemap Feature Configuring OpenSEF's Sitemap Generating the Sitemap Submitting the Sitemap

SEO Conclusion Getting Visitors to Play Tag

38 38 39

40 40 40 41 44 44 45 46 47

48 48 [ ii ]

Table of Contents

FijiWebDesign's TagBot Linkbaiting Techniques Case Study on Linkbait—Oxfam.org.uk–"Bit Unfair" Typical Linkbaiting Tactics

48 50 51 53

Summary

57

Using RSS Feeds Permission Marketing Affiliate Programs

Chapter 4: Traffic or Log Analysis

Traffic or Log Analysis is Vital Intelligence Obtaining Logs What Information Do the Logs Provide? Getting Actionable Data JoomlaStats Google Analytics—Another Approach

Taking Action

What You Need to Learn What You Need to Do with This Vital Intelligence Right Now

Summary

Chapter 5: Site Layout and Optimization

Optimizing Your Site for Ease of Use Menu Navigation and Content Organization Simplicity Pros Cons

Complexity

54 54 56

59

59 59 60 60

60 62

64

64 64

66

67

67 68 68

68 69

69

Pros Cons

69 69

Meeting in the Middle Content Navigation

69 70

Pros Cons

70 70

Implementation

70

The Default, Core Way

Accessibility Measuring Usability Color Psychology, Typefaces, and Design Fire and Ice, Classic and Jazzy What to Ask Yourself Typefaces Design Considerations for Fonts Basic Color Psychology Hot Colors [ iii ]

70

71 71 72 72 73 73 74 74 75

Table of Contents Red Orange Yellow

75 75 75

Cool Colors

75

Green Blue Violet White Black

75 76 76 76 76

Cultural Considerations Writing Effective Copy Ten Tips for Effective Copywriting Real-World Views Instilling a Sense of Urgency Six Tips for Instilling Urgency Summary

76 77 77 78 83 85 85

Chapter 6: Generating Revenue

87

Signing up with Banner Affiliates Becoming Your Own Ad Broker

88 89

Banner Advertisements Pros Cons Where to Obtain Your Ads

87 87 88 88

Lock and Load Banner Strategies Joomla! Banner Component Direct Template Installation Ready, Aim, FIRE!

89 89 90 90 90

Uploading a New Banner

Direct Template Inclusion Evaluate, Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome Text-Based Contextual Ads Pros Cons Where to Obtain Your Ads Text-ad Strategies Ready, Aim, FIRE! Evaluate, Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome Product Affiliate Programs Pros Cons Tracking and Reporting [ iv ]

90

93 94 95 95 96 96 96 97 98 98 99 99 99

Table of Contents

Ready, Aim, FIRE!

100

Amazon Amazon Product Feed Bridge Using the Omakase Module

100 101 102

Direct Template Inclusion Using Other Product Affiliate Programs Using the CJ Affiliates Module Import Any Product Affiliate Code—mod_html Running an Affiliate Program iDevAffiliate Types of Ads Available Affiliates Marketing Conclusion Subscriptions and Joomla! Configuring Account Expiration Applying Unique Changes Known as Hacks Managing Logins with Account Expiration Subscriber Access Control with JACL Installing JACL Accepting Donations Donations (Tip Jars) Pros Cons Advanced PayPal Donations Module Amazon PayPages Module

104 106 107 108 108 108 116 117 117 117 119 119 120 120 121 121 122 122 123 124

Instant Branded Products E-Commerce Installing VirtueMart Configuring VirtueMart Adding and Editing Products Choosing a Payment Method Optional Modules Summary

125 126 126 127 134 139 140 140

Chapter 7: Disaster Recovery

141

Installation

Ask Yourself, "Is My Site Ready?" If It Can Go Wrong, It Will

You Have to be Prepared What is Risk Tolerance? Factors to be Considered for Disaster Preparation Basic Steps to Take when an Outage Occurs

Preparing for Battle

Using .htaccess to Protect Your Site

124

141 141

142 142 143 144

144

145

[]

Table of Contents Permissions and Your Site Passwords Backup and Restore

Maintenance of Your Joomla! Site Being Prepared is Job 1 Conducting a Mock Drill Establishing a Communications Plan Purpose of Media Contact

Summary

146 146 146

147 148 150 151

151

152

Chapter 8: Small Change

153

Marketing Your Joomla! skills What You Offer It can be Daunting—I Know! The Grand Master Plan

153 153 153 154

How I approached It

154

Networking to Win You Can Do It Too Finding Joomla! Work Offer Joomla! Templates Offer Free Templates Offer Commercial Templates Offering Commercial Services Conclusion

155 155 157 158 158 158 159 159

Index

161

[ vi ]

Preface So you want to be an entrepreneur? Or maybe you already are one. Maybe you want to earn some extra cash, but don't have the time to setup an eBay® store. Whatever the case is, this book is for you. As a young man, I always dreamed of running my own business and being in control of my business destiny. Well, that dream is not only possible, but with the Internet, it is very easy and lucrative. Planning to run your own business, brick and mortar or Internet based, isn't easy, and sometimes not fun. However, one thing that I have learnt in life is that the more you know a subject, such as Internet-based businesses, the easier it can be. The team of volunteer programmers who bring you Joomla! have given you a tool that, when properly applied, will yield great fortunes! Or at least yield a nice return. Remember the effort you put into this will determine the benefits you receive. If you aren't ready, then read the book, play around with the software, set it aside and come back in a few weeks. Read it again, and continue. However, if you are ready to jump whole heartedly into your own Joomla! cash stream, use this book as a guide, but keep studying. Read the forums at Joomla.org, read other online business books; study and examine successful sites, don't steal but visualize and make your own, and improve your site. Make no mistake; this is a full-time effort, which you should not take lightly. Take it on as if your doctor has asked you to. In other words, take all the medicines, eat right, get plenty of sleep, exercise, and you will feel better. This book, will serve the same. Visualize your business, write your marketing plan, learn good layout and optimization techniques, prepare for disaster, market your skills, and learn how to take in money and pay out commissions. Without further ado, let's join the business already in progress on the Internet.

Preface

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 talks about the hype versus reality aspect of the Internet and clears away the "if I build it, they will come" myth. Also, it tells you that a Joomla! warrior should be disciplined and should learn all the skills to be successful. It explains the four P's required for efficient marketing: Product, Place, Promotion, and People. Chapter 2 teaches you how to evaluate, adapt, improvise, and overcome obstacles that keep you from achieving digital battlefield victory. Chapter 3 covers the basics of SEO or search engine optimization, links and tags, RSS feeds, newsletters, and multimedia marketing. Chapter 4 explains how to obtain critical data for your website as a basis for action. You will learn about traffic/log analysis. Chapter 5 will help you understand how to make your site visually appealing so as to generate traffic and revenue. Chapter 6 will provide you with tips for generating revenues for your Joomla! site. Chapter 7 will provide you with a brief tutorial on disaster preparation for your cash-generating site. Chapter 8 explains a few more cash-generating weapons: marketing your Joomla! skills and offering commercial templates.

Who This Book is ������� For ����

This book is suitable for business people with a medium level of technical skill who need a good primer on how to implement a cash-generating website. Those unfamiliar with Joomla! would benefit from reading Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1.

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[]

Welcome Warriors! Do you have a product or service you wish to sell on the Internet? Do you possess specialized knowledge that has value? Do you design or implement websites? Do you want to make money? Chances are good that you fall into one of these categories. I assume that you've �������������������������������������������������������������������� selected this book because you have a vision and you realize that your vision is one that's been held by countless people since time immemorial, or at the very least, since 1995. You may wish to have a site that will promote your unique recipes, something like www.carolsfavorite.com, and depend on small amounts of revenue from Google Adsense ads. Perhaps your vision is to get the terrific after-market product ideas for automobiles from your mind to the Internet. You would need to accept credit cards online, be search-engine friendly, and have a shopping cart. Perhaps you fall somewhere in between. In any case, you share the vision of countless entrepreneurs, which is to make money! If, on the other hand, you've selected this book because it has a misspelled, westernized, Swahili word in it's title, then let this paragraph serve as notice that this book has nothing to do with the sub-Saharan Bantu languages, and that the author, editors, and publisher of this book have no need to correct the spelling for that entire language family. Joomla!�������������������������� is Bantoid (Swahili) for All together now, and as we'll see throughout this book, the terrific developer community surrounding ������� Joomla!, the �������� Content Management System or CMS, has provided an arsenal of components and extensions for people with vision to turn their ideas into reality. This book will give you the tools and describe the techniques to get your site online; however, the rest is up to you; just as Rome was not built in a day, neither is a popular website born overnight. We'll concentrate on techniques for building a steady, reliable, and money-making website that could provide you the freedom to see your vision turn to reality and reward you with real dollars. The effectiveness of

Welcome Warriors!

your site is determined by numerous factors—one of them being the functionality of your site. Joomla! is built to��������������������������������� accept add-on software known as extensions. These extensions delivered both commercially and under the GNU/GPL licenses offer a wealth of power that will make an average site a good one. While reading this book, you will get the opportunity to closely examine real-world examples. By reading about others' experiences you will see how websites are used to make cash. Joomla! is a perfect platform to begin your training as a Joomla! cash warrior.

Business is a War—You Must be Prepared to be a Warrior!

To be a warrior, you must learn a warrior's winning tools and techniques. In this book you will learn valuable, time-tested skills to earn search engine ranking, turn affiliate website clicks into cash, and track the movement of visitors. One of the greatest Internet warriors is Bob Parsons of GoDaddy.com, the website host and registrar. He has 16 rules of success, and he swears by them. Rule no. 9 is: measure everything of significance. By learning about tools you will be able to gauge the progress. Lastly, this book will help you to learn how to keep your soon-to-begenerated cash site up and happy.

Hype versus Reality—the Internet

We've all experienced the hype-versus-reality aspect of the Internet; you labor on your website, crossing every virtual T, and dotting every digital I, in the pursuit of providing a rewarding experience to your visitors and getting your intended message across. You launch your website securely making sure that Google, Yahoo, and the others will bring multitudes of visitors your way, quickly and painlessly. Soon, you'll be on the Internet A-list. However, you wait and ���������������� nothing��������� happens.

What went Wrong?

Nothing. You, like countless others believed the "If I build it, they will come" myth of the Internet. This insidious myth has been circulating since the days of digital yore, spread by the lucky few who were at the right ����������������������������������������� place������������������������������������ , at the right ��������������������� time����������������� , with the right idea������������������������������������������������������ , and most importantly, the right �������������������� venture capitalists�. []

Chapter 1

Today one of the myths is that search engine submission and indexing is the only step needed to build a successful web presence. Yet this represents but one of the weapons in our arsenal. There are many others and as with the ancient Bushidō� �������� code, (�������� Bushidō������� ������ means �������������������������������������������������������������� "way of the warrior"), mastery of one principle does not make a person master of the entire discipline. Just like the Bushido of the Samurai of ancient Japan, the code means a code of conduct. You being a Joomla! warrior must be disciplined in several different skills and conduct, to be successful. Presumably, this book's readership does not reside on the Forbes Magazine list of the world's wealthiest people, so we will assume that we do not have a billiondollar, near‑limitless, pre-dotcom-bust budget, cheerfully funded by breathless, money‑showering venture capitalists, who also want to be "in" on the "next big thing". Instead, we will accept that we must learn and use excellent strategies and tactics to take our ideas and bring them to the rich, ������������������������������������� spending����������������������������� masses. We will accept that we must choose our battlefield carefully, with weapons and tactics suitable to our terrain. By doing so, we will stand out in the crowded digital battlefield and will arise victorious.

The Way of the Warrior

The Way of the Joomla! Warrior encompasses all the techniques of successful website production, and recognizes that what works in one situation may not be suitable in another. It further recognizes that what has worked before may or may not necessarily work again. Finally, it recognizes that hard work, virtue, and persistence are the cornerstones of any successful endeavor, digital or otherwise.

Mind Your P's

As any first-year marketing student will quickly recite, the foundational basis of marketing revolves around four P's: product, place, price, and promotion. Our first weapon to achieve the four P's is ��������������������������������������� preparation���������������������������� . So we begin by developing a comprehensive idea of what we are������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������������� and what we ������������������������������ do���������������������������� , �������������������������� who ���������������������� should be rewarded by visiting us and ��� how. Here's a brief overview of the four P's:

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Welcome Warriors!

Product

Our website's ���������������������������������������������������������������������� prime product��������������������������������������������������������� is usually the content and information, which we use to draw our visitors in. We will typically want this content to be fresh and topical, but we can also get away by offering stale, over-exposed information, if we offer a new twist or interpretation by providing fresh, contrasting, analysis or extension of an otherwise tired topic. As an example, the popular retro-culture site ����������������� X-Entertainment��(http://www.xentertainment.com) quite successfully manages to retread old content by providing a nostalgic, retro spin on cultural icons of the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast to this, are the political commentary sites, many of which manage to not only provide a primary product of fresh analysis and commentary on current events, but also physical secondary products related to the current socio-political zeitgeist. Our ���������������������������������������������������� secondary products���������������������������������� are the products we actually ���� sell. These could be our own products, ranging from exclusive, subscriber-only content that extends, or is related to our free content, to branded merchandise or actual consumer products. In this case, we must not only provide the content, but also a compelling presentation with plenty of reasons to scratch the itch and buy the product. In an e-commerce storefront, our prime products are the ones we intend to sell, and our secondary products are free value-adds, often free user's guides, user forums, or FAQs; this requires that we plan the design of the site's layout appropriately. The astute reader will realize that what we're really discussing here is how to commoditize our visitors: ������������������������������������������������������������ are they consumers of information, or consumers of physical products? Will they generate revenue for us by simply visiting the site, or help spread the word? Or, is their main contribution to our bottom line to be found in products they buy? Proper consideration of the ������������������������������������������������������� true nature of our product����������������������������� is imperative for answering the question of how our product will be presented in our website's design.

Place

Our ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ place������������������������������������������������������������������������� , obviously, is the Internet, and, specifically, our Joomla! site. If we consider our website as we would a store front, then certain operational concerns become evident. We want our place to be attractive, something that draws the visitor's eye right away. We want a clear, uncluttered presentation of information; particularly, we want the information that drives buying decisions to be readily apparent, and attractively presented. []

Chapter 1

Having the Internet as our ��������������������������������������������������������� place ��������������������������������������������������� confers certain advantages and disadvantages. Take a brief look at our primary assets and liabilities on the topic of place:

Some Advantages

A website is a lower-cost medium in terms of cost-per-customer than other mediums. Our Joomla! site is available 24/7/365 to visitors the world over. The Internet permits more than merely the old-school, two-way interactivity of a typical physical retailer. For example, allowing visitors to rate or review content or products allows for a collaborative, multi-dimensional presentation of what is most relevant to our consumers.

Some Disadvantages

Websites lose direct control over their interaction with customers, instead relying on a passive, customer-driven experience wherein the consumer has the final say over how the information presented is interpreted and acted upon. Dissatisfied customers often have no direct, person-to-person capacity to resolve their disputes and obtain satisfaction from an initial unsatisfying experience. Remember, your competition is only a click away. Websites have little-to-no control over the fulfilment process, which is to say, what happens with a customer's product after the checkout process is completed, and the product shipped. Unsatisfactory product-return arrangements from Internet retailers are commonly a major cause of dissent against e-commerce in general. Make sure you consider your customers' experience in the design and operation of the site. Make returns easy. Make sure your HELP number or HELP e-mail address is clearly labeled. Your visitors are not someone simply "passing by" like cars on a freeway.

Price

The old maxim There is no such thing as a free lunch, provides a good basis for our brief discussion of price� ������. If our prime product is free information, then the user often provides restitution for the value our content provides by considering or acting upon our advertising. If our prime products are physical inventories, users often make their decisions based on either the cost, or the features or benefits. In that sense, then, we would want to pitch our free informational resources on a product as a value-add to the product itself, thus benefiting us both with the price and flexibility. []

Welcome Warriors!

Running an e-commerce site, armed with the right components, can enhance your sales. Consider for instance, how your e-commerce site could offer high profit, high impulse products at checkout time to enhance your loss-leader product. An example is a car-charger for your mobile phone, which, offered attractively and at the right strategic time,���������������������������������������������������������������������� would clearly increase your bottom line. In the retail world this is done all the time in the form of "end-caps" and checkout kiosks offering gum, candy, batteries, glass cleaner and all sorts of items that have very high margin.

Promotion

Promotion��������������������������������������������������������������������������� is the subset of marketing where a website can really shine, but also the area in which some of the old mythologies of the Internet can really interfere with proper implementation of a promotional strategy. On one hand, a properly designed Joomla! website can make promotion a breeze by offering the capacity to promote based on word-of-mouth, referrals, optimized search‑engine indexing, banner advertising, RSS feeds, email blasts, document downloads, forums, and more. On the other hand, one problem intrinsic to any website is the problem of cutting through the Internet's natural noise level, and providing our consumers a quick, concise way to drill into our content and obtain their desired benefits. The "build it, they will come" problem we've already considered is part and parcel of promotion. Visitors will come, once it's built, but they must know its there. Having a promotional plan and executing it is another weapon in your arsenal of success. Heed the words of advertising genius, David Ogilvy, I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. Promotion is your advertisement.

The Forgotten P—People

Many aspiring webmasters tend to forget that their visitors are not numbers, but living, breathing people, whose individual needs must be addressed. We should have a clear understanding of our intended audience and design our site accordingly. For example, if our site is targeted towards senior citizens, then we could make certain changes, to make their reading easier, as many older users keep their desktop settings at lower resolutions for increased readability.��������������������������������� We could������������������������� increase the font size, consider a fixed-width and a smaller layout. If the targeted audience is highly technically-literate, then we could overload the visitor with information, as long as that information is well-organized and logically presented. If, on the other hand, our audience is new to computers, a simpler, more intuitive design and layout should be pursued. [ 10 ]

Chapter 1

Analyzing user behavior and psychology is crucial for successful designing. Studies have proven that different genders, age groups, and economic segments respond differently to different color schemes and layouts. More importantly, analysis of a visitors' behavior while visiting your website can reveal trends and patterns that can alter your perception of how your website's information is being ��������������������������������������������������������������� received,������������������������������������������������������ as opposed to how that information is actually being presented���������������������������������������������������������������� . We'll discuss tracking visitors to the site later in the book.

Summary

Just as there are a myriad of options when building a website, there are a myriad of options for defining and refining our marketing concepts and how they relate to our overall plans for our Joomla! website. This book will dive into these topics as well as look at the commercially available and GNU/GPL freely available extensions to make your site shine. If you're ready, warrior, strap on your armor, grab your weapons and let's join the battle…already in progress.

[ 11 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan We will cover the following topics in this chapter: •

Why have marketing plans?

•

Creating marketing plans

•

Objectives for attaining a revenue-generating Joomla! site

Why have Marketing Plans?

This is a question that many business people struggle with. You would not build a house without first checking your finance, finding land, and getting a blueprint for the house. The purpose of the blueprint is to tell the building crew how to build it and what it should look like. It includes a plan for all the necessary items such as plumbing, floors, electrical wiring, roof, and more. Without the blueprint you wouldn't be able to describe your house. Marketing plans are just like that, they describe your offerings, detail your plans for the features, functions, and benefits of your website. In short, without one you would not be able to accurately identify and sell your products at the highest profit margin. As a Joomla! warrior, you may want to go to battle with your marketing plan.

Creating a Marketing Plan

The marketing plan is easy to put together; however, the difficulty comes in knowing what questions to ask, where to find the answers, and factors that constitute a strategy or a tactic. However, let's establish a simple way to remember this. You have a vision����������������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������������� of what the end result of your site would be. This can be considered as your goal. For example, you say that you want to earn $25,000 in the first year of operation.

Creating a Marketing Plan

This is a simple goal that requires a good strategy supported by tactical objectives. As we move into the objectives, you will see how they complement each other, yet change forms, all for the purpose of achieving the goal of $25,000. An excellent tool to help craft a marketing plan is Marketing Plan Pro� from Palo Alto software (see ���� http://www.paloalto.com/ps/mp for more information). This package helps you craft your message and plan by asking you the hard questions. However, for us fellow warriors, let's examine some of the elements that go into a good marketing plan and how to craft them.

Elements of Your Marketing Plan

Your battle plan, i.e. your marketing plan, should at least contain the following elements: •

A solid description of the buyer or the end user of your product or service

•

What segments of the market will you compete in for your product

Each product or service should have a clearly defined statement that discusses your unique value proposition. In other words, why are you different and ���� not� a commodity. Never compete solely on price. You will lose. Compete on value, by defining your value strategy as opposed to your competitors. If I were the buyer, and were comparing your product, against the competitor's product, I would likely buy the competitor's product even though it may be more expensive, if you have not communicated strategically with me throughout the experience. Communications—What advertising should you do? What will it cost? What is your budget? What will it say to the reader or target? Develop an advertising plan within your marketing plan. In your plan, describe your business—what is it? ���������������������������������� Why is it?—Ask yourself, why does my business exist? A powerful warrior will answer these questions with ease. Know your enemy, know yourself, and you will be victorious in all the battles. As you can see a marketing plan is a complex document. It should change as your terrain changes. Should you run into a river (metaphorically speaking) what in your plan guides you around it, or through it? A river may be a rushing torrent, such as a competitor, offering the same products at a lower cost. Be prepared to address these things in your marketing plan.

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Chapter 2

The Warrior's Strategic Objectives

In our marketing plan, we have milestones or objectives. These are built to gauge how we perform to reach our goal. For example, the overall goal of this book is to teach you, the reader, how to use Joomla! to develop a site and sell or provide content, products, or services to make money. With that, there are specific objectives, such as traffic generation, that must be planned. Once we plan for these, we need a way to measure and adapt to the changes. The remainder of this chapter covers these objectives in detail. Take the time to absorb these key concepts as they will prove to fill your quiver with arrows to fire at your target.

Evaluate, Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome

We begin crafting our battle plan by considering our strategic objectives. Once we have determined our overall objectives, we can ��������������������������������� evaluate������������������������� and select the specific tactics necessary to achieve each objective, ������������������������������������� adapt�������������������������������� to emerging trends, ����������� improvise,� and capitalize������������������������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� those trends and other operating conditions. We will overcome����� ������������� our competition by virtue of our enlightened warrior's understanding of the battlefield in question.

Objective 1—Direct Revenue Generation

Our direct revenue generators are the primary means of beginning a revenue stream for our Joomla! site. They provide cash directly—by means of some activity by the visitors, who visit the website, which might range from simply visiting the page to a deeper participation like the visitor taking some kind of action like completing a survey, getting a quote for a product, or even outright buying the product. Here are our weapons for direct revenue generation: •

CPM advertising: CPM costs are priced per thousand. The M in the acronym is the Roman numeral for one thousand. Advertisers pay for each thousand impressions the ad receives.

•

CPC advertising: Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their listing and is redirected to their website.

•

CPA advertising: The advertiser pays only for the number of users who complete a transaction, such as a purchase or sign-up.

•

Affiliate programs:�������������������������������������������������� This model allows you to promote your website on other websites. They in turn will receive payment for click-through, click-per-action, or other means.

•

Sale of physical products. [ 15 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan

•

Sale of instant, branded merchandise.

•

Exclusive multimedia content—�������������������������������������������� subscription access to video, podcasts, etc.

•

Exclusive editorial content (subscription access to content).

•

Newsletter marketing.

•

Donations: This ������������������������������������������������������������� is not a high yield method for revenue, but can work if prompted properly.

Objective 2—Traffic Generation

Generally speaking, more traffic equals more business, equals more money.������ More importantly, increasing traffic is the most important aspect for converting your Joomla! website from a minor hobby to a major asset for your future. Here are our weapons for traffic generation: •

Well-tuned, keyword-rich copy writing: ������������������������������������ In a nutshell there are rules to be followed to get search engines' attention. This area is one of the most critical areas around.

