Developing Membership Websites With Joomla

Membership Websites and Internet Marketing using Joomla


Joomla is one of the fastest growing open-source content management systems. The growth of Joomla can be attributed to its easy of use (once deployed) and its flexibility towards extending functionality. Joomla though difficult to install and configure (Its no rocket science either), once installed and configured is quite easy to use by a non-technical person.

The true power of Joomla is the ability to extend functionality, this indeed has seen several business spring up around Joomla and now there is a thriving Joomla community with around 4000 free and paid components, modules and plug-ins available to use with your Joomla Website. Joomla combined together with some great components creates a fabulous Membership Website and Internet Marketing Platform.

The Membership Website business model is becoming a very widely used model, people are generating immense amount of money using this model, Joomla is a perfect choice for this business model. Joomla provides all the features necessary for managing a Membership Website. Some of the great features provided by Joomla out of the box include:

• Users
• Articles
• Blogs
• Calendars
• Forums
• FAQs
• Image Library
• Language Internationalization
• Links
• Newsflashes/News
• Page Caching
• Polls and Surveys
• Printable page versions
• Web Indexing
• Site Search and more…

These can be easily compounded with some excellent components to create a full powered membership website with a fabulous internet marketing platform. Here are some of the great components you can use to create an integrated internet marketing platform using Joomla:

• Membership Subscriptions and Payment Processing – AEC Account Expiration Control is an excellent component to create paid memberships and provides payment integration with nearly 40 payment processors.This component had been opensource and free for a very long time, but in the recent times its been made commercial for a small price, but is fabulous in the value it delivers.

• Affiliate Tracking – Amigos is a good affiliate tracking tool, it integrates with AEC account subscription and provides payment accounting based on clicks or sales as a fixed price or a percentage. The free version of amigos works fine with AEC account control. AEC Control integrates with Clickbank too and can use Clickbank for an Affiliate management system.

• Integrated Blog -Though Joomla has its own mechanism for a Blog, a better blog for Joomla is Lyften Blog. It is a simple blog and provides several features for Blog Marketing, including pinging services automatically.

• Helpdesk - There are several helpdesk available for Joomla, I would recommend Billets which is fairly priced and works very well. There is a free helpdesk as well Web Amobea which works very well. But if you would like to impress your customers with customer support,then Billets does a great Job.

• Autoresponders for Customers Follow-ups – It is advisable to integrate your auto-responder to an external autoresponder like getresponse, aweber or icontact, this is because their mail servers are highly respected on the internet and receive better click through rates.

• Shopping Cart - Virtuemart rules Joomla shopping carts, its an excellent shopping cart integrated with several payment processors and provides extensive features as a shopping cart. Virtuemart is opensource, i.e. there is no cost.

• Forum – Kueuna and Fireboard provide excellent forums for Joomla and are opensource, i.e. there is no cost.

Click here to know more about developing your Membership Website using Joomla