Overview

There are many ways to make money online with Joomla; one of them is by joining a Joomla affiliate program.

You just need to register an account, promote a Joomla product and the money will roll right in. It sounds attractive, right? I know that some of you might want to be an affiliate to make money online. So now, let's get some behind-the-screen secrets revealed.

Make money online with a Joomla affiliate program

An affiliate program

An affiliate program is an arrangement in which an online merchant website pays affiliates a commission to send them traffic or get people to buy their products. This agreement is usually based on the number of people the affiliate sends to the merchant's site, or the number of people they send to make a purchase or perform some other actions. There are at least three parties in an affiliate program transaction:

• The merchant who offers products and affiliate program. This site will give you a URL, store the content of your page and slap on some advertisements.
• The affiliate who advertises the merchant's products to the customer. These affiliates advertise the merchant's URL (via websites, email and so on), then they get paid according to a particular agreement.
• The customer who takes the action which the merchant desires, via affiliate programs.

There are various promotion types: Via Banners, Page Peels or Text Ads, Emails and so on. In the Joomla affiliate world, the affiliates mostly get payment when the customers buy products (Pay-per Sale).

Requirement

To join an affiliate program, you should have:

• Promotion methods: They might be website(s), Social Media Pages(s) or Email Address(es). With these, you can promote products by placing banners, tweet about products, send emails to introduce the product and so on.
• An online payment account: All of Joomla merchants who offer affiliate programs use online methods to pay you money. Paypal is highly recommended. Some of them use only Paypal.
• A relationship network: A network of friends, co-workers and more - who you introduce products to.
• HTML / CSS design knowledge (Optional): Not all merchants offer you pre-designed banners, so you should know some HTML / CSS design knowledge to create affiliate banners.

Process

• Select suitable vendor(s): Affiliate programs work best when affiliates choose products or services that match the content of their websites. You should make sure that you choose reputable products or services as well.
• Register as an affiliate: You fill in your information such as username, website, payment service and so on.
• Run the affiliate programs: Select the promoting method, get your HTML code or create your own link. Then you place code in your content to create the desired banners, links, etc.
• Check your affiliate report: Normally, you can check sales, traffic, account balance , how banners are performing and more from your report.

Dashboard of an affiliate program of Idevdirect - A popular affiliate software to make money online

Joomla affiliate programs, here they are!

Below are Joomla product providers and Joomla service providers that offer affiliate programs to make money online. Let's have a closer look at common definition first:

• Software: The application which the merchant uses to monitor affiliate program and the affiliate uses to check his report.
• Commission: A certain payment the affiliate earns for each sale.
  • EPC Earnings per Click): Commissions generated by all affiliates / total number of clicks.
• Advertising method: The ways that the affiliate can choose to promote products or services. It might be banners, page peels, email templates, etc. Mainly, merchants provide you with available stuffs so you can get your affiliate campaign started immediately. However, some others just provide you with an instruction and an ID number so you need to design them yourself. Below you can see common methods:
  • Banners, Lightboxs, HTML Ads: Graphic designs that contains the target URL. It might be static or dynamic with various sizes and designs.
  • Page Peels: Website corners where you can peel them to see messages underneath. If you click on the messages, you will be redirect to the target URLs.
  • Textual links (Text Ads, Text Links, Email Links, Social Media): Text that links to target URLs.
  • Email templates: Sample text email to send to your friends. Target URLs are included.
• Payment:
  • Payment methods(PM): The service the merchant chooses to pay money for you.
  • Payout threshold (PT): Minimum balance requirement for payout.
  • Payments are issued (PAI): The certain day of each month when the merchant pay you money.
  • Initial deposit (ID): the bonus money when you join the Affiliate Program.
• Benefits:
  • Referral cookie (RC): The cookie of visitor' computer will be detected. If he visited the merchant's website before and makes a purchase after X days, the affiliate still gets his commission.

Now, you can get the details:

Joining StackIdeas affiliate program

We use EasyBlog to build our blog. This is a great Joomla blog component from StackIdeas and it's great to introduce it to my followers by text links or on Twitter via their affiliate program. I'd love to share my experience with you guys.

StackIdeas offers 3 levels of sales, from 25% to 40 % commissions if you sell from $1 to above $1000 total. They run this program on Plimus. Besides EasyBlog, I can also sell other products of theirs such as EasyDiscuss or SectionEx to make money online.

Below is my step by step process to run their affiliate program:

Step 1: Becoming a Plimus Seller

It's easy to register as a Plimus Seller. I filled in some information in the registration form. Then, I waited about 2 minutes to get a confirmation email that I had been accepted as a member the Plimus Affiliate Network. After that, I logged in to the Plimus Dashboard and waited for 2 hours to get an email to inform me that I was accepted as a StackIdeas affiliates.

URL to StackIdeas affiliate program: http://stackideas.com/affiliates.html

Plimus dashboard

Step 2: Learning how to run an affiliate program with Plimus

I hadn't known about Plimus before, so I had to learn about it. Then I knew all about Affiliate stuff:

I was provided with my own URLs to StackIdeas products. For example:

• My URL to the Buy Now page of Easy Blog, Professional Edition: https://www.plimus.com/jsp/buynow.jsp?contractId=2817182&referrer=1012424".
• My URL to Product Information: "https://www.plimus.com/jsp/redirect.jsp?contractId=2817182&referrer=1012424".

For more convenience, I added:

• Tracking IDs to fully monitor and compare referral sources and success rate. For example, I added "&tid=Twitter_Nov24" after the Buy Now page to check the status of the affiliate tweets which run on Twitteron November 24th: https://www.plimus.com/jsp/buynow.jsp?contractId=2817182&referrer=1012424&tid=Twitter_Nov24
• Additional notification email: To send a notification message when an order for this contract is successfully dealt with.

There are more customization guidelines; you can check them at the Learning Center for Affiliates: http://home.plimus.com/ecommerce/learning-center/affiliates

Step 3: Running my affiliate program

• I tweet the Buy Now page with my own tracking ID on my Twitter page:

The promotion of Easyblog on Twitter

• I often check email and sometimes check the report.

Plimus report

• I make some changes to run it more effectively.

In conclusion

Joomla affiliate program allows you to make money online fast. However, it should be considered as a bonus to your main source of revenue since it is not a stable source of income.

I've attached a package of some of the available banners of the programs above. Please download it for further reference.

Have you run any Joomla affiliate programs? Do you intend to place some Joomla banners in your website to make money online? Please feel free to make comments if you have something to share with others about how to make money online.