•

SEO: Search �������������������������������������������������������������������������� engine optimization, is the tool you will use to prepare your site to move up in rankings.

•

Getting your site reviewed or featured in other media, such as newspapers and television.

•

Sitemap submissions�������������������������������������������������� : This provides a "roadmap" for search engines to catalogue and document your particular website in their indexes.

•

RSS: RSS ���������� is an ���������������������������������������������������������� XML-based vocabulary that specifies a means of describing news or other web content that is available for "feeding" (distribution or syndication) from an online publisher to web users.

•

Website invitation and referral mechanisms.

•

Cross-promotion with other websites.

•

Use of news-aggregation sites and blog sites.

•

Giving away valuable, free stuff.

•

Running contests.

•

Starting an online club.

•

Starting an event or trend.

•

Newsletters.

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Objective 3—Visitor and Traffic Analysis

Within a few months of your website's launch, new trends and traffic patterns will emerge. The wise webmaster uses this intelligence in the metrics through careful analysis to adapt to the changes and improvise. Through this the webmaster can make changes and updates to the site as needed to improve the traffic and increase the revenue. The following could be used: •

Website log analysis

•

Clickmaps

•

User surveys

•

Product sales versus advertising or promotion

Objective 4—Behavior or Conversion Analysis

After careful analysis of our logs, the webmaster, becoming the Joomla! warrior, can begin to tailor the site to meet the visitors' needs with greater accuracy; turning an eye toward converting the visitors into buyers or consumers of the product or service. The following could be used: •

Prioritizing your content's presentation based on user popularity

•

Determining what features, components, and articles are used

•

Altering the color scheme, or adding additional navigational options

•

Streamlining the e-commerce checkout processes

•

Adding compelling high profit, value-add items

•

Creating a sense of urgency in the customer's mind to adopt or purchase the product rather than delaying the decision

Objective 5�������������������������������� —������������������������������� Competitive Analysis—"Know Thy Enemy"

Arming yourself with knowledge is one of the keys to victory. Gather as much information as possible about your competitors and use this knowledge to improve your site's offering and your interaction with the customers. •

Analyze your competitor's strengths and weaknesses: �������������� Also known as SWOT analysis.

•

Identify under-served niches, topics, and products.

•

Analyze the relative search engine positioning of the competitor, to determine how to gain ground on them. [ 17 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan

•

Analyze the link popularity and referrers for your competitors, so that you may know who they are aligned with and how these alignments would benefit you.

•

Tailor content, products, and offers to address the weaknesses in the competitor.

Objective 6—Bringing it All back Home—"Winning Hearts and Minds"

The most successful websites encourage user loyalty by recognizing the user's contribution to the website's overall success. This recognition has the ancillary benefit of introducing the "rising tide" factor to "lift all boats", that is, it encourages other users to play a more active role in the site. For e-commerce sites, recognizing and rewarding ongoing loyalty can serve as a powerful inducement for users remaining loyal in their buying decisions. Finally, donating some of your site's revenue to charity increases your popularity as a good citizen of the Internet. We can win hearts and minds by: •

Returning value to your visitors (running a points program for free product)

•

Donating some earnings to charity, or donating time by being a supporting member of a technical forum for your favorite open-source software project

•

Featuring user contributions and highlighting individual users

•

Highlighting user's websites and sharing traffic

The Warrior's Tactics

Now that we've established the broad brushstrokes of our master strategy, it is time to move on to the tactical realization of our strategy, identify our individual weapons, and put them to use. Successful Joomla! warriors will rely on a shrewd mix of tactics, techniques towards the competition in their pursuit of the website's strategic plan. These tactics incorporate a thorough understanding of the terrain of our chosen niche, coupled with a full understanding of the tools and practices appropriate to all situations. In the following sections, we'll look at each of these objectives in greater detail.

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Chapter 2

Objective 1—Direct Revenue Generation

As a Joomla! warrior, the sole purpose of your site is to generate revenue or "cash". This cash you generate should represent profit. In other words, after all expenses both hard and soft are accounted for, all you should be left is profit. Hard expenses include advertising, affiliate marketing payouts, cost of goods (COG) which is what it costs you to purchase raw product or material and turn it into product, and then sell it. Soft expenses, often overlooked, are things like time, hosting costs, minor expenses for office supplies or for security certificates. All these have monetary value and should be accounted for in the profit scenario. Let's review ad-based revenue generation in general by considering the Google AdSense model. According to Wikipedia AdSense is: … an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousandimpressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google's targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website. The Adwords charge is measured in either cost ����������������������������� per thousand impressions (1 impression = 1 person looking at the ad) or ������������������������������������������� cost per click����������������������������� . The cost per click can get very pricey and should be chosen against an appropriate budget. As a Joomla! warrior you can place the "AdSense code" on their website, using tools such as mod_html, allowing you to receive ads related to your site's content. When a visitor clicks the ad, you get a small portion of the revenue (CPC). If the ad is in "rotation" and is based on CPM, you will receive a small portion of that revenue as well. You can learn more about Google's AdSense by visiting http://www.google.com/adsense.

[ 19 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan

Affiliate Marketing

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, the online bookstore, is one of the early pioneers of the affiliate marketing program. In fact, he launched one of the earliest affiliate marketing programs way back in July 1996 after having a conversation with a woman at a cocktail party. Since then many sites offer an affiliate marketing program. This affiliate marketing program is typically a passive sales force on the Internet. Someone will "sign up on your site" and request to be an affiliate. After they meet all the requirements set out by the site, they receive some code-scripts to place on their site. Visitors click-through and visit your site, either purchasing or moving along. Either way, they leave a digital footprint, a mile wide and two miles deep. The Joomla! warrior, will follow these tracks in search of their target. If for example a visitor clicks through and buys, one of the more popular methods is to pay a small percentage of the profit. Typically this is accumulated until a certain dollar value is attained at which payout will occur. This can be a powerful weapon for you for many reasons. The first of these is free advertising and the second is to improve the search engine rankings. Many search engines give importance to the number of inbound links coming to your site, in other words, how many places you are listed on other sites. It is an indication of the popularity of your site and can help you gain higher rankings.

Goods, Goods, Goods

Other means of direct revenue generation are sales of physical products, such as apparel, fishing gear, books, or practically anything else. These typically require shipping, which offers another indirect method of revenue by adding markup to the shipping and handling. Instant branded merchandise such as e-books, software downloads, and more provide a Joomla! warrior's site with impulse purchases and of course high profit.

Information is Power

In his groundbreaking book, Membership site bible, Perry Lawrence describes in detail how and why you should offer a subscription service and how to convert it to cash. One item a Joomla! warrior should be versed is turning knowledge into cash. Various tactical methods exist such as: •

Exclusive multimedia content by subscription only, which can include training, special messages, or more

•

News or information that is highly valuable and that consumers will pay for [ 20 ]

Chapter 2

Do not ignore these niche areas as you certainly are a specialist in your hobby or area of expertise. Turning this hobby into dollars is easy and profitable.

Objective 2—Traffic Generation

Generating traffic discussions often revolve around the idea of creating a complex and expensive "ad campaign", which usually delivers less than stellar results. Ad campaigns are great for maintaining brand awareness, but difficult if you are unknown. The warrior must use guerrilla tactics to achieve his or her aim. In that arsenal you will find that saying the right things, being in the right place at the right time, and complying with the search engines' rules of order are some of the most powerful tactics a warrior can employ. Let's dive into them and learn more about each.

Keyword-Rich Copywriting

Keywords are somewhat like categories in which there are mini-categories. For instance, you would not look for a specific automobile part for your classic 1964 Ford Mustang by typing "car parts" in the Google search engine. Rather you would type in specifically "tie-rods 1964 ford mustang". This gives the search engine a way to determine the target site. If your site sold car parts, but only had a sparse mention of tie‑rods and does not state that they are for a 1964 mustang, your site might show up in the search results but not likely at the top. When you craft your keywords, think very hard about what you would search for to find your website. This is what likely will be searched for by others to find you. Keywords should be scattered throughout.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a procedure to prepare your site, its content, your Meta data and Meta tags, your images, and more. The better your site is optimized for the various search engines, the more likely it is that your site will attain high rankings. One excellent resource for learning about SEO is at: http://www.searchenginehelp.com.

Sitemap Submission

Quite simply, a sitemap submission is an XML (extended mark-up language) file that describes where everything is located on your site. The search engines send out spiders that follow and verify the XML document and return their results to the search engine. One of the best tools for Joomla! is OpenSEF and it is discussed further later in the book. [ 21 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan

RSS Syndication or Really Simple Syndication Turning again to Wikipedia we learn the definition of RSS:

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel", contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually. This very popular tool offers the Joomla! warrior a clever method to keep their clients and prospective clients informed using a "push-pull" methodology. Where current levels of spam are nearly crippling to email systems and have certainly rendered email marketing a mediocre effort RSS shines bright. However with RSS, the consumer of the information determines if they wish to receive it. After that you are given a direct conversation with them. For instance, if you publish a monthly news article on dogs and specifically dog shows, then those who have subscribed� ����������� via RSS, using an RSS reader, will receive the updated copy of My Dog Show Monthly News as soon as you post it. Then you need not worry about email and spam filters and whether they checked the site for an update. This is a powerful weapon in the marketing efforts of a Joomla! warrior. Another way to take advantage of RSS feeds is through news aggregation sites and blogs. Spend time and become a contributor to blogsites that relate to your product. Provide news articles to news outlets, and as they push out your news, others will learn of you.

Free! Free! Free!

Other items to generate traffic and sales are to give away something. It may be just a coffee cup, but it's amazing how much someone will give up in terms of personal information to win something. If you can tie up with another site, such as holding a contest to win a prize or promote an online club, it is a great method to draw in visitors, and thus dollars.

Objective 3—Visitor and Traffic Analysis

Recall that the third objective involves analyzing your visitors. As you are likely aware of, walking across the digital landscape that is the Internet, you leave a swath of information a kilometre wide and a kilometre deep! It is that information that we will analyze.�

[ 22 ]

Chapter 2

Our first stop is to learn what our log files say. Every website host has statistical data about visitors, which they collect and often store in the root directory. This information can be very powerful and should be used extensively to promote your site. Some of the items we can expect to get are: •

Which pages get the most and the least traffic on your site.

•

What is the URL of the site that referred a visitor to you (known as the "Referrer").

•

If there is a popular browser for your audience. The log files will tell you what browser and OS that are being used by the client and other information.

•

The log reveals if a search engine has visited and if so which one.

•

What part of the world a visitor came from.

•

What is their IP address.

•

If they searched for you, what keyword or phrase they used.

While this information is abundant, it is often not easily readable without the addition of a "stat package" of which several are available on the Joomla! extensions site. Other important data points to be considered are: •

Clickmaps: ������������������������������������������������������������������ Also called as "heat maps", these are a visual track of where the visitors clicked. Typically a clickmap will show you more intensive hot-spots indicating several clicks. It's a great tool to show you where to move the content that may be of value, but is ignored.

•

Survey says!�: User surveys are tricky, but can provide some great analysis. Keep in mind that unless users are rewarded somehow, they probably won't take your survey and if so the data may be 'iffy' at best. For a great book on surveys, I recommend—How customers think: Essential Insights into the mind of the market, by Gerald Zaltman. This book will show you how to conduct a successful survey. Once you conduct a survey be sure to carefully consider the data and if appropriate, then by all means use it to improve.

•

Product sales versus advertising/promotion�: This is a key metric in determining if a promotion has increased traffic, increased sales or the inverse is true. Has it hurt� sales? This is a powerful and easy-to-measure metric to gauge visitor activity.

[ 23 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan

Objective 4—Behavior and Conversion Analysis

Our fourth objective is one of calculated action based on careful measurement. In other words, we want to convert the window shoppers into buyers. There are several ways to do that and some of the most important points are covered here. •

•

•

Prioritize your content's presentation based on user popularity. Using the concepts presented in objective 4, we see that by watching our log files, using heat maps, and so forth, we can determine what items are the hot favorites. By capitalizing on those and linking to other pages in your site, you can catch a few more set of eyes. Determine what features, components, and articles are used: Focusing on the things that matter the most will make you successful in family, personal, and business life and on the web! Spend����������������������������������������� time to review what items are not being used, viewed, or otherwise may be a detriment. Remove them, hide them or recycle them into something else. Don't make it difficult to use or view your site. Doing so will chase people away. Refine your copy in under-utilized areas: Is your copy as stale as a bachelor's refrigerator? Take time to review it and see if it makes sense. Numerous examples of poorly written copy are seen on websites. This simply tells the visitor that you don't care about them. It says, I'm not smart enough to run a spell check. Sure very few of us are well known authors, but there are some basic things you can do to improve; here are some tips: Ask people who know nothing about your copy to read it, and see if they understand it. ° Buy a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style to check if you have written properly. ° Get a thesaurus. Alter the color scheme, or add additional navigational options: Do your colors scream or make people scream! How does it appear to your visitors? Sure there are culture issues to consider, but unless you are targeting a specific ethnicity, that's a secondary concern. Primary concern is no plaid with stripes! No yellows with a color that clashes, unless that is the aim of your site. Visit the Pantone® color site and learn about what colors mean. What feelings they invoke in the visitors. But what if your colors are perfect but the navigation is lacking? Your visitors will not stay around. Have someone you trust drive through your site while you watch over their shoulder to see how they get from point a to point b. Take notice of it and if necessary repeat it with a few other friends. The information you will gain from this exercise will be very helpful. °

•

[ 24 ]

Chapter 2

•

Streamline the e-commerce checkout processes: Here's a test. Go through your own e‑commerce process as a customer. Buy something with your credit card, *THINK* how is this working? Is it easy? Could I shave steps off? Should the customers enter their information twice? If so why? The most powerful tool in your arsenal is the question "why". Why am I doing this? You might answer and say, "My shopping cart makes me to do it. I have no choice". Bunk! You have a choice. There are thousands of shopping carts, many, many good ones! Find one that makes it easiest for your�������������� ������������������ customers to give you their money. Here are a few tips to help you with this process: °

Remove any unnecessary steps; again change shopping carts if need arises.

°

Put your shopping cart in test mode and run a few test orders with friends. Seek their feed back. Watch how they go through it.

°

Use the power of post-purchase survey. Be thick skinned about it.

°

Read reviews of shopping carts.

°

Spend time at your local grocery store and see how they� ����� streamline the check-out process. See if there is anything you can learn.

°

Adding compelling high profit, value-add items: These are better known as impulse items. The Add-on sale. Are you doing add‑ons? Are you offering say, a high-margin car charger with the purchase of an electronic device you are selling? If you offer services, have you offered an additional perk at check-out time? These can dramatically increase your profit by recognizing the human behavior of buying impulse items.

°

Create a sense of urgency in the customer's mind to adopt or purchase the product rather than delaying decision. You will recognize this tactic in the form of a "limited time" offer. One way to direct the behavior in the direction you want is to put a timelimit on it. For instance, maybe a pop-up that says, buy in the next 20 minutes and get 10% off! This has the benefit of creating a bit of stress in the consumer's mind that they will wish to relieve by purchasing the product.

[ 25 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan

Objective 5—Competitive Analysis "Know Thy Enemy"

One of the tenets of the book The Art of War by Sun Tzu������������������������� is to "know your enemy, know yourself." The underlying thinking here is that you must know yourself very well and your enemy better than yourself. This enables you to think with the enemy's mind. Think what you would do if you were them. Analyze your competitors' strengths and weakness—conducing SWOT analysis. This strategic exercise is conducted by winning companies large and small. Conversely, it is not practiced as often or as much in losing or declining companies. Why conduct a SWOT? This should be your first question. Why are we doing it? Ask ���� yourself, if the objective is attainable, does it serve the purpose of your company? If you can answer these questions, then you can move onto the question of Strength:� What are your strengths? What will this strength provide you? How will this help your competition? Strengths are the attributes of the organization that help in achieving the objective. Once you have this knowledge, take a strong and honest look at your processes and yourself, your staff, your products, in essence everything. Look for Weaknesses. Do not sugar-coat them, review them for what the are. Do not put yourself under condemnation; rather, look at it as a way to turn them into strengths�. Weaknesses are the attributes of the organization that are harmful to achieving the objective. As you move through your planning, you will find Opportunities external to you. These may be in the form of a unique product you offer. It may be a unique service you offer. Whatever it is, an opportunity is something to be exploited. Note these in your planning and note how they can help you achieve victory over your competitor. Remember, they may have the same opportunity as you. Opportunities are external conditions that are helpful in achieving the objective. Threats are ��������������������������������������������������������������������� something against which we must defend. A threat may be a supplychain interruption, such as not being able to ship or receive product. Weather may be a threat. A threat may be competitor who is about to leapfrog you. Whatever they are you must identify them and mitigate them by planning for them. Later in this book, we will examine disaster preparation, which by its nature deals one hundred percent with threats to your organization. You must determine the best defence against threats.

[ 26 ]

Chapter 2

Threats are external conditions that are harmful to achieving the objective. Identify under-served niches, topics, and products�������������������������������� . In many cases, a product that fills this need is worth any price you name. Your product or service can be obtained practically anywhere; its value is driven ������������������������������������������ solely by price. The value of the product would be determined by need if the product or service is available only at a few places. In such a case one could charge a heavy premium. Analyze the relative search-engine position of competitors to determine how to gain ground on them. �������������������������������������������������������������� Let's imagine you sell widgets and your closest competitor is widgetworldwebsite.com. Further imagine that they have a fairly high ranking and show up in the first search page for "widgets". Your widget site shows up on page seven. Who do you think the clients will pick? Surely not you, unless they are explicitly looking for you. By examining your competitor rankings, you can move your site up through various means. Ask yourself, why �������������������� do�������������� they rank so high? Possible answers could be that they have better search engines optimization, or perhaps they have been on the Internet longer. Other possibilities could be that they might have purchased AdWords® from Google, which helped their rankings, or maybe several sites link to them. Examine the reasons and change your site accordingly. Analyze the link popularity and referrers for your competitors so that you know who they are associated with and how these would benefit you. ����������������������� In other words, who do they know that you should know? Are you in the same industry? Would link referrals from those high-traffic sites help you? Maybe, maybe not. However, if your competitor is gaining benefit from it, the chances are good you will as well. Tailor content, products, and offers to address the competitor's weaknesses. Do ������� you have a ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� better mousetrap? If so exploit it! If you don't, get one! After 9-11, a product came in the market, known as AccessWallet™ which was marketed as a travel wallet, designed to accommodate both the air traveler and the security personnel. It was not just a "travel‑wallet"; it had a purpose as well. In fact Entrepreneur magazine (April 2004) said it was a must have. Why is this important? The product was tailored to an industry and a customer's need. The competition, while they competed on quality of leather, price, or availability were selling commodities. The AccessWallet™ gave the buyer an advantage as they moved through the air-security process. This enabled the inventor to offer a product, in a commoditized product space, that could command a premium price. Your site should look for similar advantages.

[ 27 ]

Creating a Marketing Plan

Objective 6—Bringing it All back Home

The entire thought process behind the idea of brining it home is to create a sense of community and belonging. Giving a higher degree of value to the consumer gives them a sense of pride of belonging. Do you sell a repeat-purchase product? Give points toward a free or discounted product. Give it to charity or an open-source author. Look at featuring users' contributions that have added value to your site or highlight other websites and share traffic. It is the law of reaping and sowing: if you sow generously into your visitors and partner sites, you will reap traffic abundantly.

Summary

In this whirlwind view of crafting a marketing plan for your site, we learned that there are several elements to a plan. The first is the plan itself and the tools needed. The plan itself is "why", why are you in business? What is your purpose? How will you serve your customers needs? As you craft, those several objectives become apparent and we covered those in detail, the important ones being traffic generation, products that give you an advantage, revenue generation, and knowing your competitor. The most important point in this chapter is to ��� plan. Plan to succeed, plan for problems, and plan for opportunities. In our next chapter we will discuss generating traffic for your site in detail.

[ 28 ]

Generating Traffic We will cover the following topics in this chapter: •

Search-engine optimization

•

Website structure and organization

•

Promotional optimization

•

Boosting inbound links by playing tag

•

Link baiting

•

Using RSS feeds and services

•

Permission marketing

•

Affiliate programs

What is SEO?

Search-engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of preparing your website to be spidered, indexed, and ranked by the major search engines so that when Internet users search for your keywords, your website will appear on their results page. Proper search engine optimization is a crucial step to ensure success and should be undertaken with care and diligence. It should also be noted that SEO is an interdisciplinary concern, combining web design functions with marketing and promotional concerns. If aimed properly, SEO would be a powerful weapon in your arsenal. Proper SEO is: •

Optimizing META data

•

Optimizing page titles

•

Optimizing page content

Generating Traffic

•

Selecting proper keywords

•

Testing your optimizations

•

Promoting link popularity

•

Using standards-compliant HTML

•

Optimizing image ALT tags

•

Using a logical website structure

•

Validating your content

Proper SEO isn't: •

Keyword spamming

•

Hidden text

•

Cloaking content

•

Link-farming

•

Excessive content or site duplication

•

Paying for questionable links

Structural Optimization

Optimizing your site's actual structure and presentation is the most immediate approach to SEO. Since these factors are under the immediate control of the webmaster, they represent a foundational approach to the SEO problem. Once you've optimized your site's structural components, you can optimize the promotional aspects of SEO, which we'll discuss momentarily.

Items That Search Engines Look for in Your Site's Content

It's important to remember that today's search engine rankings are determined by highly sophisticated algorithms. Trying to stay one step ahead of the major engines with bad tactics is not only a very bad idea, but also a waste of time. Well written content will win repeatedly. Giving the search engine robots a well prepared site page contributes in promoting your site. Three items that many search engine robots look for are: •

Relevant page titles to your content

•

Relevant keywords and descriptions (META tags)

•

Relevant, keyword-rich content, presented in clean and valid HTML [ 30 ]

Chapter 3

Take a note of the recurring theme—"relevancy". If your site is relevant in terms of what the user is looking for, you will achieve respectable search engine rankings without any additional promotion. However, this is not a place to stop, as search engines correlate your site's standings among your peers and competitors by evaluating certain external factors.

External Views of Your Site by Search Engines

Search giant, Google, likes to describe its proprietary algorithm, known as PageRankTM, by discussing how the external factors can accurately define your site's relevancy, when considered along with your site's actual content. Most search engines today follow this formula in determining link popularity. Some popular items that are used to measure are: •

How many websites link to yours

•

Where they link in your content

•

What words are used in the actual link text (i.e. the description of the page)

•

The topical relevancy of the sites that link to your site.

The power of web search lies in the search engine's ability to provide accurate and relevant results that someone can quickly use to find the information they seek. More importantly, the other end of the search process guarantees that the visitors we draw from search engines are truly after the information or services we provide. Another way to look at it would be it's the right message, but the wrong person. Thus we see that our interests, the interests of the search engines, and the interests of web surfers actually coincide! If we tune our content properly, and connect our content with similarly relevant content, we can expect to be rewarded with targeted traffic eager to devour our information and buy our services. If we try to deceive the search engines, or common people, we deceive ourselves. It's that simple.

Optimizing META Data

Metadata is the data about the data. It's the section where you define what a search engine should expect to find on your page. If you've never taken note of META tags before, then take a brief tour of the Web and view the source code of several websites. You'll see how this data is organized, primarily into descriptions and keyword listings. Joomla! provides functionality for modifying and dynamically generating META tags, in the Site | Global Configuration | Metadata dialog, as well as within individual articles via the META tab on the right-hand panel. [ 31 ]

Generating Traffic

This is where the dynamic aspect of metadata becomes important—your main page will have certain needs for proper META optimization and your individual Joomla! content articles will require special tuning to make the best of their potential. This is accomplished though key words and phrases scattered through out the text. Keep in mind that each search engine is different; however keeping ratio of about 3 to 1 for keywords and META (keyword) in the top 1/3rd of the page is a decent rule of thumb. Using the Site | Global Configuration | Metadata dialog, is pretty straightforward. You can enter descriptions, keywords and key phrases that are pertinent to your site on a global level. You should select the META keywords based on the keywords appearing in your content with the greatest frequency. Be honest and use META keywords that actually appear in your content. Search engines penalize you for over use of keywords, known as keyword stuffing.

Title Optimization

What's in the actual title of your page? The keywords you insert into your site and article's titles play a huge role in successful search engine optimization. As with META tags, the key is to insert frequently-used, but not stuffed, keywords into your title, which correlate the relevancy of the site's title (what we say about our site) with the metadata (how we describe what it's about) and the actual content, which is indisputably "what the website is about".

Content Optimization

Writing clear content that uses pertinent language in our intended message or service is the key to content optimization. In your content, include naturally-written, keyword-rich content. This will tie into your META tags, title description and other portions of your site to help you achieve content relevance and thus higher search engine rankings. One note of caution—while we use our best keywords frequently within our text; we should not cram these words into our content. So don't be afraid to break out the thesaurus and include some alternative words and descriptions! Good content SEO is about achieving a balance between what the search engines see, and what your readers expect on arrival.

[ 32 ]

Chapter 3

Keyword Research and Optimization

Researching our keywords not only gives us an idea of how our competitors are optimizing their websites, but also gives us a treasure-trove of alternative keywords that we can use to further optimize our own sites. There are several online tools that can give us an idea of what keywords are most typically searched for, and how the end-users phrase their searches. This provides a vital two-way pathway into the visitor's minds, showing not only how they reach the products and information they seek, but also how they perceive those items. You can find a listing of free keyword research tools at: http://www.joomlawarrior.com. For our example, we'll use Google's freely available keyword suggestion tool for its AdWords program, and use Joomla! itself as our intended optimization candidate. See http://www.google.com/adwords for the keyword tool. The following example will demonstrate the AdWords tool and how it helps you determine good keywords for your site. Entering joomla into Google's keyword suggestion tool yields the following display:

[ 33 ]

Generating Traffic

The three key pieces of information as seen in the previous figure, which help us in making a decision about keywords, are as follows: Keywords: This column indicates the keyword whose Search Volume and Advertiser Competition we want to check. Advertiser competition: This is graphical indicator of how many ads are in rotation for this keyword. Search Volume: Graphical indication of how many people in the world are searching this keyword for a product or service. As we see from the example, when we search for the keyword joomla we see a lower Advertiser Competition than content management system, but a higher Search Volume. If we then examine open source we see a heavy Advertiser Competition, but the same Search Volume as joomla. What this means is that if we advertise in the crowded keyword space—"open source", we can expect a lot of competition. Changing our keyword to Joomla! would give us less competition and about the same Search Volume. If we advertise something related to Joomla! then that would be the best choice. However, if we were advertising a tool for open source, we would want to spend our money on the keyword "open source". The last take away from this is if we are selling a joomla template, you see from the figure that there isn't much competition (at the time this was taken), but a healthy amount of Search Volume.

Website Structure and Organization

Organizing your website according to easily navigated, logical structures is important, not only because the search engine spiders love it, but also because we want our visitors to easily find the information they seek.

Internal Linking and Navigation

Establish a well-laid out menu system by linking all your pages to each other. In addition include a link back to the main page in your logo or header of your site. You can't always predict where a search engine robot will choose to begin indexing your site unless you deploy a robot.txt file, so minimize the number of orphaned, one-way-in, one-way-out pages on your site by including a global-level menu, as well as any sub‑menus that are appropriate to the specific content on a page, along with an easy to find "home" link, so that visitors linking deeply into your content can find their way quickly and easily to other content on your site. [ 34 ]

Chapter 3

Using a robots.txt File

One method to ensure the robots will follow your site in the manner you want is to include a robots.txt file in the root of the site. A robots.txt file is a set of instructions that tells the spiders which portions of the site are important and public and which ones not to be indexed. It is important to remember that the robots. txt file is a suggestion and not a command. Not all the bots or spiders will obey it. Therefore do not store information on your site you wouldn't want to find in Google! The following is the default robots.txt that is installed with Joomla! v1.0.12: User-agent: * Disallow: /administrator/ Disallow: /cache/ Disallow: /components/ Disallow: /editor/ Disallow: /help/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /includes/ Disallow: /language/ Disallow: /mambots/ Disallow: /media/ Disallow: /modules/ Disallow: /templates/ Disallow: /installation/

What this tells the search engine spiders is that all are welcome but they should stay out of certain areas. The User-agent: * is a wildcard designation, which means any spider can crawl the site. The Disallow: /file location/ tells the spider not to crawl. If for instance you wanted to keep all the spiders out of the site you would use the following command: User-agent: * Disallow: /

By adding these two lines to your robots.txt file you will conceivably keep all the search engines from crawling and ranking your site. However, I do not recommend you to use this setting. Remember that the robots.txt files are a strong suggestion and not a rule that they have to follow. To learn more about robots.txt files and their uses you may wish to Google robots. txt or visit: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Write-aRobotstxt-File/

[ 35 ]

Generating Traffic

Using Image ALT and TITLE Tags

Many search engines notice how you provide alternative descriptions for the images within your content. This can help boost your relevancy and keyword density, by giving you additional opportunities to use your best keywords without venturing into spammy territories. It's a free pass to use a few more keywords, so use these attributes whenever you add an image to your site. Joomla! provides an easy WYSIWYG method for doing so from within the default content editor known as TinyMCE, while other editor plug-ins offer the same functionality. To add ALT TEXT to your images, select your content by the following: Content | All content items then select the content you wish to modify. Click on Images, select the image you wish to add an ALT TAG to, scroll down to ALT TEXT and enter your text. This will have double benefit of loading faster on browsers that load without images, and also it will describe the image to the viewer and provide keyword food for the spiders.

Promotional Optimization

Now that you've optimized your actual site, it's time to magnify its appearance to search engine robots by promoting your site on websites that are relevant and wellranked by the search engines.

Link Popularity

Another important component of search engine optimization is link popularity, which is simply the number of external sites linking to your site. Search engine spiders tend to view the entire Internet diagrammatically. From the spider's point of view, the more links pointing to your site, means that more relevant the topic is. More links means more relevance and a higher search engine position. Webmasters can get a rough idea of their link popularity in the major search engines by using a link search. Using www.yourdomain.com, on most major search engines, will return a list of websites that link to your site. If this number is low, you might consider mounting a link campaign. If it is high, you might peruse your inbound links to ensure that they're of good quality and fine-tune the presentation of your link on those sites, if possible. For a complete set of commands visit: http://www.searchcommands.com/link/

[ 36 ]

Chapter 3

Link Anchors

The words used to create links to your website are given more importance by robots and spiders. You should ensure that your keywords are given prominent roles in the anchors you place around the Web as part of a link campaign. Using your company or website's name seems more natural, but should be avoided in general—keeping in mind that the product name could be used in the search and not the company's name. The best way to determine the keywords best suited for your link anchors is by doing a keyword research—commonly searched for phrases are generally the best anchors for inbound links. As an example, let's consider the Joomla! website, http://www.joomla.org. Having done our keyword research, we can quickly see that the keywords we want in our website also make the best possible keyword link anchors for external use. The following are good link anchors: •

Content management system

•

Open-source CMS

The following are bad link anchors: •

Joomla! CMS

•

Joomla!

•

Joomla.org

The idea here is to be creative and well-prepared. By performing your keyword research, you will by now have a good idea about terms that you should include in external link anchors to your website. The point is to be persistent, creative, and neighborly in seeding your links around the web. You don't want to litter one source with the same link, and want your links to be followed by both end users and robots alike. So vary your approach, and tailor it to the source at hand. To continue using Joomla! itself as an example, if you wanted to plant links on a forum for new and beginner-level webmasters, you might use: •

Easy CMS administration

•

Quick and easy CMS

•

Powerful content management

Instead of the frequently searched for examples, remember your keyword research will reveal a large number of alternative keyword phrases that may not be searched for frequently on an individual basis, but offer the opportunity to combine many of these phrases into a campaign that is more effective than trying to rank higher for the frequently searched for, more competitive phrases. [ 37 ]

Generating Traffic

Choosing Relevant Link Partners

You might want to ensure that the places where you leave links are relevant and have high-quality resources. You certainly wouldn't place a link for a furniture store on a website for recipes! Google considers the relevancy of websites linking back to your website as a subset of the formula used to determine your own relevancy.

Determining Link Relevancy

Locating and vetting relevant websites on which to place your link is another area in which the prepared warrior will find great success, by making efforts. In general, you might want to restrict the placements of your links to only the finest, most highly regarded websites and directories. If you have the Google toolbar installed on your browser, or have an SEO-related extension installed in your Firefox browser, then you're already well equipped to get a good quick-read on which websites are best. Just check the site's Google PageRankTM. If the site you wish to link to is PageRankTM level 4 (also known as PR4) or above, it's probably a great choice for placing the link. That said, PageRankTM should not be your only consideration, but you should also consider the website's traffic rankings, search engine results for your key phrases, and overall quality when deciding to place your link or advertisement on a given website. For further information on the concept of ranking please check the following websites: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Don't Go There–Links to be Avoided at All Costs

Since the relevancy of linking websites is considered a part of your own relevancy, you'll want to avoid linkfarms (sites that exist purely as a list of links) and other similarly spammy websites that obviously exist as an attempt to drive traffic in this direction or the other. According to Wikipedia a linkfarm is any group of websites that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. A link farm is designed to spam the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamexing or spamdexing). You might also want to consider the amount of control you have over the link. If you drop links on website forums or other lightly moderated sites, you leave your site's rankings at the mercy of those forum's visitors. If they feel, correctly or otherwise, that you're spamming the forum, then they can easily sabotage your efforts by inserting negative keywords into your attempted advertisement causing the search engines to associate those negative phrases with your website. This can quickly result in some less‑than-satisfactory search engine results. [ 38 ]

Chapter 3

Additionally, you might want to avoid websites that are poorly ranked, as their poor ranking would reflect on yours. You'll often be targeted by such sites, wanting to boost their own rankings at your expense. You should carefully consider the value of the real estate you're providing on your site, as opposed to theirs, before agreeing to any reciprocal linking arrangements. In a word, don't put links on linkfarms "to" or "from" your site. It's simply a bad idea, and a good SEO practice doesn't require it.

Competitive Analysis

Finally, you might want to examine how your competitor is approaching the SEO problem, and adapt your own tactics. You may notice additional keyword phrases to be used, or be able to measure other ways to improve your own site. You may even gain the satisfaction of realizing that your SEO efforts are superior to your competitors! Remember—the astute warrior learns all that the enemy has to teach him or her, and never interrupts the enemy while he or she is making a mistake.

Lock 'n' Load—Using SEO in Joomla!

There are several paths to optimize your Joomla! website. Joomla! offers basic SEO functionality right in the core, and can be partnered with third-party plug-ins, extensions, and components to further optimize a site and its contents for indexing.

Using Joomla's Core SEO

Joomla! provides some terrific basic SEO functionality right in the core, which can be accessed through the Site | Global Configuration dialog in the Administrator's Control Panel.

Once we've set the Search Engine Friendly URLs option to Yes, we'll be reminded by Joomla! to copy the contents of the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess.

[ 39 ]

Generating Traffic

What is .htaccess?

.htaccess is a special file, read when the web server first accesses a file in

a directory that gives special instructions on how to handle the files therein. Specifically, the .htaccess file provides instructions on how to translate Joomla's URLs into an easier format for both the search engine spiders and humans. For example, a non-friendly Joomla! URL might look as follows: http://www.myexampledomain.com/index.php?option= com_content&cat=2&id=2

After being made friendly, this URL would show up in your browser's address bar as: http://www.myexampledomain.com/content/view/2/2/

This helps bypass issues with search engines being unable to index content that is "deeper" than simply index.php. Later in the book, we will explore disaster preparation and will cover backup and restoration, if this method causes your site to fail.

Copying htaccess.txt to .htaccess

Either from a console shell, or via FTP, simply rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess, enable the SEO feature in Site | Global Configuration | SEO in the administrative console of the Joomla! site, and you should be ready to go!

Are we Done Yet?

As we've already discovered, for best effect, we want some of our actual keywords in our URL, and we want our URLs to reflect the structure of our site. Thus, we will probably want to take the SEO fight further, by using a component to further rewrite our URLs with even-friendlier URLs. To do this, we simply obtain our SEO/SEF component of choice from Joomla!'s extensions site. There are several such components available. We have chosen the popular OpenSEF package.

Installing and Configuring OpenSEF

At the time of writing this book, the 2.0.0-RC5_SP2 version of the OpenSEF component is available and can be downloaded from the Joomla! forge website at: http://forge.joomla.org. One word of caution—OpenSEF may not work with all extensions; therefore it is wise to check with the author's website about the extensions as well as do extensive testing to ensure compatibility prior to putting it into production. [ 40 ]

Chapter 3

Installing

The component installs as normal, through the Installers | Components dialog. However, we still have much to do after we've installed it. We must tweak the .htaccess file to use our new component's SEO logic, rather than Joomla's core SEO logic. To do this, we "comment out" Joomla!'s core SEF in .htaccess, and "comment in" the 3rd Party SEF section: ########## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section ############# Use this section if using ONLY Joomla! core SEF ## ALL (RewriteCond) lines in this section are only required ## if you actually ## have directories named 'content' or 'component' on your ## server ## If you do not have directories with these names, comment ## them out. # RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes## RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php # ########## End - joomla! core SEF Section ########## Begin - 3rd Party SEF Section ############# Use this section if you are using a 3rd party (Non Joomla! core) SEF extension - e.g. OpenSEF, 404_SEF, 404SEFx, SEF Advance, etc # #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes## #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC] #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d #RewriteRule (.*) index.php # ########## End - 3rd Party SEF Section

All this involves is removing the # characters from the lines in the 3rd Party SEF Section, while adding # characters at the beginning of the lines in the Joomla!! Core SEF section. Now that we've settled these prerequisites, we're ready to configure OpenSEF. The OpenSEF configuration dialog is located at Components | OpenSEF | Configuration: [ 41 ]

Generating Traffic

Enable OpenSEF by selecting Yes in the OpenSEF Enabled? option. The other options on the Basic Settings screen are administrative, so we'll switch to the SEF tab. Here we have an array of options to control how OpenSEF alters and redirects URLs:

[ 42 ]

Chapter 3

Most of these options are fairly straightforward, but pay special attention to the Section Title Fields and Category Title Fields, as well as the Content Title Field. These controls alter how your redirected URLs will display. An important field you might want to pay close attention in the SEF tab is the 404 Not Found URL, which can be set to index.php or a custom 404 error page. Moving on, the Replacements tab provides an alternative mechanism for manually replacing certain problematic characters. Should you have trouble with you thirdparty components and redirected URLs, click on the Core Alias tab and review the settings as shown in the following figure:

Some common problems occur in situations where the "alias" URLs conflict with actual, physical URLs in your structure, so keep a close eye on these situations, as they will cause your redirected URLs to display errors. Most of these problems can be addressed by excluding OpenSEF from redirecting for certain components. This option is available in the Components tab. The Features, Advanced, and Metatags tabs provide advanced functionality for the OpenSEF component, with the Metatags function expanding on Joomla!'s core capabilities in that department. These options are quite straightforward for the most part, but for an exhaustive description of their functions, consult OpenSEF's documentation. It is worth nothing that some third-party components will fail when using OpenSEF. Review the forums for your third-party extension problems. And don't forget to test, test, and test. [ 43 ]

Generating Traffic

Tip for Using OpenSEF

At this point, we click Save, and refer back to our main page to verify proper operation of OpenSEF. Note that OpenSEF will not "rewrite" URLs until a given article has been accessed; for a big site with lots of existing articles and content, it may take some time for your visitors to do this work for you by clicking around your site. Here's how the rewritten URLs appear on http://www.joomlawarrior.com:

As we can see, we've now been rewarded with keyword-rich addresses that combine with Joomla!'s dynamic page titles to effectively account for two of the most important aspects of proper search engine optimization.

Using the Sitemap Feature

Google gives great importance to sitemaps; giving sites that use a well-organized sitemap priority in its search-indexing. OpenSEF includes a built-in function to quickly generate and put a sitemap to use. We begin configuring our sitemap by entering the OpenSEF configuration dialog and clicking on the Google Sitemap tab.

[ 44 ]

Chapter 3

Configuring OpenSEF's Sitemap XML file name: This entry simply controls the filename of the exported XML RSS feed file. It's best to use a descriptive name. Sitemap Location: By default, OpenSEF might output your sitemap to the components/com_sef directory, but we'll want to have this in our site's root to be truly Googlecompliant. As such, simply take this field and blank it out. Last Modified: Allows you to specify whether your site's Last Modified date should be the current date, or the date of the most recent change as stored in your site's database. Change frequency: Tells Google, or the other search engines, how often to expect the site's content to change. This allows for more efficient indexing by the robots, and speaks to how relevant your site is, by defining how current you keep your site. Priority: Refers to the relative priority of deep pages, when compared to your index page. Display Edit Screen after Scan: This is simply a precaution against a lengthy list of articles to be inserted into the sitemap causing the Control Panel to display a blank screen.

[ 45 ]

Generating Traffic

Generating the Sitemap

Now that we've specified our settings, we can generate the sitemap. We start by simply clicking the Generate XML option from the left-side menu in OpenSEF:

Once we've done this, we'll see a list of available content items to be considered for our sitemap. OpenSEF includes everything, so we'll want to carefully edit each entry, and avoid giving undue indexing priority to our advertisements, links, FAQ, and other ancillary content to the detriment of our main content items.

[ 46 ]

Chapter 3

Once we've checked the articles for inclusion in our sitemap, we can simply click Save XML File and create our sitemap. If you get a message saying that the sitemap could not be generated, you have a permissions issue. You can perform either of the following steps: •

Create a blank text document with the yoursitemapname.xml format and upload it via FTP and CHMOD it to the proper permissions for writing by the web server.

•

If you have access to the console shell, you can simply enter touch yoursitemapname.xml, and then CHMOD.

Assuming that everything's working properly, your sitemap will be generated, and you'll be apprised of such by the proceeding dialog. You're now ready to submit your sitemap to search engines!

Submitting the Sitemap

You can submit your newly-generated sitemap not only to Google, but also Yahoo, via their Site Explorer option, available at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. You'll be asked to verify the ownership of your site, by either including a special META tag within your site's HTML, or by uploading a special HTML file to your website's root. [ 47 ]

Generating Traffic

To insert a META tag, insert it into the META section of your template via the Site | Templates | Edit HTML dialog.

SEO Conclusion

"If you build it properly, they might come." That's the hard lesson borne by hundreds of website launches in the last ten years. What we've really been talking is about building the foundation of our "house", and now we need to see about making our house livable for our guests and visitors. The key to proper SEO, once you've mastered the basic aspects and their interactions, is to test, test, and test! If you do not achieve the rankings you want, try adding or subtracting aspects of the title, META tags, or SEO settings till you start achieving the results you want. However, remember that SEO is a trailing indicator—Changes you make today may not be reflected in your search engine rankings for a couple of weeks, so remember to be patient as well. However, we cannot expect to achieve real success on the basis of our efforts alone. It is imperative to involve our visitors in this process as quickly as possible, so we can sit back and watch our content spread across the Web like a tidal wave.

Getting Visitors to Play Tag

The greater we spread our content across the web, the better the chances are of our website becoming successful. And the easier we make it for our users to spread that content, the more likely it is that they'll take the effort to do so.

FijiWebDesign's TagBot

FijiWebDesign's Joomla! tagBot makes it easier for a Joomla! webmaster to dive into the world of user-submitted news aggregation, by implementing an easy to install plug-in (mambot) that provides customizable links at the bottom of every news article that allow your members to submit your articles to numerous aggregation sites and services.

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To start with, we download the plug-in file from www.fijiwebdesign.com and install it via the Control Panel's Installers | Mambots dialog. Then, we must configure and publish the tagbot mambot, via the Mambots | Site Mambots dialog:

Here we see that there are multiple options for controlling the tag's display positions. We can restrict our tagging mechanism to just individual articles, or include the tagging mechanism on our front-page content, depending on the site's needs. TagBot includes the ability to display up to 21 different tagging options, so we'll want to consider the space requirements for such large line of icons, and plan accordingly in selecting and ordering our preferred tagging choices:

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Generating Traffic

We can also use the configuration dialog to control whether the tagging mechanism triggers within modules and alter the CSS styling of the tagbot. Here is the result, after publishing the plug-in and selecting our preferred aggregators:

Careful analysis will be a key in determining whether your tagbot performs best when placed before the text article, or after it. I've placed the content on JoomlaWarrior.com to complement this book and as it is quick-glance type material, I've placed it before the main text article. The important thing is to give your visitors the opportunity to take some of the promotional burden off your shoulders. Once we've done that, we'll be rewarded by constantly running into new places where our readership will drop links for us. The more links we have, the more popular we become, and we begin to obtain a critical mass, moving beyond lesser websites and truly beginning to generate a major audience. Verify this plug-in works with your version of Joomla! before you deploy it. At the time of writing this book, it was tested on v1.0.11 and found that it did not function properly however, upgrading to Joomla! v.1.0.12 seems to have fixed it.

Linkbaiting Techniques

Linkbaiting refers to the practice of obtaining inbound links by providing content that encourages visitors to drop links to your site on other websites of their own accord. Another definition comes from modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk and reads: Linkbait is essentially a piece of content placed on a web page–whether it's an article, blog post, picture, or any other section of cyberspace—that is designed for the specific intention of gathering links from as many different sources as possible. In an ideal circumstance, you're contributing to the value of your visitor's Internet experience, and they're rewarding you by voluntarily, and democratically, linking your site externally. In less ideal circumstances, you're gaining negative attention by virtue of people linking your site in an undesirable or disparaging context.

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Chapter 3

Case Study on Linkbait—Oxfam.org.uk– "Bit Unfair"

Oxfam is a large charity based in the United Kingdom, analogous to the Salvation Army in the United States. They operate thrift shops, and operate their website as a means of promoting their mission to end poverty. This is fine and good, but consider, who is likely to visit Oxfam's website? Is it for people who have understood the message, or is it for people who may have never stopped a moment to consider the plight of the poor? Take a look at their website and decide for yourself:

It's easy to see here: Oxfam's website preaches to the converted. People who visit Oxfam.org.uk visit because they already know Oxfam's core mission, and either want to help by buying from their commercial operations, or wish to donate directly to the cause in question. How does Oxfam reach the people who matter the most: the people who have never taken their message into account? They create a fun website that illustrates in no uncertain manner the points they are trying to make. They call it "A Bit Unfair", and it's a excellent linkbait. You can visit it yourself at http://www.bitunfair.com.

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Generating Traffic

The "game" starts by presenting you with an easy set of choices: define how much you spend in cash, on clothes and other luxuries, on a regular basis. You then get to select from a comical series of "contests", which, depending on your choices, always end up displaying just how hard it is for people born poor to break the shackles of poverty. The whole thing is accompanied throughout by a hilariously pompous emcee, who reminds the visitor that "you can't do anything about being poor".

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Chapter 3

At the end of the game, the "player," having learned something of just how arbitrary poverty can be, is offered the opportunity to sign up for Oxfam's mailing list, play the game again, or send it to a friend.

Now, consider: If you were going to try to illustrate the plight of the poor to an uncaring audience, would you try sticking to dry statistics? Perhaps, but for those who are immune to PowerPoint®, this excellent viral site is just what the doctor ordered. It makes the core points in a fun way, without being overly preachy.

Typical Linkbaiting Tactics

There are several tactics by which you might successfully linkbait: •

Adding unique, informative content

•

Employing humor to get your message across

•

Giving the visitor a motivation to virally spread your message [ 53 ]

Generating Traffic

Using RSS Feeds

What is RSS? RSS is known as Really Simple Syndication. Think of it this way. Every time you want to read a favorite blog or a new site you have to visit it. If there isn't anything there, then there was no use visiting it. With RSS Feeds, you can set up a "subscription". For instance, if you publish the SYNDICATION module on your Joomla! site you enable a feed. When you subscribe to a feed using a reader such as Google Reader, whenever a blog, a website or other Internet-based information source is updated, the reader receives a copy of the change. The information is pushed to you; this means you don't have to go looking for it! It arrives just like the newspaper in your lawn on Sunday mornings. This is a perfect way to allow your customers to stay in touch, but not be inundated with email. Lots of people use RSS, such as newspapers. According to the Bivings Report, July 2007, America's Top 100 news papers (97%) use RSS. Other uses of RSS include podcasts, which deliver fresh podcasts to your client, which are in turn made available on your favorite MP3 player. RSS has nearly unlimited uses for keeping you in touch with your customers. Imagine if you put out a catalog of your goods and the prices were subject to change on a regular basis. By publishing the catalog via RSS feeds, the customers would always have the most recent and up to date information available. Think what kind of applications this could have to keep marketing information in the customer's hands, such as updated specifications on your newest widget. With RSS you can easily stay in your customers' minds, and their hearts. Let's say that you are developing a new website for a real-estate agent using EZRealty, (www.raptorservices.com.au), and you recommend RSS to the realestate agent. The real-estate agent could keep their prospective buyers informed of properties by providing an RSS feed to them. Think about that! A steady stream of homes arrives in their inbox as they are added to the site. This small difference may make or break a sale in a hot real‑estate market. As you develop your strategy for generating traffic keep this secret weapon in your arsenal. Here is a link to learn more about RSS, how it works and its uses: http://www.rss-specifications.com/industry-feeds.htm.

Permission Marketing

Permission marketing is the term coined by Seth Godin and it simply means that you "take" the consumer's permission before sending them materials. [ 54 ]

Chapter 3

Think about "spam". Spam is so prevalent that industries are built around to stop it. The United States congress, tried to enact a law "the Can-Spam act" that addressed the "permission" part of sending information to customers through email, but failed to realize that only honest people ask for permission. Spammers in foreign countries (outside the US) don't care about permission. They flood networks and inboxes with spam. Rules to follow to be successful in permissions marketing: •

Do not send emails unless a customer has "opted in". This means you need to have a terms and conditions button or check box on your site when someone signs up for an account. Take the time to craft a friendly, clear message stating that they agree to receive information from you occasionally (or what ever period you deem) and they do not have to accept these terms. However if they don't you aren't obligated to allow them access.

•

Publish your privacy policy. Consult what ever legal expert you need, but make sure you detail out what you will or won't do with their information. How you will protect it and what will happen if you suffer a breach and their information is compromised.

•

Opt-out. This is a process where you allow the customer the opportunity to be removed from your list. Even if they agreed at one time, once they change their mind, honor it. Make it easy. I have one example where I opted out, the guy confirmed with this wonderful email, etc. However, I still receive his emails. I use GMAIL and as such, I marked him as spam.

•

Use their email address wisely. Did they buy something? Confirm the purchase by email. Confirm the product has shipped, give them a tracking number with a link to the shipper. Do you have a new product that may complement their purchase? Send details of it along. But do not, do not, do not, simply email to spread your message to them.

•

Return the favor. Customers are not giving you their address so they can have more email. They expect something in return. If you build your list , offer them something for signing up. Give them a 10% off coupon for your product, give them a free "how-to" guide. In other words, it's a barter. You give me your email address and permission to communicate with you and I will give you something in return.

•

Do not release your list. It is as valuable as gold and would turn to dust if you released it. Do not sell it, do not rent it, do not give it or in any shape or form show it. This is intellectual property. Make sure they know you will guard their information (privacy policy) and that it's safe in your hands.

•

Do remember, that one angry customer can have a much larger effect than thousand happy customers who won't mention you. [ 55 ]

Generating Traffic

Affiliate Programs

An affiliate program is simply a way to spread your product, good, or service to other websites by offering money, perks, or other rewards. An "affiliate" website will sign up with you, agree to your terms and conditions, and then place a small bit of code on its site. As its customers or visitors see this some of them might click the link provided, and might buy your product or service. Once this is done, a predetermined amount of funds are credited to that website. At the level determined (usually $50.00 or more) they are paid out. The beauty of this is you get a potentially a large number of websites pushing out your message, which has the benefit of higher search engine rankings, more "eyes" for your product or service, and higher sales. The downside is you have to share your profit. You may not like what their site is about or want to be affiliated with them. Remember you have complete control over that aspect. One of the most successful programs is the Amazon.com affiliate program. By placing a small link and graphic on your site you can offer the entire Amazon. com catalog to your customers and if they buy, you (the website owner) get a small portion of the sale. You can see how encouraging others to sign up for your program would have the potential to grow and grow. In a later chapter we'll cover a tool, IDevAffiliate, in detail. This great product can set up your site to accept, track, and pay affiliate websites. Some important tips about affiliate marketing to drive traffic to your site are: •

Make it easy to sign up.

•

Make it worthwhile to sign up.

•

Be prompt in payment.

•

Provide over-the-top-incredible support.

•

Take the time learn about the affiliates' sites and tell them so—write them a note of thanks for putting your link in a prominent place.

•

Do you see an affiliate site in your network that impresses you? Do they offer an affiliate program? Sign up! Offer to do a link exchange.

•

Remember, affiliate programs are simply modern-day bartering systems.

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Chapter 3

Summary

In this chapter we learned about generating traffic through various means such as search engine optimization, great content, excellent and judicious use of links, and more. Use of an search-engine friendly tool, such as OpenSEF can enhance your site by making your URLs user-readable and friendly. It is worth reminding you that having an affiliate program is invaluable to your efforts through the sharing of wealth with those who help you. Remember, you reap what you sow. The key to getting into your customers minds and hearts is respect. Respect them by asking permission. Permissions-based marketing is critical for your success in any email-based program. In our next chapter we'll delve into the topic of analyzing and improving the traffic through the use of your log files. Don't forget to consider your customers' needs and wants in your marketing program. Next up—Traffic analysis!

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Traffic or Log Analysis We will cover the following topics in this chapter: •

Obtaining logs

•

Getting actionable data

•

Google analytics

Traffic or Log Analysis is Vital Intelligence

Traffic analysis is the science of obtaining actionable data from your website's logs. Your logs can deliver facts about your membership that you might not be aware of, such as which articles are gaining the most readers and which are most likely to keep a new visitor reading your site, where your traffic originates, and also the platforms, browsers, and software used by your user base. All these factors can influence the use of the other weapons in this book, particularly search engine optimization, or be used when making design decisions. Traffic analysis can also prove effective in deciding where your marketing efforts will provide the best possible payoff. In short, traffic analysis is vital intelligence that a webmaster ignores at his or her expense.

Obtaining Logs

Most hosting providers collect and can provide you with access to the raw HTTP logs. If they do not, you should strongly consider switching to a different provider. Your logs will typically be stored in a directory just above your website root, or will be accessible through whatever user control panel solution your provider has selected. Your hosting provider will be able to provide the necessary information to gain access to the log files.

Traffic or Log Analysis

What Information Do the Logs Provide? Most raw HTTP logs provide the following information: •

The visitor's IP address

•

Their browser and associated plug-ins and extensions

•

The page or file requested, and the status of the transfer

•

The URL from which the visitor was referred

•

Time and date of visit

•

Country of origin

And much more, which we will see later in this chapter.

Getting Actionable Data

To get truly actionable data, we need to cast a wider net. There are many approaches to this problem, but we'll take a look at two common solutions for obtaining actionable data based on your website analytics, JoomlaStats and Google Analytics, each having its own unique strengths and virtues:

JoomlaStats

The JoomlaStats extension can be obtained through JoomlaStats.org, and offers convenient, back-end availability of vital statistics.

Pros •

Convenient, easily installed, available through Joomla!'s admin interface

•

Full array of statistics provided

•

Deep referring-URL digging

•

Plenty of modules to display statistics on front-end pages as needed

•

Attractive admin interface

•

Platform and JavaScript independent

Cons •

Adds a lot of MySQL queries, making the pages "heavier" on your server.

•

Log files will continue to build in your database potentially causing slowdowns and affecting backups.

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Installation

The component, once obtained through the JoomlaStats site, or via Joomla!'s extensions directory, is quickly and easily installed via the Installers-> Components menu, and the accompanying modules are equally easy to install. After you install the component add this to your default template, directly after or under the statement:

Click the Save button.

As you can see from the administrative overview, JoomlaStats provides a very rapid and intuitive approach to grasp your website's reach, giving you information such as the total number of visitors, how many times they visited, how many pages were viewed, and how many visitors were referred to your site.

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Traffic or Log Analysis

At the top of the screen, you see your options for drilling down to more actionable data: •

Global stats on a monthly or yearly basis

•

Daily, monthly, or yearly visitors as arranged by hostname or number of visits

•

The systems and browsers in use by your membership

•

Referring URLs, drilled down to individual pages on clicking

•

Search referrals

•

Visitors by Country

•

Bots and Spiders

•

Unidentified visitors and robots

•

As a benefit specific to JoomlaStats, it offers correlation between IP addresses, and the registered members associated with them!

Google Analytics—Another Approach

Google's free Analytics program is simply another approach of traffic analysis. Google also integrates analytics with its popular AdWords program, allowing the webmaster to refine their CPC contextual ad buys and targeting over time based on actionable daily statistics. You can sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics.

Pros •

Easily installed, remotely hosted, saves bandwidth and resources

•

Light-weight JavaScript tracker

•

Full array of statistics, including screen resolutions in use by your visitors

•

Easy, powerful administrative interface for advanced users

•

Provides actionable intelligence for AdWords buyers

•

Handy map showing visitor origins at a glance

•

Provides a handy Site overlay click-map showing what areas of your site are hotspots for user clicks, giving you important information on how to best use the available screen "real estate" on your page

•

Wide array of data-exporting options

•

Wide array of reporting options, sorted by webmaster, content, marketing, and conversion summaries

•

Wide array of statistical reports [ 62 ]

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Cons •

JavaScript dependent

•

Excessively complicated reporting for beginners and those with simpler needs

•

Admin interface is heavily flash-based, and is best used on broadband.

Installation

Installing Google Analytics is simple; you can simply add the provided JavaScript tracker code to the bottom of your page, just above the tag, using the Site>Site Templates->Edit HTML dialog.

Overview

Here's a look at Google Analytics' administrative overview:

Google's vast array of reporting and summary options can be overwhelming to the beginning user, and early experimentation is a key in understanding just how powerful this free solution truly is. However, there are, a few items to pay particular attention to, as they're features you won't find so conveniently packaged elsewhere: The Site Overlay, as mentioned, shows you a click-map of where your visitors are navigating on your site, and where they aren't. The calendar tool can be used to adjust reporting for specific date ranges, as needed. [ 63 ]

Traffic or Log Analysis

The optimization tools help you better prepare your content for inclusion into Google and other search engines.

Taking Action

Now that we're armed with all the data, it is time to define our goals and how we intend to make use of the information we've gathered.

What You Need to Learn You need to learn the following: •

Who is visiting

•

Where they're coming from, and when

•

What kind of platform or browser combination they're running

•

How they got to our site and what they searched for (i.e. why they came)

•

How long they're staying at your site, and why they might be leaving

•

What countries are drawing the most traffic and attention and if possible, why

•

How widely your site is spread throughout major, minor, and specialist search sites

What You Need to Do with This Vital Intelligence Right Now You should do the following: •

Spot peaks and valleys in your traffic quickly, and take action. Don't let another site steal the spotlight!

•

Track your average pageviews-per-visitor. For a content-based website earning ad revenue, increasing pageviews-per-visitor translates immediately to your bottom line!

•

Target weak days in your traffic for special promotions. Send newsletters on that day, and directly monetize the resulting traffic by writing strong, selling copy, and providing a sense of urgency to buy, adopt, read, etc.

•

Leverage your returning visitors by providing further inducements to their visit! Take notice of when a customer comes back your way again!

•

Tailor your site to specific browser or platform combinations by tailoring your site's CSS. Spot the minor differences in your site's presentation across platforms and push for a uniform user experience for the greatest number of visitors. [ 64 ]

Chapter 4

•

Optimize your site for easy reading for the widest possible array of visitors, or tailor your site to maximize the value of users running with wider screen formats.

•

Learn what searches are bringing you the most traffic, and tailor your approach. Take the lessons learned from the SEO on your popular pages and apply them to your less-trafficked pages.

•

Cross-promote the less-trafficked content on more-popular parts of your site, and offer related content to visitors coming into specific articles from searches.

•

Keep an eye on your popular searches using this to fine tune your content or advertising.

•

Learn about new search engines you can submit other projects to, particularly smaller engines that specialize in particular searches. These can be a source of highly convertible traffic, since visitors from such sources know precisely what they're looking for, and what to do with it when they buy.

Remember the important data that you can glean from your logs is: •

Number of visits

•

Most popular pages

•

Entry and exit pages

•

Most popular paths visitors take

•

Depth and length of each visit

•

Where the visitors come from

•

What search engines visitors are using

•

Which search terms visitors are using

•

A lot of information about the browsers, operating systems, and robots that visit your site

It is important to note that this is hardly an exhaustive list! That is the strength of this particular weapon in your arsenal. The ways to aim and fire it are only as limited as the webmaster's imagination. Moreover, this is a weapon whose value increases over time, as you become able to track month-over-month and year-over-year increases in sales or traffic. Overall, using more than one method of gathering and analyzing website traffic data is strongly recommended. Both the solutions that we looked at, as well as all the others in the market, have their own specific weaknesses and underreported data, so taking a multi‑tiered approach is the optimal way to obtain the fullest possible picture of your website's true reach and potential. [ 65 ]

Traffic or Log Analysis

Summary

Between your SEO work and traffic analysis, you should be able to get a fairly good picture of how usable your website is, and how easily visitors can reach critical information without actually needing to consult your visitors. By consulting your visitors, you'll obtain the clearest possible picture, and obtain critical actionable data on how your website can be improved.

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Site Layout and Optimization In this chapter we will learn the following: •

Optimizing your site for ease of use and credibility

•

Menu navigation and content organization

•

Content navigation

•

Accessibility

•

Measuring usability

•

Color psychology, typefaces, and design

Optimizing Your Site for Ease of Use

The first aim should be that the visitors locate your site. The search engine optimization techniques are your best weapons for this. Once they find it, are they going to see a few poorly taken pictures and some badly written copy, or will they find a bigger-than-life professional, credible site? According to Barrie North of Compass Designs, creditability is as important as anything else. If your site looks like as if your twelve year old nephew put it together, your customers are going to assume you are not for real. Barrie North writes: Viewers must think your website is credible: Once they have found your site, and figured out how to use it, they need to stay on it. "When a site lacks credibility, users are unlikely to remain on the site for long. They won't buy things, they won't register, and they won't return" (Stanford-Makovsky 2002). What makes a site credible? In the same study Stanford/ Makovsky found that the "Design Look" or the site's overall design or look accounted for

Site Layout and Optimization

46% of a site's credibility. This included layout, typography, white space, images, color schemes, and so on. This was followed by "Information Design/Structure" (28%) [ or how well ] or poorly the information fit together, as well as how hard it was to navigate the site to find things of interest. You can visit: http://www.compassdesigns.net/tutorials/joomla-tutorials/ usability-accessibility-web-standards-seo.html to view the complete text. The way your site is laid out and organized can have a huge impact on the visitors surfing your site. This, in turn, has an impact on the duration for which these visitors remain on your site, and the actions they take—sales, joining the site, giving permission for further contact, etc. We'll start by looking at the foundational approaches of site layout, and draw a more complex perspective, in which we seek to make our templates, layouts, and designs as inclusive as possible through the use of powerful Joomla! extensions. Since the installation and configuration of the extensions in this section are either very easy, or very complicated, we shall forego the usual installation instructions, focusing instead on how to use these extensions to achieve the desired results, rather than how to install them.

Menu Navigation and Content Organization Take a look around at some of the most successful e-commerce sites. You will notice two basic approaches:

Simplicity

Simplicity and elegance as a design philosophy aim to make navigation streamlined, narrowing the full scope of content or products offered down to a relatively few navigational choices, and forcing the viewer through those narrow chutes into their wider offerings. Champions of this approach include Joomla! itself, and many of the big name players in the computer software and hardware industry.

Pros •

Provides an obvious, easily navigated gateway to commonly used parts of a website

•

Clean, elegant, and easy on the eyes

•

Convenient for inexperienced or novice users [ 68 ]

Chapter 5

Cons •

Difficult to find more detailed, or infrequently accessed content

•

Increases reliance on internal search capabilities on the site as users try to efficiently drill down to their desired content

•

Frustrating for the experienced users who know the features, pages, or products they want

Complexity

Sites with more varied and disparate content might need to consider a more complicated navigational scheme. While this offers a certain amount of flexibility to provide the widest array of destination content to the widest array of people, it also represents a problem for clearly delineating navigational options within a coherent structure. Champions of this approach include Yahoo, MSN (the portal), and popular geekculture sites such as Slashdot and Digg, and news portals such as CNN.com. The philosophy here is that people will find the content they're interested in easily, and know where to look for it in the future.

Pros •

Provides first-page access to the largest-possible percentage of content

•

Provides cross-pollination opportunities between visitors pursuing different content, products, or articles

•

Allows for flexibility in presentation of navigation options

Cons •

Crowds and clutters your presentation

•

Confuses new users, and sometimes experienced ones as well

•

Can make relational navigation, i.e. telling others how to get somewhere, unnecessarily difficult

Meeting in the Middle

Joomla! provides the infrastructure necessary to meet your user base in the middle, by providing flexible and powerful submenu capabilities that expand the "main" menus and can be independently positioned by directly adjusting the template code, or by any one of several extensions available at the extensions site or elsewhere. [ 69 ]

Site Layout and Optimization

I particularly recommend the following: • •

Menu4Joomla (http://www.menu4joomla.com) ExtendedMenu (http://de.siteof.de)

Each of these menu solutions adds worthwhile functionality to the core menu systems without getting too fancy. If eye candy is what you want or need for a particular project, there's plenty available on the extensions site at http:// extensions.joomla.org/.

Content Navigation

If you're dealing with lengthy content, you will, of course, want a detailed table of contents to lead the experienced users to the parts of a particular article that might be relevant to them. A good example of this sort of navigation is the tables of contents sections in articles on Wikipedia.org.

Pros • •

Gets your users quickly to relevant information within content they might be otherwise familiar with Provides a clear picture of the content to be presented and discussed

Cons •

Visitors will not stay around or return if they cannot navigate easily.

Implementation

This topic is covered in Packt Publishing's book Building Websites with Joomla, by Hagen Graf. It's in Chapter 6, under mambots. It is quite easy, and there are at least two ways of doing it: • •

The "default" way Using a third-party mambot, such as the table of contents bot, originally designed by kuuasema.com, and now hosted on Joomlaya.com.

The Default, Core Way

This method is easy, and takes advantage of Joomla!'s internal page breaks button, located at the bottom of the TinyMCE editor. When you break pages in this way, a mini-module labeled Article Index will appear. [ 70 ]

Chapter 5

You can manipulate the presentation of the "pages" under the Article Index by adding a title directive to the {mospagebreak} code. For example: {mospagebreak title=Chapter 1}

This will result in a link to "Chapter 1" instead of defining the broken content as a website-style "page". If you haven't read Hagen's book yet, you really should. It's a terrific piece of work that is built on Joomla!'s documentation project and is a very easy read. Using the Table of Contents Mambot The table of contents mambot, available at Joomlaya.com, offers an alternative approach for defining a table of contents, allowing for a newer, easier, and more SEO‑organic method of breaking content. It just like any other mambot, and requires that you publish it under the Mambots menu to begin the operation. From there, you use a {toc} tag in your content items, and it automatically generates a table of contents based on the actual header tags used in your document.

Accessibility

We need to consider that not everyone wanting to access our sites will have the same vision as we do. Adding functionality to accommodate blind or visually-impaired persons is not only good practice, in many places, it is rapidly becoming law to provide alternative access methods for the visually impaired. As always, the extensions site comes to the rescue with great solutions, each of which is available under the directory listing of accessibility: •

Resize font: Allows your users to resize the fonts in your site to comfortably view your content within their limitations.

•

Text reader support: Adds functionality for people who are totally blind.

Measuring Usability

How we organize our content and navigation is critical to how easily our intended audience will choose to adopt our product, content, or services. Make reaching your content a challenge, and you'll have a great-looking website with no readers or customers. Make it all easy, on the other hand, and people will buy almost without thinking about it.

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Site Layout and Optimization

Consider your neighborhood supermarket. Large chains often employ greeters to help new customers get around in the store. You don't have that option! Your layout and organization must serve as the greeting, welcoming your visitor into the site, and leading to critical products, information, and services. Often engage your audience on usability issues, to measure where your site stands in terms of usability, and where it needs to go. Here are some quick, easy ways to gauge your customer's opinions on your usability without breaking the bank: •

Run a simple poll: Ask people with what ease they found what they were looking for.

•

Offer valuable free goodies: Provide goodies such as bonus products, free trial memberships, free downloads, or special-access content, as an inducement to your customers to actively engage in your usability studies.

•

Engage in peer review: There are plenty of web design forums where you can easily obtain the advice of fellow designers on how best to organize and deliver your content

•

Listen!: Accept feedback from your users on usability issues as if it were coming from a trusted friend or relative.

•

Ask them to send you an email: You might get a few emails that are nonsense but you might as easily get a nugget of gold from someone that will improve your site.

Color Psychology, Typefaces, and Design Different colors and different fonts affect people differently. Take a look around your local supermarket and you can gain a quick and concise view of how carefully color and typography choices are by major corporations—and your competitors.

Fire and Ice, Classic and Jazzy

Let's start with the cereal aisle. The kid's cereals are brightly colored, as are the adult cereals geared to "active lifestyles". By contrast, the cereals associated with mature, stable lifestyles, such as your garden-variety Raisin Bran, are generally colored with cooler, more conservative coloring and fonts. Now consider the soft-drinks aisle: "Classic" cola brands are generally muted in coloring, or have their own iconic color scheme and lettering that is assiduously followed throughout their product line. Drinks associated with active lifestyles, such as energy drinks, invariably have brighter, more garish packaging, with active, daring lettering. [ 72 ]

Chapter 5

What to Ask Yourself

There's a reason for all of this grocery talk, and you can gain the benefit of millions of dollars of research just by walking the aisles of your neighborhood store, and carefully considering the following: •

Who is in your target market?

•

What values do the people in that market identify with?

•

Is your target market more naturally oriented towards hot "action" colors, or muted, "cooler" colors?

•

Are you targeting a specific ethnic demographic? Remember that certain colors mean different things in different cultures. What is a color of purity in your culture might be a color associated with death and mourning in another.

•

Are you marketing to the subconscious, suggestive mind, or the conscious, reactive mind? Or both?

•

When you think of your site, what concepts or feelings come to mind? Classic? Modern? Formal? Casual? For a good reference to the types of fonts you may wish to consider doing an online search for "Choosing fonts in web design". This will yield several good online resources that are beyond the scope of this book.

•

Does your site make the visitor turn away because it hurts their eyes with the color scheme? If so you have not done the right thing by yourself or them.

Consider learning about colors by researching the Pantone® color guides and understand the emotions generally caused by colors, their hues, and tones. Remember the clothing rule, no plaids with stripes.

Typefaces

Using the same examples, look at the typefaces used in the logos of major consumer products. The products aimed at an older, mature, or universal audience use a "classic" font, often a serif font. By contrast, products aimed exclusively at younger audiences, such as teens, use more "active" fonts, and products aimed at children use basic, often sans-serif typefaces. An excellent online application to help you choose your fonts may be found at: http://www.will-harris.com/esperfonto/

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Site Layout and Optimization

Design Considerations for Fonts

An important thing to consider when selecting a font is whether it will be used primarily within image-based design elements, or text-based elements. Remember that not all fonts, particularly the more esoteric ones, are installed universally. In fact, there are really very few universal fonts on most computers. You can be fairly safe choosing from this list to ensure your chosen font will be there: •

Verdana

•

Arial (generally the default sans-serif font)

•

Courier

•

Times New Roman (generally the default serif font)

If you've ever stopped to wonder why so many websites use the same fonts, you've found the answer. There are only a few that a designer can count on to be universally installed, or at least have a close substitute, on every possible platform. When a font is specified by a designer that isn't available on a given system, the nearest substitute is used. Be sure that that nearest choice looks good on a basic personal computer setup. If possible look at it in Firefox®, Internet Explorer® versions 6.xx and 7.xx, and on an Apple® computer. This will ensure that each browser renders your fonts appropriately, or at least as close to your design specifications for your site as possible. One concern is the size of your font in your site. It is indeed a difficult question because you do not know what the target computer screen will be set for. One design tip is to choose a relative measurement, rather than a fixed measurement. If possible choose a Joomla! template, such as one of those from JoomlaShack.com, that allows the visitors to size the text for their screen and their eyesight. Font color choices will impact the readability of your site dramatically, therefore, choosing a good background color against a font color is paramount.

Basic Color Psychology

I'll bet you didn't know that the colors you see can induce changes in your mental and physiological health. Look it up: it's true, and has been proven by study after study. Accordingly, you should select your site's color scheme by what emotions, feelings, and values you want your audience to experience. There are many excellent resources on the values, concepts, and ideas associated with various colors worldwide. Here's a condensed version. [ 74 ]

Chapter 5

Hot Colors

Exposures to hot colors have been shown to increase metabolism, and stimulate mental activity, and used in extreme, can invoke anxiousness. Use the warmer colors more carefully than the cooler ones.

Red

Red is the color of energy and love, fire and chaos, war and danger. Use it when you want to convey a very active, even dangerous feel to your site. Alternatively, red's status as a primary color makes it ideal for marketing aimed towards children. Used in lighter hues, reds more actively convey love and passion, and are the universal color of romance.

Orange

Orange is the color of hazy sunsets, and while a hot, active color, can convey feelings of energy and enthusiasm, happiness and creativity, and is associated with good health due to the coloration of citrus fruits and juices, as well as harvest wheat. Use orange when you want an active feel, without the risky sensation associated with red.

Yellow

Yellow is the color of the sun, arousing feelings of joy, and conveying an energetic feeling. It also has a jarring affect on attention, warning of impending danger, which is why insects commonly use this color to warn predators not to eat them! As a primary color, yellow is good for grabbing, and holding, the attention of children. Use yellow sparingly, and it has a calming, relaxing effect. Use it too much, and you disturb your visitors.

Cool Colors

Cool colors tend to evoke calmer mental attitudes, at the expense of calming the overall body. Use cooler colors when you want your audience to be less excited by the content being presented, and want to make it easier for them to concentrate on important information. Cooler colors also have a greater tendency to invoke feelings of trust.

Green

Green is the color of the natural world, and evokes feelings of calm contemplation. It is associated with healing, stability, freshness, and harmony. Good for use in any natural context, green also conveys a sense of safety and consolation. [ 75 ]

Site Layout and Optimization

Blue

Blue is the color of the intellect, and of the sea and the sky. It can symbolize trust, honesty, expertise, and tranquility, and is a common color associated with technology brands due to its correlation with the cerebral concepts involved. Studies show that men are more responsive to blue than women.

Violet

Violet has deep historical connotations of royalty, wealth, and extravagance. Roman senators wore purple garments made from a special, and expensive dye, and the color has been associated with people of high social station ever since. Studies show children to prefer purple over other colors, by an overwhelming margin.

White

White is the de-facto standard background color of the Internet, and for good reason. Associated with cleanliness and purity, white is generally the preferred color when wishing to maintain an orderly feel within your site and its contents. However, be careful, many eastern cultures associate white with death.

Black

Black is less commonly used as a background color, because it diminishes the light returned to the eye, and thus, renders pages more difficult to read. By contrast, black fonts are the standard in design because they render starkly against bright backgrounds, maintaining steady eye contact with the reader. It is associated with fear and death in many western cultures, and evokes a feeling of power, but should be used sparingly.

Cultural Considerations

To list all possible cultural differences in color perception would be exhaustive, but Wikipedia offers an excellent summary on Color Symbolism, available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Symbolism

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Chapter 5

Writing Effective Copy

Good copy and headline writing is another thing that can make the difference between a successful website and a boring, mundane, "me too" website. We'll examine a couple examples of effective, and ineffective, copy writing, and then go through some basic guidelines and tactics.

Ten Tips for Effective Copywriting

Writing copy for your site may sound easy but often is difficult. There are some interesting rules in writing for the web. One tried and true method is having the introduction first, then the body of the text and wrapping up with a summary at the end. This is due to the fact that Internet readers "scan" the text, visually speaking, rather than do in depth reading. Remember: Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. This works to reinforce your message. •

Cultivate mystery: You want people to need to know what's on the flip side of a hyperlink. At the same time, don't deceive your audience.

•

Be clear: If you've chosen a punchy, but potentially misleading headline, provide a synopsis in common prose describing what the reader should expect to see.

•

Engage the reader right away: Your initial paragraphs, headlines, or images are the key to retaining the reader's interest once it is obtained.

•

Provide clear and immediate benefits: Once people have clicked through, whether from a headline or an ad, they'll want to know that they are indeed going to get the promised content, answers, or products. Don't over-promise, and don't under-deliver.

•

Be bold: If you write a piece of content that fails to meet the initial expectations of yourself or your visitors, consider combining it with another underperforming article in the same general category to provide a one-two punch to overcome this problem and inform your visitors.

•

Be ruthless: Don't get attached to a particular headline or paragraph. Edit for clarity and precision. If you need to provide deeper information, hyperlink to a longer article where readers can obtain additional clarifications or directions.

•

Meet needs and answer questions: The primary use of the Internet for casual users is for reference needs. If you can meet somebody's informational needs, answer their questions, or generally leave them better informed than they were when they arrived at your site, you've won an important battle. [ 77 ]

Site Layout and Optimization

•

Take full advantage of your medium: If you expect your visitors might still be confused about particular issues at the end of a content piece, or after seeing an overview of a product, take advantage of the opportunity for two-way communication by offering contact links or information.

•

Compare and contrast: If you have a particular page or product that seems to outperform all others, analyze it to see what you may have done with that item to make it superior in the eyes of your visitors.

•

Act on feedback: If it comes to your attention that people are being underserved by a content item, act on it immediately by editing and revising the content.

•

Read it aloud: Read the copy or text to yourself, out loud. Does it sound correct? Is it easy to read? Are you using words that make sense? If you weren't the writer, do you think you would understand it?

Real-World Views

In the following sections we will review a few websites to see how they use copy, layout and use of, well, interesting things. Example: Supermarket Tabloids

This is a screenshot of the Weekly World News, a common supermarket tabloid in the United States. It is also the lowest common denominator of such publications, offering fare that the more reputable rags wouldn't deign to print. [ 78 ]

Chapter 5

But I bet you see a couple things on that page you'd click on, don't you? Absurdity sells, even when you know it's absurd. It sticks in your cranial cavity, compelling you to see what's behind such hilarious nonsense. This is a double bonus if you print the silly and reward it with a compelling reason for them to buy. Better still if you can sneak some serious selling into the center of all that silliness. This sort of thing keeps people coming back, and is the sort of thing that keeps this hilariously impossible collection profitable. Example: Old Media, New Media

One look at the venerable New York Times' website is enough to convince that old media companies are dinosaurs waiting for an asteroid. You can see where they want your eyes to go. But, when you read the headline, are you still interested in reading? However, the site does summarize the main article, which is about the bomb attack, which killed many people in Pakistan. Yet, they have made the advertisers an afterthought.

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Site Layout and Optimization

And after a few minutes on the site, so have I.

Now we see the Internet's equivalent of a pulp-press tabloid. The Drudge Report continues to enjoy meteoric growth at a time when "old media" readership, both in print and online, is in a state of decline. Is it because Drudge provides a superior news experience? It can't be: he's built his little empire on the backs of the old media dinosaurs, by linking into their content. Maybe, it's because of the punchy headlines. Drudge probably nearly single-handedly drives the traffic of some of the news sites he features. And he clearly has a superior understanding of what headlines belong on a front page. If I were the head of a media conglomerate, I would hire Drudge to write headlines, before he hires a stable of like-minded writers to work for him.

[ 80 ]

Chapter 5

Just so we can see who's winning the war, here's a traffic comparison from Alexa, comparing the traffic of two of the news sites we've looked at as well as a few others for comparison:

Lines from top down: •

Nytimes.com

•

Drudgereport.com

•

Guardian.co.uk

•

Usatoday.com

•

Latimes.com

Of all these sites, only the New York Times (the top line) beats Matt Drudge on the Internet. Also bear in mind, that all these old media sites have thousands of pages for visitors to view to drive their stats up. Matt Drudge has only one. If I were running the LA Times, Guardian, or USA Today, I would fire my entire online division immediately after viewing this graph. The only reason, and I repeat, the only reason that Matt Drudge doesn't own his own media empire now is because, for whatever reason, he has chosen not to. [ 81 ]

Site Layout and Optimization

He could change his mind at any time. Example: Humour Portals

Fark.com is one of the Internet's current destination sites, due to the consistently hilarious headlines that keep visitors clicking through to the equally hilarious conversation threads. Fark is also at the forefront of a growing number of sites harnessing the power of user submissions as a force-multiplier in generating content. Of course, many of these headlines are problematic and out of a humorous context. But that doesn't change the fact that they're compelling. You can probably imagine a few ways to adapt a humorous approach to serious copywriting after spending a while perusing Fark. Thanks to Drew for granting permission to reprint this.

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Chapter 5

Instilling a Sense of Urgency

You want your customers to buy your products, or sign up for memberships, right away. The problem is they may not necessarily want to comply! Sometimes, you need to provide a clear reward for your visitors to get them to take the action you want them to take. Let's take a look at some websites that provide clear benefits to acting right away, rather than waiting for the acting or buying impulse to wane. Example: Dell Computer Corporation

Dell used to be a lot more effective than shown in the previous screenshot. However, Dell hasn't completely lost its touch: the bar in the middle of the screen rotates through several powerful inducements with the aim of providing the broadest possible audience a clear added benefit to buying a Dell, right away.

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Site Layout and Optimization

Example: PC Magazine and the dreaded pop-up

Right idea, but wrong approach. PC Magazine thinks that putting a subscription box right in front of the entire website will make people more likely to subscribe. They might even think that we're stupid enough to be tricked into a subscription. This is wrong thinking as it doesn't allow the consumer to have the power, which is the key to success on the Internet. They even make it clear that this great introductory price expires soon. I don't know about you, but my sense of urgency is directed to other matters, such as getting this pop‑up annoyance out of my field of view, big-fast-soon, and in a hurry. Who cares about the copy, the ads or the magazine if I'm chased away by that 'in-your-face' style? Tip: Don't get in your visitors' way. Ever.

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Chapter 5

Six Tips for Instilling Urgency •

Provide a clear benefit. Make sure the customer understands how they benefit by adopting right away.

•

Don't insult your customer's intelligence. Don't try to trick people into adopting or purchasing.

•

Make procedures easy and painless. Don't get in your customer's way. Make it easy to close the sale and provide extra benefit. Traditional "mail-in" rebates are going the way of the dinosaur for a good reason. Nobody's fooled by them any more.

•

Be easy to find. Don't tuck your moneymakers away where a prospective customer has to work to find them. If your competitor makes life easier for your customers, you will soon not have to worry about the competition, because you'll be in bankruptcy.

•

Follow through. Make sure the inducement you're providing is of high quality, or otherwise is worthwhile to your customers.

•

Make sure the customer feels he or she is in control of their Internet experience, all the way from the start to the checkout.

Summary

Our chapter started out with a lot of information about the uses of colors, fonts, and navigation. A simple walk through your favorite part of Mother Nature will show you the importance of colors and navigation. As you design your site, think about the examples from Drudge, NY Times, Weekly World News and others. Think about usage of colors, the way they laid out ads (revenue) and of course tongue-in-cheek humor. The last takeaway is to ensure the consumer or visitor of your site is in control of their Internet destiny on your site.

[ 85 ]

Generating Revenue We will cover the following topics in this chapter: •

Banner Advertisements

•

Contextual, text-based advertisements

•

Affiliate ads

•

Running your own affiliate program

•

Running subscription-based Joomla! websites

•

Accepting donations

•

Offering "instant branded" merchandise

•

Joomla! and e-commerce (shopping carts)

Banner Advertisements

The most obvious and typical revenue-generating tool used on websites throughout the Internet is the ubiquitous banner ad. The banner ad has been a part of the commercial Internet virtually from the beginning, and since then has morphed into a variety of formats and sizes. Implementing banner ads on your Joomla! site has certain benefits and liabilities:

Pros

Banner ads are easy to implement and provide a moderate unobtrusive solution to monetizing your website. Depending on the type of ad you select, banner ads can form a small, but steady income for the smallest of sites.

Generating Revenue

Cons

Advertising that is forced on the visitor is considered annoying and could drive away the sales. Before you take this approach, consider how it is perceived. Another liability of banner advertising is that it is intrinsically associated to your site's traffic itself. Less page views less pay. Many banner ad types and programs: • •

• • •

Can be irritating to some users (if poorly placed in your site's interface). Are sensitive to natural ebbs and flows of website traffic. (If your traffic falls, so does your revenue, and some ebbs are natural. Fewer people use the Internet during the summer months, for instance.) Sometimes require action (a click) by your visitors. Can be intrusive and debilitating to your website's message and content. Sometimes require that JavaScript be enabled on your visitors' machines.

Where to Obtain Your Ads There are two potential routes here: •

Sign up with a banner ad affiliate program.

•

"Become your own ad broker" and sell directly to the advertisers.

Signing up with Banner Affiliates

Signing up with a CPM or CPC banner ad program is an easy way to obtain a sizeable ad inventory to "sell" on your website. You simply sign up, select your preferred ad formats and advertisers, and implement a small chunk of code on your website. However, there are some stipulations here. Firstly, ads and content must meet guidelines deemed appropriate by the advertising agent (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.). Secondly, you can often lose control over the advertisers and the quality of the ads you run. Many ad brokers will deal with any advertiser willing to shell out the required funds, and many of those advertisers are our dear friends who have so generously offered us "free stuff" for so many years. Finally, you are at the mercy of your ad program for your monthly payment, which is generally not a problem with a reputable broker, but sometimes it does happen and your check gets lost in transit. Also, your site must typically meet certain "minimum" amounts such as $50.00 or more, in order for the ad broker to cut your check. [ 88 ]

Chapter 6

Becoming Your Own Ad Broker

An alternative to associating yourself with a major ad broker is to sell your ad space directly to the advertisers. This has the benefit that it allows you to carefully screen your advertisers, to meet your own quality guidelines, also to directly negotiate the rates and terms of the arrangement. Unfortunately, it means more work for the administrator. You'll need to wear the hat of an advertising executive as well as that of a webmaster. More than that, you'll also need to devise and implement how you intend to accept payment for ads, and what policies for payment and content quality you'll require of your advertisers.

Lock and Load

While implementing ads, there's a list of considerations you must keep in mind in order to obtain the best balance of commercialization and content. You must determine: • • • • •

Which ad formats to use Which ad types to use Where to install these banners in your template Which programs to sign up for What components to use

On Joomlawarrior.com you will find an expanded tutorial on advertising formats and programs, which are beyond the scope of this book. There you may review and sign up for several advertising affiliate programs. Now, we must select the solution appropriate to our ad strategy. There are several components available on Joomla!'s extensions site; however, many are rewrites or hacks of the original pre-installed Joomla! banner component. Thus, for our examples, we'll demonstrate the original component.

Banner Strategies

As a wise warrior follow these guidelines in placing your ads: • • •

Place them in a visible location. Plan ahead: Not all ads are of the same size. Make sure that your template will not break if a wider ad gets served in. Avoid using pop-ups unless your visitors will understand the need for increased revenue. If you do use pop-ups, don't use more than one, and don't make them pop more than once per visit. [ 89 ]

Generating Revenue

•

Blend the ads with the content intelligently and unobtrusively, not excessively or haphazardly.

Joomla! Banner Component

The Joomla! banner component is a terrific and easy solution for do-it-yourselfers, but cannot effectively implement third-party ad solutions, such as AdBrite or Google's AdSense programs, without manual intervention on the administrator's part.

Direct Template Installation

This method allows for the inclusion of rich, JavaScript-based ads that are typically available from major ad brokers.

Ready, Aim, FIRE!

It's time to aim and fire our weapon. For our example, we'll consider the top banner on JoomlaWarrior.com:

This banner uses the default banners component, and is positioned just to the right of the logo, in a specific module position. As you can see, the current ad displayed is the default OpenSourceMatters ad that ships with Joomla!. Here's how to add a new banner to the default component:

Uploading a New Banner

First, we log in to the Administrator's Control Panel and select the Site menu, and then select Media Manager:

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Chapter 6

Now, we have Joomla!'s Media Manager up, and we want to proceed into the pre‑installed banners folder.

And, finally, we upload our new banner ad by using the Browse button and clicking the Upload button from the top-right menu.

Once the image has been uploaded, you should be able to see it in the banners folder within the Media Manager. Now, we must set up our client, "Joe's Questionable Quality Discount Electronics" in the banner component, and get "Joe's" ad up and running. To set up Joe as a client, perform the following steps: •

Switch the Components menu.

•

Select the Banners submenu.

•

Select the Manage Client menu.

•

Select Add new client. [ 91 ]

Generating Revenue

Here, we simply fill in "Joe's" information, then click Save. Now "Joe's" is a client. Now that we've got our client, we can assign him a banner. We'll go back to the Components Menu, and down to Banners, but this time we'll select Manage Banners. Once in the Banner Management dialog, we'll select New from the top-right menu.

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Chapter 6

In the Banner: New dialog, we give the banner a name, select the client to whom it is assigned, and set the number of impressions they've purchased. (We can set this to unlimited for our "house" ads.) Then, we assign a URL for the banner to point to, and insert any custom code that we want. Finally, we select the actual banner from the drop-down box, and our selected banner loads into the pane. We can now click Save, and "Joe's Questionable Quality Discount Electronics" will now run banners on our website! One tip: be sure to select Show Banner from the drop-down box. This minor thing could trip you up.

Direct Template Inclusion

This more direct method requires the administrator to simply log in to the Control Panel, and edit the template directly under the Site | Template Manager | Site Templates dialog. If you're proceeding with a third-party ad broker, they'll have a method for you to generate the necessary code to include directly in your template. You can then edit the HTML directly, and add a JavaScript ad-include anywhere in the template you wish. As we already mentioned, however, this means your site's ad displays are now at the mercy of your selected ad broker, so you won't have direct control over which ads are displayed and when. You might want to be sure that you've selected a reputable vendor with a quality advertising inventory. Here's an example screenshot of the JoomlaWarrior.com site with a third-party ad broker's public-service ads running:

Here we see why it's important to plan ahead: many ad brokers lump 728-pixel-wide ads in with the traditional 468-pixel-wide ads, so it's important to understand in advance how variations in ad size can affect your template. Since I've planned ahead, and placed my banner in a flexible spot, there are no problems running a wider ad format. The typical ad size can be found by viewing the default banner ads that come with Joomla! They are typically 468 x 60. However, again, ads can come in any size. [ 93 ]

Generating Revenue

Evaluate, Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome

Now that we've fired this weapon, we'll soon realize that keeping track of the various metrics involved is crucial to our long-term success. We may quickly realize that we need to re-aim our weapon to hit our target. You can obtain the data through your control panel, log files or through your ad broker to evaluate the progress of your ad campaigns. This involves asking ourselves some objective questions, taking measurements of the progress made, adjusting our approach to suit our results, and finally, outperforming the competition by having a flexible perspective on how to achieve the goal at hand. Here are the things we want to consider for our Banner Ads weapon: •

Are the ads attractive to our users and not a detriment to our content?

•

Are the ads being acted upon (are they being clicked)?

•

Are there better ads available? Better advertisers we can solicit?

•

How can we increase our site's "stickiness"?

•

Is our available ad inventory (i.e. our number of page views) full?

If the ads are not attractive to our users, and are intrusive, we can expect fewer visitors making fewer page views in the future, which will lower our ad income. On the other hand, attractively placed, subtle ads will hardly trouble your users, leaving them free to click through your site, making additional page views and ad clicks to generate you more revenue. If the ads are not being clicked, this would mean we're not providing a very good value to our advertisers, who are now just as much our clients as our visitors are. If we're suffering a dismal click-through rate or no clicks at all we might try altering the positioning of the ad in our content, or trying to select an ad more closely targeted to our visitor's demographics. As you can clearly see the performance of the ad will vary based on the interest level of the target audience. Note that many third-party ad brokers have strict requirements as to minimum click‑through rates, so if your site isn't measuring up, you should take action, rather than wait for your ad broker to unceremoniously dump you from their program. Are there better ads available? Better ads means better value for your visitors, better value for your advertisers, and better value in your wallet. If there are products or ads that seem tailor-made for your audience, run them. You might be surprised the first time you actually have somebody thank you for an ad they saw, acted upon, and were happy and satisfied with the product or results. Certainly your advertisers will thank you for sending them quality traffic: They'll renew their ad buy based on their results from your campaign. [ 94 ]

Chapter 6

Remember that running ads means tying your reputation to that of your advertisers. Always be aware of reasons that you may no longer wish to affiliate yourself with certain advertisers if their ads are counter to your site's content or you have a deep personal disagreement with them. How can we increase our site's stickiness? With banner ads, more page views mean more money for you. Just keeping your visitors on your site for one additional page view, on average, can make a serious difference to your bottom line, and we'll discuss weapons for doing so later in the book. For now, it's enough to realize that this is an important concern. Is our available ad inventory full? If not, we may actually want to consider lowering our prices, or our standards, provided that we do not lower them too much. We can also run "house" ads to promote other parts of our site, or to sell our own products as needed until we can obtain more advertisers and fill our available inventory. If your inventory is not full, you're losing money with every empty page view. You can recycle the same ad over and over, but the smart warrior will endeavor to gain more ads for their site and thus more revenue.

Text-Based Contextual Ads

The latest entry into the banner ad market has been text banners, which offer a less‑intrusive user experience for your users. Frequently, these banners are contextual, which means that they're dynamically generated to match your content as closely as possible. Some text ads are not contextual. These ads should be used sparingly, and with caution, as they sometimes represent a terribly confusing message with your content. Here is a real example: http://photos-418.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v78/220/95/ 584895645/n584895645_648418_3296.jpg

In any event, text-based ads have their own set of benefits and liabilities:

Pros • • • • •

Text ads are subtle and unobtrusive. They easily blend with the site's template. They offer superior value to the visitors when they match our content. There is a wealth of programs to choose from, and it's easy to join them. There is a wealth of Joomla! components to use. [ 95 ]

Generating Revenue

Cons •

They typically pay only on a per-click basis.

•

The pay rates are typically set at what the buyer is willing to pay.

•

They usually require the visitors to have JavaScript enabled.

Where to Obtain Your Ads

There are scores of text-ad companies on the Internet. The two most popular are Google's AdSense program and AdBrite. Google's AdSense is fully contextual, while AdBrite specializes in text-ads tailored to sites that do not fit Google's stringent conditions. AdBrite does offer contextual ads, but at the time of this writing, its primary market was offering a marketplace where advertisers could directly place text ads on member sites, rather than relying on content matching in the way Google does. We'll examine Google's AdSense, as it's the market leader and de facto standard in contextual advertising. You may read more about both of these programs, as well as some others, and find links to sign up for these programs at JoomlaWarrior.com.

Text-ad Strategies

The first tactic is to sign up with Google for your AdSense account. Simply follow this link:� https://www.google.com/adsense/g-app-single-1. Once you are there, just follow the easy instructions and you will be up and running in short order. Google provides many tools to help you maximize your ads to gain the highest revenue. One of the best tools is the Google Inside AdSense forums; by following instructions on these from Google you can provide a relevant ad, and receive a financial reward. You can learn more about this at: http://adsense. blogspot.com/2005/10/six-adsense-optimization-tips-for.html. Overall using Google AdSense is an easy source of income and is a powerful weapon in your revenue arsenal. Following these tips will improve your success: •

Embed the ads in your content. Text ads work best when closely aligned with your site's actual content. A common mistake is to treat text banners in the same way as image banners.

•

Change the colors of the text, background, and borders to blend with your site's color scheme and layout.

•

Try different size formats to gauge which best works for you.

•

Maximize the use of keywords to allow a wide range of targeted ads to display. [ 96 ]

Chapter 6

Ready, Aim, FIRE!

Joomla!'s extensions site offers several extensions to integrate Google's AdSense into your site. The most highly rated is JoomlaSpan.com's ClickSafe AdSense module, which not only provides AdSense integration, but also helps guard against click fraud. UserWrittenResources.com's Community Builder Integrated AdSense module is also a very promising innovation that allows a webmaster to share AdSense revenues with the site's contributors, using Community Builder to keep track of the various contributor's affiliate IDs. (We'll be featuring Community Builder later in the book, so if you've not heard of it yet, don't worry.) For brevity, we'll focus on JoomlaSpan's ClickSafe AdSense module, which is also available with a Revenue Sharing option. Installation runs as expected through the Installers | Modules dialog, and when entering the Modules dialog to configure the module's options we are presented with the usual array of options for publishing the module and configuring the pages on which it will be displayed. However, beneath the usual options are options we must configure properly with our AdSense ID and styling information:

One tip for using Google AdSense is that you might want to be certain at all times that your site is not doing anything that violates Google's terms of service, or you will find yourself dumped from the program. When you set up this module, you will be tempted to click the ads several times to test them. Don't do it or at least determine what your IP address is and put it in the dialog box to block it. [ 97 ]

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Below the configuration options are a full range of styling and coloring options to help you blend the module into content. The setup is easy; just enter your AdSense ID and ad channel, configure your preferences for the ad format, and we're all set. I've selected a 468x60 text banner, which I will put beneath the content in the main window of the site. You may wish to tuck your AdSense module elsewhere; many folks get good results by tucking a link unit under some commonly used element of their site, such as a search box or menu. A fuller discussion of AdSense tips and tricks may be found on JoomlaWarrior.com. The result will be as follows:

Evaluate, Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome

We evaluate our text-ad weapon in the same way as we would evaluate a traditional image‑based banner ad. We should take an overall look at the exposure and click through rates, and move the module around in our template until we obtain the desired results. You can also try varying the format, colors, and type of your text ads. Keep in mind that your content determines what ads are displayed, so selecting good keywords for your article titles, META tags, and article text is essential. If your ad inventory is low or non-existent, check and see if there are default or "house‑ad" options that can be used. This is rarely a problem; generally there are plenty of advertisements available to serve.

Product Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing involves directly selling products from popular vendors and programs on your website. Generally speaking, you are paid only once when your visitor actually buys the product in question, which typically means that you must generate a lot of traffic in order to achieve high commissions. Affiliate programs are available from several companies; most notably, Amazon derives a significant share of its sales by grabbing the long tail of the Internet and monetizing traffic generated by smaller websites. [ 98 ]

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Common mass-market affiliate marketing programs include: •

Amazon.com

•

Commission Junction

•

LinkShare

•

Shareasale.com

Probably while surfing you must have noticed that the net has many smaller, niche‑oriented websites and companies that also offer affiliate programs. In fact, many commercial Joomla! companies offer affiliate programs, many of which you'll find featured on the Joomla! Warrior website.

Pros

Running affiliate ads allows the website operator to offer quality products and related content to visitors. In this sense, if done properly, running affiliate ads can be more of a service to your visitors than a solicitation. These ads generally pay a straight commission.

Cons

Typical sales rates for this class of ad are quite low, so it can take massive amounts of traffic to generate compelling commissions. Another drawback is that every visitor that clicks an ad is taken away from your site! This can affect your ad revenues if you run CPM ads alongside these ads. Finally, it can require extensive research to find "just the right" ads for your site's audience.

Tracking and Reporting

There are several important things to consider when selecting an affiliate program to ally yourself with. Firstly, some programs require the sale to happen immediately after your website's direct referral. These programs offer no cookie-based tracking of sales that you might otherwise have ownership of. In other words, if your visitor doesn't buy at once, you don't make money. On the other hand, many programs will install a tracking cookie on your visitor's computers that may extend your ownership of the sale to a week, month, or even a year‑long period of time, which can greatly improve your chances of earning revenue from promoting these vendors' products on your site. Also important is the threshold at which sales are paid out. Nearly all programs have a minimum payout requirement, which can mean that smaller, less-trafficked sites can wait an extraordinarily long time to see their payments. [ 99 ]

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Any program you select should have a reporting mechanism through which you can track your sales and commissions, as well as see what kind of traffic you need to send in order to achieve each sale. Any program that doesn't offer a strong reporting function should probably be avoided.

Ready, Aim, FIRE!

There are many programs to choose from, each with its own virtues and drawbacks. We'll feature Amazon.com and Commission Junction, since they're two of the biggest affiliate marketing programs, and because there are Joomla! extensions available to easily integrate both into our websites.

Amazon

Joining Amazon's Associates program allows you to review, highlight, and offer any product that is sold on or by Amazon.com, giving you access to a literal galaxy of compelling books and consumer products. To sign up for Amazon's Associates program, click the link at the bottom of Amazon.com's webpage:

You'll have to fill out your personal information, including tax identification information, and also describe information about the website on which you'll be offering Amazon's products. Once you've signed up, you'll have access to a wide range of tools to help you generate links to products. But we want it to be easier! And Joomla! lets us achieve that precisely. Here are some extensions to consider for integrating Amazon into your Joomla! site. •

DeanMarshall.co.uk—Amazon Product Feed Bridge (visit deanmarshall.co.uk)

•

JevonTech.com—Omakase Module (visit jevontech.com) [ 100 ]

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Amazon Product Feed Bridge

The Amazon Product Feed Bridge simply bridges a CGI program, the Amazon Product Feed (APF), into Joomla!. As such, you'll need CGI support on your website's hosting to make use of it. Once you've installed APF, it's a simple step to getting APF Bridge to work properly. Once you've finished, you won't just be selling through Amazon.com, you'll essentially be Amazon.com! Take a few minutes if you wish to install this before continuing. If you need help with the program, you can visit http://www.mrrat.com/aws/. From there, simply obtain the Bridge component from Deanmarshall.co.uk, and install it via the Installers | Components dialog. Once the component is installed, we need to configure it to properly pick up APF from our cgi-bin directory. You'll find the component's configuration options under the Components menu under APF by Mr. Rat:

There will already be some information populated into the configuration; you'll need to adjust this to suit your installation and website. We'll then need to add a menu link to the APF Bridge component. Other than that, it's quite simple, and here's the result:

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We'll need to further style APF's output with CSS, but other than that, it takes about ten minutes to go from being a regular website to essentially being Amazon.com!

Using the Omakase Module

Amazon recently introduced what it calls its Omakase service, which is a contextual system for displaying pertinent books beside relevant content dynamically. This module can be downloaded from http://www.jevontech.com/joomla.html. Upon downloading the module, you simply install it via the Installers | Modules dialog, and insert your Amazon Associates ID in the appropriate field. You can then style the rest of the module with the remaining options:

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The following screenshot shows the published module on the front end:

In this case, the Omakase module is keying on the Joomla!, PHP, and other keywords in the content I've placed on this site, and is serving the appropriate ads. One minor drawback of this module that you should be aware of is that the ads can also trigger based on what your visitors have browsed on Amazon. As such, this can sometimes inadvertently result in inappropriate or poorly targeted ads displayed among your content. However, overall the Omakase module is a terrific and quick way to get started with Amazon's Associates program without investing a lot of time selecting a library or recommendation list. Let Amazon do the work for you!

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Direct Template Inclusion

We can also use Amazon's link tools to directly incorporate Amazon content onto our sites. Log in to your Associates page to start. Next, we would build a link to our intended product from within Amazon's Associates website:

Then, all we need to do is create a custom module for the HTML link Amazon provides, which is easily accomplished by creating a new Wrapper module from within the Modules dialog. First, select the Iframe src target URL, and copy it to your clipboard.

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Second, in the Modules dialog, edit the Wrapper module, giving Joomla! the information of where we want our module to be displayed, and what URL to display (the one we just copied):

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Having put in everything correctly, upon clicking Save, we will see our new Amazon Associates featured book on our frontpage:

Now that we've edited our HTML in our new custom module, we can publish it, and we see that Hagen Graf's Joomla! book is now prominently featured on JoomlaWarrior.com.

Using Other Product Affiliate Programs

As mentioned, there is a plethora of product affiliate programs out there, and you can mix and match different ads as needed, noting of course to observe contractual conflicts. There are both free and commercial Joomla! extensions to help you build your affiliate product inventory. On the commercial side, MoreSmart.com offers store-building components for both Commission Junction and Share-a-Sale. On the F/OSS side, I'll look at JoomlaTexas.com's CJ Affiliates module, since it is available as a GPL/open-source download. [ 106 ]

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Using the CJ Affiliates Module

Downloaded from JoomlaTexas.com, the CJ Affiliates module is easily installed via the Installers | Modules dialog. When we proceed into the Modules menu to edit the module's parameters, we're presented with the following:

As you can see, we'll need the SmartZone code from CommissionJunction to complete our module. Within CJ build your desired ad campaign using the SmartZones feature and then use this module to display it. [ 107 ]

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The remaining options on the parameters dialog deal with the styling and storage needs of the module, and will vary widely depending on your specific needs.

Import Any Product Affiliate Code—mod_html Finally, fijiwebdesign.com has long provided the handy and popular mod_html module, as well as the mod_php module, which allow you to insert Javascript and HTML, or PHP into your modules. These modules allow you to add code from any product affiliate program in existence, but are not dynamic solutions. They're easily installed via the Installers | Modules dialog, and their module parameters in the Modules menu basically consist of input fields for your rich-content code. It's very straightforward—open the module, insert your code, and click Save.

Running an Affiliate Program

If you're starting your own online store, you want to quickly gain more traffic, because more traffic equals more sales! An easy way to do this is to share your profits with your existing customers or other web entrepreneurs by operating your own affiliate program. This enables you to monetize your site; offsetting the cost of running your website through payment made by referrals to others sites.

iDevAffiliate

For this section, I'll take the rare step of recommending and featuring a commercial‑license extension. I want to stress that as with all commercial-license components featured in this book, this product was selected on its merits alone. iDevAffiliate is available in two packages. A fully-Joomla-integrated version can be obtained in two parts from JoomlaElements.com, which provides a "bridge" component to merge the standalone iDevAffiliate software, available from iDevDirect.com, into Joomla!'s database. You can also obtain iDevAffiliate software, and dispense with the JoomlaElements bridge, provided you are using one of the shopping cart packages that can be integrated with iDevAffiliate. (At the time of this writing, several popular ecommerce carts are covered, and it is possible to integrate "unsupported" carts provided you have basic PHP skills.) The ����������������������������������������� difference is the amount of work and integration you wish to put into your iDev site. [ 108 ]

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iDevAffiliate is the most powerful affiliate marketing program I've run across, for the price at which it is offered. I've personally recommended it to multiple clients, and now I'm now recommending it to you. Why? Firstly, iDevAffiliate for Joomla! costs just under $150USD. Historically, affiliate marketing has been the uncontested realm of big business due to the costs involved with either working with a program such as Commission Junction, building an inhouse affiliate program, or using any of the many expensive commercial solutions for affiliate marketing. iDevAffiliate brings affiliate marketing to the masses. Another thing that really impresses me about iDevAffiliate is that has a wide range of options. It offers an extremely wide range of options on every topic from banner selection to payments and reporting, and even includes functionality for offline marketing programs to be integrated into your Affiliate Program! I won't go into an exhaustive feature listing here, let's just look at the administrator's panel:

This all looks very complicated, but we'll break it all down. For my own part, the first time I saw this panel, I felt like a kid in a candy store! There are a lot of functionalities here, so we'll start with the general setup and configuration. [ 109 ]

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On clicking on the Site Configuration button, we see the following:

On this screen, we're given several general options for defining our Affiliate Program. These options are fairly self-explanatory, but you should pay careful attention to the following: •

• •

Default Incoming Traffic Page: The incoming traffic page is important for proper tracking of your inbound affiliate links. Generally, you'll want this to be your front page. Currency: You'll want to define the financial aspects of the program in the currency of your choice. Require SSN/Tax ID? Having tax identication numbers on record is a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. You'll want to be aware of the laws regarding affiliate sales in your locality and set this option accordingly. Please review your particular Tax/Vat situation with your local taxing authority. [ 110 ]

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•

Signup Bonus: A popular way to induce people to sign up to your program; you'll want to ensure that people cannot simply sign up and cash out by making this value less than the minimum payment amount in the General Settings button, which we'll cover momentarily.

Proceeding to the Cart Integration and Processing Code buttons, we see that we have options for both automatic and manual integration, and can add extra code that will execute upon the checkout process completion. There are detailed instructions supplied with the component that will get you through these sections; there are simply too many supported shopping carts to go into an exhaustive rundown. Rest assured that I've had continued success integrating the software into multiple Joomla! payment options, including VirtueMart and the Account Expiration Component. (Both of which will be covered individually later in this chapter.) The next button in the general configuration section is the General Settings button. Here we have several very important options to consider.

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Let's go through these options in detail: •

Crediting Style (Pay-Per-Scale-Only): This option lets you ensure that the credit for the sale goes specifically to either the first person to refer the sale, or the most recent referral, depending on your needs.

•

Pay Day (day of the month): This option lets you choose which day the payments are made.

•

Payout Balance Required: As mentioned earlier, you'll want to make sure that people can't sign up, get their bonus, and cash out. Even if you're not offering a sign-up bonus, you'll want to ensure that this amount fits your needs and convenience.

•

Enable Recurring Commissions Option: Used for tracking commissions due subscription-based products, as well as commissions earned on returning customers. Allowing your affiliates ownership of "their" referrals for lengthy periods of time can help make your program stand out from the crowd.

•

Display Commission Details? This option helps increase transparency in your commission reporting, by giving the affiliate data about the sales generated.

•

Display Additional Commission Details? Offers expanded reporting of sales data.

•

Display Pending Commissions? Lets your affiliates see commissions that have been generated, but not yet approved or paid to their accounts.

•

Allow Custom Keyword Links? Allows use of the custom keyword link option.

•

Enable PayPal Payments? Self explanatory, this option turns payments of your affiliates on or off. If you want to pay all your affiliates via PayPal, you'll want to make sure this and the subsequent options are correctly configured.

•

PayPal Currency To Use: This lets you define which currency is used for payouts. You'll generally want this to match the currency set in the General Site Configuration dialog.

•

Require PayPal Account To Join? If you're offering payments by bank transfer or paper check as well as PayPal, you'll want this off. If you want to pay affiliates by PayPal only, this needs to be enabled.

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•

The next two options, Use Currency Rate, and Currency Rate, allow you to specify the exact current exchange rate for paying affiliates in foreign currencies. Otherwise, PayPal will charge its default rate, which is based on the current market rate plus a small surcharge for PayPal.

In short, if you're doing Affiliate marketing on a small scale, you'll probably want to keep your books in your own currency just for simplicity, and pay people in your own currency, allowing PayPal to take its sliver on the conversion. Down the road, as your program grows, you'll want to consider whether paying people directly in their own currency is a better option. The remaining options on the General Settings button involve 2nd Tier commissions, allowing you to pay your affiliates who refer other people into the program. This section is highly dependent on your unique needs and tastes, so we won't dwell on it here. The Commission Settings button allows you to define the various metrics by which your referrals, sales, and commissions will be tracked. You can select a flat or percentage rate commission, or offer pay-per-click on your ads:

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On the Email Notifications screen, we see the control we have over when our system sends out appropriate notifications to our administrators or our affiliates:

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The Email Templates screen lets us modify the formatting and content of the emails the system sends out. Your needs will vary, but at the minimum, be sure to modify the default footer to incorporate your contact information.

Online sales referrals are most commonly tracked using cookies. While this renders your affiliates vulnerable to customers who disable or purge their cookies regularly, it is better than systems in which your customers enter an affiliate or referral code. Many customers won't remember, or won't bother to input their codes correctly, resulting in losses for your affiliates. Also, an easy way to help your program stand out from the crowd is to offer lengthy tracking periods on referrals by increasing the expiration of the tracking cookie. This is particularly important for high-value items in which the buying decision may not be made right away. You might want to ensure that your affiliates are receiving their fair share of the sales they refer; else your affiliates will quickly abandon your program in favor of a friendlier, more lucrative one. The Manage Frequently Asked Questions button allows the easy addition of FAQ content related to your affiliate program:

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The next two buttons, Manage Admins and Color Scheme, are adapted according to your particular needs. The next option, Offline Marketing, is potentially very important if you want to integrate an existing print media or personal sales campaign into your online program. Let's take a look:

There are detailed instructions available directly from iDev on how to implement offline marketing, so we'll defer to the experts on that topic. The important thing is to get your wheels turning on how to exploit this opportunity for your own program! Here are some ideas: •

Distribute offline marketing codes to non-profit organizations to assist in their fundraising. When their code is entered by a customer, they earn the commission, without necessarily running a banner.

•

Use it to compensate a personal or direct marketing sales force.

•

Use it to track where your own print, television, or radio campaigns have the best effect.

There are many more potential uses for this capability. The remaining General Site Configuration options are advanced topics best handled by iDevAffiliate's own documentation and forums.

Types of Ads Available

iDevAffiliate allows for multiple formats of ads, allowing you to let your affiliates choose between flash and image banners, text ads, text links, and custom keyword links. This is especially crucial for obtaining the widest segment of affiliates, who may be more concerned with how your ad interacts with their site's layout than they are about your affiliate program. For many folks, if they can't run your ads in their preferred format, they'll run somebody else's instead.

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Affiliates Marketing Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is a complex subject, and obviously a few pages in this book are not sufficient to fully describe either the overall subject, or this software. I encourage you to investigate how other websites run their programs, as well as the documentation and resources available online, to best determine how to implement your program. That said, running your own program offers an exciting way to combine traditional search-oriented marketing, involving the big portals and search engines, with the wider array of lower-traffic websites to achieve the widest possible reach.

Subscriptions and Joomla!

A frequent use of Joomla! is to offer editorial content in the form of online magazines (commonly referred to as zines) or to offer exclusive content alongside freely available content. Another common application is to offer preferred access to downloadable products for paying subscribers. So how do we implement a subscription system in Joomla!? There are multiple options. On the commercial extensions front, the mosLock component, available from Phil‑Taylor.com, offers an easy and fully integrated method to control access to your content for paying subscribers. On the F/OSS front, we use a combination of the Account Expiration Component and/or the Joomla! Access Control Level component—if we want to offer tiers of content to the general public, registered users, and paying subscribers.

Configuring Account Expiration

The Account Expiration Component, hereinafter referred to as acct_exp, is available from GlobalNerd.org. Installation is achieved as usual via the Installers | Components dialog. When we access the Components | AEC Subscription Manager menu, we're given many configuration options.

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Let's start with the Settings submenu:

Here we can control the general subscription options, including how the payments are to be accepted. We can further configure the options for whichever payment gateways we've opted to use. Finally, if we're going to keep all our content restricted to paying subscribers, we can specify that subscribers are to be Registered users upon sign-up. If we're going to offer multiple tiers of content, we'll need to add a user group using the JACL component, as will be discussed in the next part of this section. Now that we've set our general payment and subscription options, we need to set up our subscription plans via the Subscription Plans dialog. You can specify subscription terms for days or full years depending on your needs. Since there are a wide range of potential plans, we won't get into the details of this dialog. The remaining configuration options for account expiration revolve around managing subscribers and subscriptions. They're all very straightforward, and will not be covered here.

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Applying Unique Changes Known as Hacks

Account Expiration extends Joomla!'s core functionality by rewriting large segments of the Joomla! code. Caution: this is for advanced users and should not be used if you are unfamiliar with programming, or do not have a current backup for your site. This is done via the Hacks menu under the AEC Subscription Manager menu:

Just click the links provided, and Account Expiration takes care of overwriting the files. (Note that it always a good idea to back up your site before you apply such a hack!)

Managing Logins with Account Expiration

Since you don't want to give your visitors the ability to create user accounts bypassing acct_exp, you'll need to use one of the provided login modules, which are integrated with Account Expiration, rather than Joomla!'s built-in registration and login functions. There are modules provided for basic registration, and a module provided that integrates with the popular Community Builder component for managing user accounts and profiles. Either of the options works just fine. Both modules are installed via the Installers | Modules dialog and are available at GlobalNerd.org.

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Subscriber Access Control with JACL

The Joomla! Access Control Level component allows you to specify additional user groups beyond the Default, Public, Registered, and other access groups that are built into Joomla!. This is particularly useful for us in the way that it allows us not ���������������� to ������������� hide all our content behind the subscription curtain, and to allow "sneak previews" to both the general public and to newly registered members.

Installing JACL

The JACL component is obtainable from Byostech.com. It installs normally via the Installers | Components dialog, and patches the necessary files to overwrite the core access control functionality and add its own functionality as a part of the installation process. So, unlike Account Expiration, there's no need to manually hack files. Configuring the component via the Components menu is straightforward. The Configuration submenu gives the options for controlling the content presented to the various user groups, and provides other controls, for statistics, etc. Generally, the defaults are fine, but you might want to tailor the configuration to your unique needs. We're more interested in the User Group and Access Level submenus. Let's look at the User Group submenu.

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Here we can add new user groups in order to segregate access and editorial control to content to whatever degree we require. Adding a new group is just like adding a new content item; just click New and follow the prompts. Once we're done, we can then delegate our new groups out to our users as needed. As to controlling member access to the actual content on the website's front end, we add an access control level, just as we created new user groups. Just as with the user groups, just click on New and fill in the two options. Here's the result:

You can see that we've added an access level beyond the typical built-in levels that we can assign to our paying subscribers to give them exclusive content, while simultaneously giving some content to the general public and to newly registered, but non-subscribed, members.

Accepting Donations

One important method of monetization of your site revolves around giving or donating money. This is often done for charities, open-source programmers, and the like. Let's consider a few tools to enable you to receive a donation. Note that, while there aren't any laws in the USA against this, your country may have strict laws forbidding this. Please consult your legal advisor in advance.

Donations (Tip Jars)

Both Paypal and Amazon offer mechanisms for directly soliciting your visitors for direct donations or tips. If you offer high quality content, these micro payments can offer you a way to make some extra money without directly monetizing your website. [ 121 ]

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Non-profit organizations in particular can also use a donations system to solicit donations from visitors. There are a lot of opinions as to whether this approach is effective, a lot of invective as to whether begging your visitors for money is appropriate, and you can expect a lot of speculation as to what you'll do with the money. The famous Internet story on this subject revolves around SaveKaryn.com, a site established a few years back by a down-on-her-luck New Yorker appealing to the world's netizens to relieve her of debt. Karyn got a lot of hate mail, but she also got a lot of donations: so much so that she easily retired her debt, and has also written a book about her experience. She now devotes her website to profiling others in need of the same courtesy and sympathy she received. The Pros and Cons on this one are fairly obvious:

Pros

On the plus side, you're not subject to the vagaries of the marketplace or the natural flow of website traffic, nor the natural attrition of visitors-versus-clickthroughs to make money. You're dealing with, and appealing directly to, your visitors. More than that, you're not beating them over the head with in-the-face advertisements, you're politely asking for some voluntary compensation, a tip, a hand-out....call it what you want, all you're doing is appealing for funds from the people reading the content you spent valuable time producing. There's no shame in it. It's a common approach, and if done properly, can result in a small but respectable income.

Cons

On the negative side, folks who solicit their readers directly for donations can frequently be targeted by hecklers. There's always been no shortage of people who can feel perfectly self-superior from the security of their desk, (or mom's basement!) and who derive questionable ego validation and amusement from belittling humble webmasters. So be prepared to have a thick skin. Be prepared also to be underwhelmed by the volume of donations: Ever since the whole "Save Karyn" thing, the effectiveness of tip-jars has gradually decreased over time. If your audience values your content, the donations will come. If you're just throwing a tip-jar out to catch spare pennies, you'll probably receive precious few. [ 122 ]

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Of course, a non-profit organization has a natural reason to solicit donations, and wouldn't be prone to these negative considerations. Now, that said, here's how we can implement a tip jar in Joomla!. As usual, we'll need to get to obtain a few plug-ins through the extensions site: •

BorgHunter.com's Advanced PayPal Donations module

•

SstreamTV.com's Amazon PayPages module

Advanced PayPal Donations Module

The Advanced PayPal Donations Modules is obtained from BorgHunter.com. Installed as usual via the Installers | Modules menu, here is the module's Parameters screen:

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Here we see that all we need to do is configure the module with our PayPal ID, and the appropriate currency and frequency options, and we're good to go. Here's what the new module looks like on the front end:

Amazon PayPages Module

The Amazon PayPages module, obtainable from SstreamTV.com, allows the use of Amazon.com's Honor System and PayPages to enable a donations mechanism, rather than going through PayPal.

Installation

The installation is achieved, as usual, via the Installers | Modules menu. When we examine the module's parameters via the Modules menu, we see the following:

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You can see that the only option fundamentally required to use this module is to obtain the proper URL code from Amazon.com. On the front end, users are given a link to click on, to provide a donation.

Instant Branded Products

Offering custom-branded merchandise using CafePress, or another similar vendor, is an effective way not only �������������������������������������������������������������� to ����������������������������������������������������������� generate revenue, but also to further your website's reach. Services like these work by letting you generate graphics to be applied to a wide range of merchandise, such as clothes, calendars, mouse pads, and mugs, and many more.

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Inserting these products into your website can easily be achieved using the mod_ html module, or using a basic custom module. You just upload the images of your products, and create the module. Alternatively, you can create a menu item to link directly to your entire store on CafePress or the custom merchandise vendor of your choice. In fact entire sites have been built around CafePress providing the owner of the site a respectable income. For an example please visit: http://www.girlscantwhat.com.

E-Commerce

So far in this section, we've looked at all kinds of ways of generating revenue. It is time now to look at the most direct possible method: Selling actual products. There is a plethora of e-commerce extensions for Joomla!, but perhaps the most widely adopted and integrated shopping cart is VirtueMart. I chose VirtueMart because it easily integrates with iDevAffiliate, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Together these two extensions form a powerful 1-2 punch to generate revenue. Configuring VirtueMart is no trivial matter, so we will proceed directly into the configuration.

Installing VirtueMart

Before you get started you will need to download VirtueMart and its associated parts from http://virtuemart.net. VirtueMart is installed as usual via the Installers | Components dialog. On installation, you'll be presented with an option to go directly to a blank store, or populate your store with dummy products so you can see, in a default way, how to set up the products and payment methods.

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Configuring VirtueMart

Here's what we're greeted with when we go into VirtueMart's configuration dialogs via the Components | VirtueMart menu:

We'll start on the Admin menu, in the Configuration dialog:

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This is the first half of the first pane of VirtueMart's admin configuration panel. This pane is labeled Global, and contains options that apply to the entire store. In the Global section, we see we can set the cart to being offline, or run VirtueMart as a pure catalog, without taking advantage of the checkout capability. Under Price Configuration, we have options for setting the price display to registered and non-registered visitors. Under User Registration Settings we can control how users are added to the e-commerce engine. We can allow people to sign up for the website independently for buying a product, or make the checkout process handle the user account setup, as appropriate. Here's the second half of the Global pane.

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Here we see some global options for taxation and for enabling or disabling aspects of the overall user experience, such as coupons, reviews and ratings, returns policies, and terms of service. Finally, at the bottom of the global pane, we have options for enabling an affiliate program, specifying whether to allow people to buy out-of-stock products, and other loose change. The next pane on the Configuration submenu is the Path & URL tab, which simply specifies certain options related to the website's physical hosting. The next pane is the Site tab, from which we can control aspects of the component's display, such as whether to allow printable PDF pages, what product attributes to show by default, and other basic global options. The shipping tab allows the selection of one or more shipping modules, which we'll cover momentarily. The Checkout tab controls how much information is required of the user, in order to check out. It allows you to skip certain information as appropriate: If you're selling e‑books or electronic media, you don't need a shipping address. If on the other hand you're selling physical products, you'll want to ensure that your checkout process captures this data from the user. Finally, the Downloads tab allows us to define the settings by which downloadable content is stored and offered. Your needs for these settings will vary depending on your application. Moving down the Admin menu, we see the Users submenu, which gives us access to the accounts of the customers who have placed orders, or specifying whom we would like to have admin access to VirtueMart. This dialog is similar to the Joomla! User Manager, so it should be already familiar to the reader.

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Next up is the Countries menu, where we see that we can sell to as much, or as little of the world as is appropriate to our needs:

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And while we may want to sell to the entire world, we may want to restrict purchases to certain currencies, which we can do under the currencies submenu:

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The Modules submenu concerns various add-on options, which will vary considerably depending on your exact needs. We'll proceed to the Edit Store submenu under the Store menu.

Here we see an array of options for providing your contact information, some additional currency options, and your store's logo.

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Here we see that we have a massive array of payment options already integrated into VirtueMart. With the PayPal option, as well as the various specific credit card gateways, such as 2Checkout and WorldPay, we simply specify the pertinent payment ID and we're done. To process credit cards directly, using the payment gateway of your choice, you'll need to obtain an SSL certificate and then prepare Joomla! for use in a secure environment. VirtueMart looks after your security by only allowing 12 of 16 credit card digits to be stored in the database. It emails the last four, which can then be added to the first set of numbers to allow you to process the card. If you're using a custom gateway, and don't want to process payments manually, you'll need to add custom processing code; there are tutorials on this on VirtueMart's website, and you'll generally need to consult your payment gateway's documentation as well. This is an advanced function, and too detailed for the scope of this book. (If you need help, you can drop me a line at joomlawarrior.com and I could provide some advice; a big part of the Joomla! community is people helping people!)

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Under the Shipping Modules submenu, you can select from several major parcel services including UPS, CanadaPost, the US Postal Service, and more. The final options on the Store menu allow you to specify which credit cards you will accept.

Adding and Editing Products

We add and edit products and the categories they're sorted into via the Products menu.

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Here we see a typical dialog from which we can edit existing products. We can also select Add New Product from the Products menu, and either way, we're presented with a screen allowing us to define a new product:

The Product Information tab of the Add New Product dialog allows us to define the basic attributes of the product, such as SKU, Name, and Categories, as well as basic pricing data such as the price before and after tax. (We'll define our tax rate later.)

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The Product Status tab allows us to set the availability of our item, and special attributes such as sizes or colors available:

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The Product Dimensions tab lets us set the size and weight of the shipped parcel, which is used in conjunction with the shipping modules to compute the shipping cost:

We add our product images via the Product Images tab. Generally, you can just upload your image, check Auto Create Thumbnail, and it will automatically generate the thumbnail-sized picture for use in the product listings.

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Finally, the Related Products tab gives us a way to define related products to sell alongside our new product.

The products we define here will show in the optional Related Products module, if we choose to install it. The remaining options in the Products menu allow us to set discounts, add categories, and other related functions. Since your use will vary widely from the examples provided, we'll skip these. The screens are straightforward and easily configured. Moving on, the Shoppers tab allows us to define groups of shoppers that may be eligible for special deals, products, promotions, or discounts. The Orders tab shows us the orders that have completed or are in a waiting status in the system, waiting for payment to be received and recorded. The Tax, Shipping, and Coupon tabs allow you to finish setting up your shipping charges and services, tax rates, and promotional discounts. The Manufacturer tab allows you to set up multiple manufacturers, in case you need the ability to refer customers to manufacturer sites for support or after-sale service. All the above tabs display just like other Joomla! admin lists, with the usual controls to open a particular record and edit it, so we won't go into details here. [ 138 ]

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Choosing a Payment Method

There are benefits and liabilities of any potential payment method. First, you'll want to know what percentage of the overall sale the payment processor takes. You'll also want to know what the per-transaction charge will be. These fees are broken down into several different areas, known as discount fee, gateway fee, per‑transaction fee, and usually a monthly fee. It is very important, so shop around the different credit card processors to get the very best and lowest fee, with the highest customer service. All credit card processors retain a small portion of the sale, known as the discount fee. According to authorize.net (http://www.authorize.net/resources/ glossary/#D), one of the largest credit card processors, discount fee is defined as: The percent of each credit card or eCheck.Net® transaction and batch settlement processed that is billed to the merchant by the payment gateway. The transaction types for which the discount fee is charged are: charges, refunds, voids, and declines. If you intend to keep and store the customer's credit card information, you might need to carefully set up Joomla! to use an SSL certificate, without putting your whole site on the "secure side" and losing valuable search-engine traffic. Additionally, you will need to understand the particular laws in your state or country. Breech of privacy carries a heavy penalty. Through the use of an SSL certificate, you establish a secure method of communicating the private information—such as credit card data— between your site, the customer, and the credit card processor. For a more complete understanding and further reading about SSL, please visit this site at Verisign: http://www.verisign.com/ssl/ssl-information-center/how-ssl-securityworks/index.html.

Another option is to employ Google's (at the time of this writing) new credit card processing. This is a simple and very low-cost method of processing credit cards. Read about it at: http://checkout.google.com. Finally, you will have to decide whether your chosen processor will be directly integrated into your cart, or you will process the cards manually. Beyond that, you shouldn't have too many problems, and if you do, VirtueMart has a large and active support forum community from which you can draw help, and you can even pay the VirtueMart developers to work on your site!

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Optional Modules

VirtueMart also ships with a wide array of optional modules, giving access to a wide range of organizational and presentational options for showcasing related products or different product categories on your site. These modules easily install via the Installers | Modules dialog, and I won't go into exhaustive detail here due to the wide array of optional modules.

Summary

As I mentioned in the Affiliate Program section, I use VirtueMart combined with iDevAffiliate whenever possible, because they form a very effective foundation to begin an e-commerce storefront. When you consider that you can have a fully-functional e-commerce cart and a powerful affiliate marketing program with a less than $200USD budget, it becomes clear just how powerful the Joomla! platform can be for small and emerging businesses. We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter, all the way from asking for donations to e-commerce enabled shopping systems with Virtuemart. I hope that the key takeaway, you as the reader received, is that there are several different ways to take your site and add the capacity to receive money. One of the best methods mentioned is a subscription site, and I highly recommend you to read membershipsitebible.com to learn how. Having a secure environment is very important in today's phishing scam and virus world. Take time before you deploy secure sites or accept money to learn as much as you can about running a secure site. You won't be sorry for the extra time taken to learn. I wish you great success in your revenue generation.

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Disaster Recovery We will cover the following topics in this chapter: • • • •

Risk tolerance Basic steps to be taken when an outage occurs Maintenance of your Joomla! site Establishing a communications plan

Ask Yourself, "Is My Site Ready?"

Since this book is about making money, protecting your site should be as important as making money. You need to be honest and ask yourself, what you would do if your site went away for some reason. In this chapter we will consider a few basics to get you thinking for preparing your site for disaster.

If It Can Go Wrong, It Will

With the growing need for websites to service the information-hungry population of the world, the Internet is becoming the first place for seeking news, entertainment, shopping, to many people. The ability to own a website is now well within the reach of most people. While websites can span using a simple website builder to spending thousands of dollars on developers and artists to compose a site, maintain it, and keep it fresh—Joomla! falls somewhere in between. Joomla! is a wonderful product that is a fully volunteer-driven effort, supported by many independent coders, offering new and useful extensions on a regular basis. With Joomla! a small or medium business can have a very professional web presence, complete with most of the features you can think of including multi-language support.

Disaster Recovery

With such an easy-to-use product, more and more individuals who are not website administrators by training or trade have been attacked by the evil malcontents who seek to damage, destroy, and devastate websites, servers, and more. The aim of this chapter is to help you prevent as much damage as possible and to quickly recover in the event of an outage. It is my belief that Joomla! is poised to start at the edge of the enterprise computing segments and will have a greater role in websites worldwide. Therefore it is imperative that the Joomla! community begins adopting enterprise-level practices for site and data security maintenance. This chapter will give the site admin, a base to respond to outages, and to report possible new attacks, yet undiscovered, in a orderly manner that will help the community quickly address and help them.

You Have to be Prepared

You can, through a small amount of hard work, have a solid, working plan that will most likely survive an encounter with the enemy. On the point of enemies, your website, and business has many. They come in various forms, some disguised as good things, such as upgrades. Some do not pretend to hide, but announce their presence like a dictator bent on ruling the country with an iron fist. These come in the form of those who openly attack and deface your websites. Each engagement with the enemy is a gift; if you are wise enough to see it, and take advantage of it, you will reap the benefits. Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.—Napoleon Hill—Think and grow rich Each time you face crisis or a disaster, you have the opportunity to improve your defenses, increase your knowledge and update your plan. Sharing with the Joomla! community increases the overall knowledge available. Trouble and problems will come, no doubt, but take full advantage of it to improve. Be prepared by being knowledgeable about your self and of your enemy!

What is Risk Tolerance?

When a disaster happens, without proper training, documentation or processes, human nature is to panic; but you must approach it with a calm mind as this is the wrong time to lose your head and start pushing buttons.

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Risk

First things first: we should assess the level of risk your website can tolerate. Using the example of the United States 911 emergency phone system as an analog, the emergency system (911) has nearly (in practical terms) zero tolerance for downtime. A personal blog has 100 percent tolerance for risk. Assess your risk in this manner to determine the risk versus the reward of building a plan.

Where on this scale does your site live? This example is not meant to imply priority. The purpose is to introduce you to an idea of how much risk can be tolerated, based on the purpose of the site. If your blog is mission critical then it would go much farther on the scale to the right. Ask your self "Can I tolerate downtime? and if so, how much?" Asking the hard questions helps you determine the real truth. Can you stand two days down without financial impact or harm? If yes, then ask, can you stand three, four, or even five? By answering these basic questions you will be well on the way to being prepared.

Factors to be Considered for Disaster Preparation •

What will the plan cost? This can often be a show stopper for a plan because it is not known, and unless the costs can be justified no one will spend the time, effort, or money to do it.

•

Does your insurance cover hardware replacement?

•

Can you obtain new hardware and install it in a timely fashion?

•

If you are on a shared host, is there a charge to restore?

•

How much data loss (measured as data added since some point time known as the recovery point objective (RPO)) can you stand.

•

How much downtime (measured in minutes, hours, days) known as the recovery time objective (RTO) can you stand. The recovery time objective (RTO) includes stopping what you're doing, getting everything healthy—or as in the case of an attack—getting rid of the attacker and attacked parts.

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Restoring the data and getting systems back online as soon as possible are your top priorities. Should you wish to explore these topics, and others, in greater detail than is touched in here I recommend the following books: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for InfoSec Managers by John Rittinghouse and James F. Ransome and Disaster Recovery Planning—Preparing for the Unthinkable by Jon William Toigo.

Basic Steps to Take when an Outage Occurs •

Realize there is an outage.

•

Make a determination to find the root cause of the outage.

•

Initiate your disaster plan to regain control, and bring your site back online.

•

Direct communications about the disaster to all parties including the stakeholders, employees, and where appropriate the general public as to the reason for the outage.

•

Review the ������������������������������������������������������������ disaster (post-mortem) ��������������������������������������������������� to determine where the flaws in your system are, and shore them up through the improvement of the processes.

Can You Afford Not Having a Disaster Preparedness Plan? This evokes "Of course!" when asked of the uninitiated. The question seems elementary but it is related to how serious you are about maintaining your site, and having as little downtime as possible. It must be asked to have an open and intellectual dialog about your business.

Preparing for Battle

War is in progress on the Internet with the goal of destroying your website. The evildoers out there often try to take over your site for purposes such as turning it into a spambot. Others may want to simply deface or destroy your site. My view is that of those who attack websites are no different than a person who breaks into your home; it is as deplorable. It should be dealt with swiftly, and providing a strong punishment. At this point I assume you have installed Joomla! and are enjoying the benefits of the free extensions. However, in those treasures lies a dark side; often not tested thoroughly, sometimes sloppily written code that has been abandoned to rot.

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As a case in a point, a series of attacks on Joomla!-based websites came through a few well known exploits. This is not to cast aspersions on the core team or the third-party developers. Rather to wake you, the administrator of your site, to the fact that in most cases these attacks were one-hundred percent preventable. The exploits came through unpatched third-party components, older core code, and incorrect permissions, among other things. If the administrators of the exploited sites had exercised good security practices code they would have prevented or mitigated many of the attacks against their websites. These practices include things like patching, backup, and recovery methods as well as updating third-party extensions, and the core code. The battle is here, whether you wish it to be or not; you must prepare. Here are some important steps needed to form the basis of security on your site: •

Proper system-wide settings: Verifying the minimum safe levels needed.

•

Settings and verifications of versions: Setting of variables such as Global registers, safe mode, and certain PHP server settings.

•

Removing any code that is considered "at-risk". This can include code that is known to have open issues or code found to be unreliable.

•

Using .htaccess file to mitigate attacks to your site.

•

Permissions: Checking to see that you have files and directories are set correctly.

•

Upgrading your core version. Many sites are potentially still running older core code.

•

Updating to the latest safe level is mandatory for secure operations.

Using .htaccess to Protect Your Site

This chapter is not a comprehensive review or tutorial on .htaccess. The .htaccess file is a text file that is specifically designed to make changes on a per directory basis. This file can contain one, two, or as many instructions as you like that tell the server how to handle a directory in a certain way. The .htaccess file impacts the directory it resides in and all the subdirectories below it. This means that you can insert .htaccess files at lower or deeper levels in your file structure for fine-grained control.

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Permissions and Your Site

UNIX was developed when security was not as much of a consideration as it might have been, had the developers been able to see the future. Yet much work has been done to add security measures to protect computers, data, sites, etc. One of these added security features is known as permissions. Permissions are a set of rules that govern who gets permission to see, use, and change files. Many common exploits on sites are the result of incorrectly set permissions.

Passwords

Passwords deserve more attention than we usually give them—both in their conception and handling. Passwords have become so common, and a part of our daily lives that we treat our passwords with little care or regard for their protection. We come up with weak passwords that are easy to guess, storing them unprotected on our desktops. We write them down, on little sticky notes attached to our computer screens for the world to see.

Creating a Good and Strong Password

It is tempting to use your birth date as your password, or your dog's name, or even the street where you live. These types of passwords are as obvious to crackers as they are to you. The challenge in creating a cracker-proof password is to make the password difficult to guess without making it impossible for you to remember.

Backup and Restore

Any backup strategy that is local and works well should have an archive process. That said, choosing your remote site for archiving is as important as the backup. This story of a devastating fire in the London and Canadian storage facilities for data archive company Iron Mountain®, only highlights that you cannot solely depend on a copy of an off-site backup. Note the following headlines: "Iron Mountain fires prompt users to hasten hunt for backup options." "Iron Mountain London facility fire expected to result in full loss of records contained within the record centre." The Iron Mountain® facility in Canada burned within a day or two of the London facility and the cause as of this time of writing according to news reports is unknown but appears coincidental. You need to consider contingencies in your disaster preparedness plan. Even to the degree of losing your backup media storage site.

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Another backup gone bad story is one that I am familiar with personally. While working at a large defense contractor in the late nineteen-eighties in computer systems maintenance, I received a panicked call from a customer about the loss of their disk drive. Upon arriving I found out that they had regularly backed up the project data nightly. I went through their procedures and did not note any problems with how they were conducting backups. The issue was they had lost a hard drive, a whopping 5 1/4" 72 Megabyte hard drive and they were attempting to restore the data. The tape they were restoring from was good, as well as the tape device and software. The machine was healthy, yet the data could not be retrieved. It seems that the person conducting the local backups did what was known at that time as an image backup. This is where you copy the entire image of the hard drive with the intention of restoring it exactly as it had come off the drive. It turns out that image backups rarely, if ever, worked. It is moot to discuss why a vendor would knowingly ship a broken product, just accept that it sometimes happens. Test early, test often, test and document, and test again. The real moral of the story here is that the backups were conducted nightly and the tape stored safely away. They never tested the restored tape and had no process or plan to do so. Had they tested it they would have found out immediately that it would not work and chosen a full or incremental backup strategy instead, choosing to do a fresh restore of the operating system and applications, then restoring data.

Maintenance of Your Joomla! Site

Any OS, software, bios, code, script, and applications tend to rot. In other words, they tend to age ungracefully, often quickly. As soon as an exploit is discovered it makes its way around the world in hours. Often these exploits are used against average people who are faceless, nameless targets for the enemies of our websites. Your site is no different in its need to be maintained than any system. Proper maintenance is important to perform and conduct according to a regular schedule. If your site were a car, would you drive it to the oil-change shop after the oil light came on? Some people might, however, I doubt if they will pay attention to this book. From July 2003 through June 2005, the average number of published computer vulnerabilities was around 2,500 per year or nearly six to seven each day. Even if you only have a single server you should expect to spend time reviewing a handful of critical patches per month. Take the time to perform regular maintenance.

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What Do You Do First? Daily •

Log in once a day just to ensure no defacement has happened, and ensure the site is up.

Weekly •

Keep an eye on the server logs (if you have access to them). Watch for anything 'out of the ordinary'—while that's a general statement, watching them daily will give you an idea of what to expect, allowing you to respond to things that are not ordinary.

•

Document the changes to any configuration files, ini files, template, etc.

•

Perform a full or incremental file backup of the site files.

•

Perform a full database backup.

•

Take (if possible) a copy of the backup files offsite.

•

If your host backs up, ask for a copy of their backup or restoration schedule or plan.

•

Read the Joomla! security forum to see if any hot topics have come up.

Monthly •

Review the security forums for exploits.

•

Review the components/mods/plug-ins related to your site.

•

Change all the administrative passwords, including the database, ftp, the core admin and any others such as RSS feeds.

•

Optional but highly recommended: Change your users passwords.

Being Prepared is Job 1

A disaster is anything that causes your IT systems to stop or fail. Why is this chapter so important? If you have a business of any size, a 1978 study by the University of Minnesota states that your business can only survive an interruption of two to six days in length. Given the Internet has compressed time for us, I would say that length of time might be even shorter. There is always someone there to take your place in line on the Internet.

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Consider the following as you work through this planning and documentation. We have weaved portions ���������������������������������������������������� of this������������������������������������ into this book in various sections. •

Carefully assess how your company functions, both internally and externally, to determine which staff, materials, procedures, and equipment are absolutely necessary to keep the business operating.

•

Identify operations critical to survival and recovery.

•

Include emergency payroll, expedited financial decision-making, and accounting systems to track and document costs in the event of a disaster.

•

Establish procedures for succession of management. Include at least one person who is not at the company headquarters, if applicable.

•

Identify the suppliers, shippers, resources, and other businesses you must interact with on a daily basis.

•

Develop professional relationships with more than one company to use in case your primary contractor cannot service your needs. A disaster that shuts down a key supplier could be devastating to your business.

•

Plan regularly with the suppliers, shippers, and others you do business with.

•

Create a contact list for existing critical business contractors and others you plan to use in an emergency. Keep this list with other important documents on file, in your emergency supply kit and at an off-site location.

•

Plan what you will do if your home, building, plant, or store is not accessible.

•

Consider if you can run the business from a different location or from your home.

•

Develop relationships with other companies to use their facilities in case a disaster makes your location unusable.

•

Plan for payroll continuity—how will you pay employees?

•

Decide who should participate in putting up your emergency plan.—if there is more than one person in your company, you should decide the person(s) in charge of various functions.

•

Include co-workers from all levels in planning and as active members of the emergency management team.

•

Consider a broad cross-section of people from throughout your organization, but focus on those with expertise vital to daily business functions. These will likely include people with technical skills as well as managers and executives.

•

Make sure those involved know what they are supposed to do.

•

Train others in case you need back-up help. [ 149 ]

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OK, I've written my plan, now what? Part of keeping your plan up to date is to integrate changes into your routine and plan. Things you want to keep a close eye out for are: •

Did the phone numbers or contacts change?

•

Is the URL and forum website addresses correct?

•

Did the testing uncover any miswritten information?

•

Does the plan work for you, can it be reordered?

•

Are the instructions clearly written so that they can be followed?

While there are a number of other stumbling blocks to success, these are some that in my experience are the most common. As part of your test, update your documentation, collect the old documentation, and distribute new documentation, based on the results of the test.

Conducting a Mock Drill

Conducting drills will help you flesh out the plan ensuring you haven't missed anything. It will bring out the problems with your planning. It will help your staff (even if that's just you) learn the procedures needed to recover and respond. I highly recommend you drill twice a year. This gives you four months to plan, document, and write test scenarios, and about one month to cover the loose ends, train staff, and of course the month to conduct testing. The plan exists on paper and must be remembered both by you and by your staff. Another point that you must bear in mind is that your plan might fail the first time through; be aware but don't be discouraged. I cannot overstress the importance of communication with your team. And again if your team consisits of only two people make sure you talk. If you have a larger staff, I would suggest that you take the report and work closely with them to develop the scenarios. I would not use the entire team to develop the scenarios. However, after they are developed make sure you run them by the team for a reality check. On the day of the test make sure everyone has a copy of the plan in advance. Get some coffee, juice, pastries, etc. This will stave off hunger helping them stay focused on the task at hand. After the test, collect all notes, and confirm you're debriefing within a week. Do not wait any longer; rather use this debrief to coach, improve, and document changes for the next test.

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Again remember that your plan may fail the first time you go through it. It might fail the second time, and so on. Keep at it because each failure leads you to a more successful plan.

Establishing a Communications Plan

You may never find yourself in the position of being contacted by the media if your website experiences an outage, yet it only makes good sense to have a communications plan in advance. Your plan for reporting an outage should have a few important elements in so that it makes it worth while for you and the reporter. If at all possible avoid the media. This may not be the right answer and will probably lay harshly with reviewers of this book, yet it must be addressed. The media does not always convey the facts in a truthful or accurate fashion. This is not a blanket statement of the media, but it is a fact of today's hurry up 24 x 7 news reporting. During a disaster you or someone in your staff may say something casually but completely inaccurate, and it becomes a "fact" the instant it is printed. The reporter may think he or she is reporting accurately, but does not verify the facts. The time while the disaster is in progress is clearly not the time to talk to the media. Do not be rude, or state "no comment", give them a statement that they can use but won't hurt you. Promise to get back to them with information as soon as you have it. To that end being prepared for the media to show up is important, and must be done. Assignment of a person that the media can speak with is mandatory. If you have staff, instruct them on directing all media requests to whoever has been assigned the role.

Purpose of Media Contact •

Baseline communication regarding the event is to re-establish trust and ensure facts and not conjecture.

•

The message should drive the behavior you want rather than driving your behavior.

In order to accomplish these things you must prepare in advance several items.They are as follows: •

Talking points for employees

•

Templates for developing a news release

•

Lists of reporters, media outlets, or blog sites you want your message directed to

•

Fact sheets for media, both downloadable PDF and paper based

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As there are several types of messages that can be delivered, the topic at hand in this book is crises communication only. Thus the tone of your message must carry confidence; it must establish trust through the use of factual information. As you can see, the planning for disaster, while detailed and lengthy, is an important item in your cash arsenal. Don't wait—planning for disaster is as important as planning your marketing.

Summary

The chapter provided a brief tutorial on disaster preparation for your cash-generating site.We learnt the importance of protecting your site and factors that should be considered for disaster preparation.

[ 152 ]

Small Change This section will discuss other cash-generating weapons that do not necessarily fit well into other categories. In this section we'll discuss: •

Marketing your Joomla! skills (being your own consultancy)

•

Offering free and commercial Joomla! templates

Marketing Your Joomla! skills

If you've read all the way through Packt Publishing's books on Joomla!, spent a few days around the Joomla! support forums, have got your site up and running, and managed to apply the lessons you've learned, you may be ready to start selling your expertise to others!

What You Offer

There are tons of website designers out there. But you're different. You're armed with a contemporary, easy-to-use and easy-to-teach content management system, and are willing to forego locking your clients into long-term "website maintenance" contracts. You're ready to free and enable your customers, and then get out of their way.

It can be Daunting—I Know!

I've walked this path before. In my hometown, a small town in Ohio, USA, a particular designer pretty much had the market sewn up. Numbering about half the town's small businesses among her clients, I had a difficult path to walk to make inroads in her business.

Small Change

Managing to sell her clients on HTML-based websites, with little-to-no dynamic capability, and later charging for updates, she had her customers locked into proprietary solutions at high prices. Moreover, the SEO work on her sites was patchy and problematic. I knew I could do better. I knew that long-term, customers would be happier with my services, partnered with an easily extensible, open-source CMS, that gave them direct control over their Internet destiny. So, I set about devising a Grand Master Plan. And I'll share (most of) it with you, free of charge!

The Grand Master Plan

Starting off, I knew I had to fulfil certain core objectives: •

Find a way to demonstrate the superiority of my services over my competitors

•

Attain a few core, small-business clients, so that I could demonstrate industry-specific competencies

•

Demonstrate my abilities to place my clients before their competitors in search engine rankings

How I approached It

I was fortunate that I had a worthwhile project ready at hand. My high-school graduating class was in dire need of a website to coordinate our upcoming reunion, so I made one, in Joomla!, virtually overnight. Pretty soon, a very large percentage of my class was online and communicating, many of them for the first time in years. I then copied the website 47 times, and edited the header graphics and configuration files so that I could offer every graduating class their own site. I now had a compelling product, offered for free, that both ������������������������ served the ����������������� public need, and demonstrated my capabilities to the entire town's population. I now had the basis of a portfolio. So, working from there, I began approaching small‑business clients around the area, and found a few receptive ears that were ready to take their website game to the next level.

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Since Joomla!'s SEO capabilities are outstanding, I had a comparatively easy time with it. Very soon, I had a list of interested parties around town who wanted to speak to me, and who already had an idea of what I could do for them.

Networking to Win

While I was doing some local small business websites, and wondering how I would approach sales efforts when the local well would run dry, I was busy building up my online contacts as well. I used to participate in online forums, help people out with their websites. Also I gradually started building a few low-key, vanity projects of my own. One day, an online acquaintance asked if I felt Joomla! could adapt to the needs of a major corporation, to be used by small internal teams. Since I knew that Joomla! can handle the needs of all but the very largest websites, I answered affirmatively, and started the necessary research of talking to the client. I got the contract, and took a project that had been projected to run as high as $100,000, and turned it around at 1% of the projected cost, providing training to the client's principals on how to handle the ongoing maintenance and provide a minimanual for their employees to complement the available online self-help resources. On the basis of my available references and Joomla! capabilities, I convinced Packt Publishing to let me write this book! and the rest is history.

You Can Do It Too

You need to be prepared to put in a lot of hard work in the beginning. The first thing you'll learn as a website designer is that you never know everything, even if you know everything. So, right off the bat, set aside some time every day to stay abreast of what's happening in the field. Participate in forums (we in the Joomla! forums can always use some fresh blood answering questions!) and be generous with your time in helping less experienced people make the most of Joomla! for themselves. In the early goings, you'll have plenty of it, and you never know when somebody you helped for free will be ready and waiting to refer some business your way! While you're busy building your contacts and credentials in the Joomla! community, keep an eye peeled for non-profits and community causes that can benefit from your know‑how. When you find them, offer your services for free as a public service. It's a great way to network your way around your own hometown, and you'll feel better for having done it. [ 155 ]

Small Change

Another effective tactic is to start a blog, and post something on it every day. It might not always be about website design or marketing, or SEO, but something to get the people's attention. When you start getting interested clients wanting to (gasp!) pay you for your expertise, be sure to follow these tips: •

Research Their Industry: Your clients will be highly impressed if they do not have to explain to you the inner workings, jargon, and conventions of their industry in the initial meeting. This saves some important time, and goes a long way towards assuming the sale.

•

Speak Frankly about Mutual Expectations: Don't try to overawe your contacts with lofty projections. Make sure they understand that successful website production is a two‑way street, and that they need to be prepared to invest as much involvement as you will, perhaps, even more! Moreover, be sure to explain, without being condescending, the various factors involved in producing the website, launching it, and getting it indexed. The most common causes of unhappy clients are rude surprises. Make sure your client understands that successful results take time, and sometimes, trial and error, particularly in regards to SEO work.

•

Speak Dollars and Sense: Explain to them the expectations they should have for the website, in terms of traffic, and especially in terms of how to successfully convert website traffic into real revenue. Also speak to them about what revenue results you've helped other clients achieve.

•

Be Flexible: When your client hears your price, they will generally do their due diligence. You need to be prepared to explain not only why you're superior from a technical perspective, but also why you are a superior solution to generic, do-it-yourself, cookie-cutter website solutions, and also why you're better than the college student down the street who's willing to work for beer money. If price becomes a concern that jeopardizes your chances of gaining the client, be willing to spread the cost across multiple months, as needed, to help make your customers comfortable and make them realize that you're not just in it for the money. You want to build a lasting, mutually‑beneficial relationship.

•

Make Education Part of the Package: Make sure that the customer understands the power you're putting in their hands! And include a few free hours of tutorial time in your estimate to help them hit the ground running when it's time to hand the website over to them. An hour spent educating your client in the early goings will be several hours saved later, when they want to make heavy additions or changes.

•

Be Open to Help Out after the Sale: So, you've sold to the customer, built the website, optimized the copy and the layout, and you've already submitted your invoice. And now the customer calls you back. [ 156 ]

Chapter 8

They want to tweak a few minor things, and they need your help in doing so. Your estimate of the time required is minimal, and half-hour, tops. Do you: 1. Break out your contract and invoke overtime clauses? 2. Just help the customer out, and tell them not to worry about a half-hour overtime? If you answered option 2, you are correct! Never nickel-and-dime your customers. You want them to be happy enough and refer you to their friends and contacts! Remember: An hour's worth of compensation is not worth a future lost client.

Finding Joomla! Work

I've had terrific luck with Joomlancers.com, a website catering to the Joomla! community, and connecting designers and programmers with businesses that already know the benefits Joomla! brings to the table!

By staying on top of the request for bids on Joomlancers, you will be at the top or at least near the top of the responses. This will enable you to win more than you lose. Other sites you may wish to review are rentacoder.com and craigslist.com. Both offer jobs, and needful customers. [ 157 ]

Small Change

Offer Joomla! Templates

The first thing many Joomla! newbies do is start looking for templates they can dress their sites in without doing their own work to build their own customized shell. And you can cash in!

Offer Free Templates

Offering free templates for Joomla! is an excellent way to build traffic for your Joomla! sites, or as a means of boosting your ability to market your Joomla! skills to business clients as outlined in the prior section. There are hundreds of searches for "Free Joomla! Templates" every single day. This can also be a great way to connect with businesses that know they want Joomla!, but that may need additional help to get their sites firing on all cylinders.

Offer Commercial Templates

When you're generating truly breathtaking Joomla! templates, you can start charging for them, in conjunction with an e-commerce component. There are several template clubs out there already, but if you have a truly stunning set of templates, it can be easy to stand out from the crowd. Clubs such as Joomlart and RocketTheme have long been lucrative additions to their operator's existing Joomla!‑related business activities. Template clubs are popular ways of making a 'subscription' base revenue. In these instances, you would offer a monthly (or some time frame) template to the club members, which they in turn could download and use as many as they like and as often as they like for a small fee. Other types of template offerings are custom, commercial templates that are typically a one-off fit for the client. Another idea is to set up for a template customization, implementation offering. What really can provide you a great income is to make the best, well tested (across browsers) templates possible.

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Chapter 8

Offering Commercial Services

If you decide to get into business and offer commercial services such as website development using Joomla!, here are a few tips you will want to keep in mind: •

Determine your (personal) rate per hour you need to make. This will include mileage, cost of tools, phone bill, time, etc. By knowing this you can structure a profitable deal for yourself and the customer.

•

Draft a statement of work for your customer. What this statement of work, or SOW, will do is protect you and the customer. It should outline what the customer's needs are. Clearly spell out what you will be doing, for what amount of pay, the time it will take and so forth. In this SOW you may wish to list your proposed time for delivery, deposit on work terms, any extra items that the customer should pay for, such as hosting, etc.

•

Set up a test server and develop the site, using something like Joomlaplug. com's Joomla! cloner. The advantage is that you don't disturb their current site; you can develop, test, etc. on your server and when done and approved can clone it over.

•

Determine what a successful launch is. This is an upfront agreement between you and the customer. This should be part of your SOW.

•

Determine what you need from the customer before you start. Make sure you return the list that the customer provides you and obtain a signature. Set time lines on the items. Items such as "customer to provide hosting at XYZ‑hosting Company by October 10." This will keep your project moving forward and keep it from getting bogged down.

•

Establish a time on the calendar to sit down and train the customer, go over various milestones, etc.

Conclusion

Joomla! is a powerful platform to build a part-or full-time revenue stream on. Take care to determine up front what you will be selling, who will buy your goods and services, and so on. If you have an artist who can handle development of the template, you are in a position to take advantage of the rapid growth of Joomla! and set up a template club. In short, there are hundreds of methods to make money using Joomla!—Get to it and enjoy!

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Index A account expiration logins, managing with 119 unique changes, applying 119 actionable data, log analysis Google analytics 62 JoomlaStats 60 ads, obtaining ad space, selling directly to advertisers 89 banner affiliates, signing up with 88 advanced PayPal donations module Amazon PayPages module 124 Amazon PayPages module, installing 124 Amazon Omakase module, using 102, 103 Amazon Product Feed Bridge. See  APFB APFB 101

B banner advertisements about 87 adapting 94 ads, obtaining 88 banner strategies 89 client setting up 91, 93 cons 88 direct template, including 93 direct template, installing 90 evaluating 94 guidelines in placing ads 89 implementing, considerations 89 improvising 95 Joomla! banner component 90 new banner, uploading 90, 91

overcoming 95 pros 87 weapon, considerations 94 weapon, firing 90 basic color psychology about 74 black, cool colors 76 blue, cool colors 76 cool colors 75 cultural considerations 76 green, cool colors 75 hot colors 75 orange hot colors 75 red, hot colors 75 violet, cool colors 76 white, cool colors 76 yellow, hot colors 75 behaviour analysis. See  also conversion analysis bit unfair case study 51

C case study linkbait, bitunfair 51 linkbait, Oxfam.org.uk 51 color psychology about 72 classic and jazzy 72 fire and ice 72 gaining benefit, considerations 73 communications plan about 151 establishing 151 media contact, purposes 151

competitive analysis about 17, 26 link popularity of competitors, analyzing 27 opportunities 26 search engine position of competitors, analyzing 27 strengths 26 SWOT, conducting 26 threats 26 weaknesses 26 content navigation about 70 cons 70 default way, implementing ways 70 implementing 70 implementing ways 70 pros 70 table of contents mambot, implementing ways 71 content organization complexity 69 complexity, cons 69 complexity, pros 69 conversion analysis about 17, 24 additional navigational options, adding 24 content presentation, prioritizing 24 copy, refining in under utilized areas 24 e-commerce processes, streamlining 25 e-commerce processes, tips 25 features, determining 24

D direct revenue, generating about 15, 19 affiliate marketing 20 information 20 products 20 disaster about 148 preparing, considerations 149 preparing for 141, 142, 148 disaster recovery battle, preparing for 144

communications plan, establishing 151 disaster preparation, factors to be considered 143 Joomla! Site, maintaining 147 mock drill, conducting 150 outage, recovery steps 144 risk 143 risk tolerance 142 site, preparing for disaster 141, 142, 148 donations about 121 cons 122 pros 122

G Google analytics about 62 cons 63 installing 63 overview 63 pros 62

H hacks. See  also unique changes

I iDevAffiliate about 108 ads, types 116 options 109 packages 108 internet 6

J JACL about 120 configuring 120 installing 120 Joomla! commercial sevices, offering 159 commercial sevices, tips 159 commercial templates, offering 158 free templates, offering 158

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optimizing 39 SEO 39 SEO, using in 39 skills, marketing 153 templates, offering 158 work, finding 157 Joomla! Access Control Level. See  JACL Joomla! banner component 90 Joomla! Cash disaster recovery 141 Joomla! skills, marketing 153 marketing plans 13 Joomla! site maintenance 147 monthly maintenance 148 weekly maintenance 148 Joomla! tagBot 48 Joomla! Warrior 7 JoomlaStats about 60 cons 60 installing 61 pros 60

L linkbaiting about 50 affiliate marketing, tips 56 affiliate programs 56 bit unfair, case study 51 Oxfam.org.uk, case study 51 permission marketing 54 permission marketing, rules 55 RSS feeds, using 54 tactics 53 linkfarms 38 log analysis about 17, 22, 59 action, taking 64 actionable data, getting 60 clickmaps 23 information, providing 60 logs, obtaining 59 product sales versus promotion 23 survey 23

M maintenance, Joomla! Site about 147 monthly 148 weekly 148 marketing, Joomla! skills be flexible, tips 156 be open to help out after the sale, tips 156 blog, starting 156 commercial services, offering 159 commercial templates, offering 158 free templates, offering 158 make education part of the package, tips 156 master plan 154 master plan, approaching 154 networking 155 research their industry, tips 156 speak dollars and sense, tips 156 speak frankly about mutual expectations, tips 156 templates, offering 158 tips 156 marketing plans about 13 creating 13 elements 14 objectives 15 tactics 18 menu navigation simplicity 68 simplicity, cons 69 simplicity, pros 68 Meta data about 31 optimizing 32

O objectives, marketing plans competitive analysis 17, 26 conversion analysis 17, 24 direct revenue, generating 15, 19 higher degree of value,giving to consumer 28

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log analysis 17, 22, 59 traffic, generating 16, 21 user contribution, recognizing 18, 28 user loyalty, encouraging 18 OpenSEF about 40 installing 41-43 sitemap, configuring 45 sitemap, generating 46, 47 sitemap, submitting 47 sitemap feature, using 44 tips for using 44 options, iDevAffiliate administrator panel 109 commission settings 113 email notifications 114 email templates 115 general settings 111 general settings, options 112 manage frequently asked questions 115 offline marketing 116 offline marketing, implementing 116 offline marketing, implementing ideas 116 site configuration 110 site configuration, options 110, 111 outage recovery steps 144 Oxfam.org.uk case study 51

P place about 8 advantages 9 disadvantages 9 price 9 product 8 product affiliate programs about 98 Amazon 100 Amazon Associates program, signing up 100 APFB 101 CJ affiliates module, using 107 cons 99 direct template including 104

mod_html module 108 product affiliate code, importing 108 pros 99 reporting 99 tracking 99 weapon, firing 100 promotion 10 promotional optimization about 36 competitive analysis 39 link anchors 37 linkfarms, avoiding 38 link popularity 36 link relevancy, determining 38 relevant link partners, choosing 38

R Really Simple Syndication. See  RSS real world views about 78 Dell computer, example 83 humour portals, example 82 new media, example 79-81 old media, example 79-81 PC Magazine, example 84 supermarket tabloids, example 78 revenue, generating account expiration, configuring 117 advanced PayPal donations module 123 affiliate marketing conclusion 117 affiliate programs, running 108 banner advertisements 87 donation, accepting 121 donations 121 e-commerce 126 iDevAffiliate 108 instant branded products 125 JACL component 120 optional modules 140 other product affiliate programs,using 106 payment method, choosing 139 product affiliate programs 98 subcriptions 117 text-based contextual ads 95 virtuemart, configuring 127-133 virtuemart, installing 126

[ 164 ]

T

risk tolerance 142 robot.txt.file 35

S search engine optimization. See  SEO security, Joomla! Site about 145 .htaccess, using 145 backup 146, 147 necessary steps for forming 145 password, creating 146 passwords 146 permissions 146 restore 146, 147 SEO .htaccess 40 about 21, 29 conclusion 48 content optimization 32 external views of website, by search engine 31 htaccess.txt, copying to .htaccess 40 items in website, search engine looking for 30 keyword, researching 33 Meta data, optimizing 31 OpenSEF 40 site optimization 33 structural optimization 30 title optimization 32 site layout basic color psychology 74 color psychology 72 effective copy, writing 77 effective copywriting, tips 77, 78 real world views 78 typefaces 73 typefaces, fonts 74 urgency, instilling tips 85 site optimization about 67, 68 accessibility 71 content navigation 70 content organization 68 menu navigation 68 usability, measuring 71

text-based contextual ads about 95 ads, obtaining 96 cons 96 pros 95 text-ad strategies 96 tips, improving success 96 weapon, evaluating 98 weapon, firing 97 traffic, generating about 16, 21 keywords-rich copywriting 21 linkbaiting 50 linkbaiting techniques 50 online club, promoting 22 promotional optimization 36 RSS syndication 22 SEO 21, 29 SEO, using in Joomla! 39 sitemap submission 21 website organization 34 website structure 34 traffic analysis. See  also log analysis; typefaces about 73 fonts, design considerations 74

U unique changes 119

V virtuemart, configuring products, adding 134 products, editing 134

W website organization about 34 ALT TAG 36 ALT TEXT 36 internal linking 34 navigation 34 robot.txt.file, using 35

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Thank you for buying

Joomla! Cash

Packt Open Source Project Royalties

When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. Therefore by purchasing Joomla! Cash, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Joomla! Project. In the long term, we see ourselves and you—customers and readers of our books—as part of the Open Source ecosystem, providing sustainable revenue for the projects we publish on. Our aim at Packt is to establish publishing royalties as an essential part of the service and support a business model that sustains Open Source. If you're working with an Open Source project that you would like us to publish on, and subsequently pay royalties to, please get in touch with us.

Writing for Packt

We welcome all inquiries from people who are interested in authoring. Book proposals should be sent to [email protected]. If your book idea is still at an early stage and you would like to discuss it first before writing a formal book proposal, contact us; one of our commissioning editors will get in touch with you. We're not just looking for published authors; if you have strong technical skills but no writing experience, our experienced editors can help you develop a writing career, or simply get some additional reward for your expertise.

About Packt Publishing

Packt, pronounced 'packed', published its first book "Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management" in April 2004 and subsequently continued to specialize in publishing highly focused books on specific technologies and solutions. Our books and publications share the experiences of your fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today's systems, applications, and frameworks. Our solution-based books give you the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies you're using to get the job done. Packt books are more specific and less general than the IT books you have seen in the past. Our unique business model allows us to bring you more focused information, giving you more of what you need to know, and less of what you don't. Packt is a modern, yet unique publishing company, which focuses on producing quality, cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike. For more information, please visit our website: www.PacktPub.com.

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