Let users spread your message

Posted by: Qasim Virjee on Saturday, 07 October 2006

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Google's great at bringing people to your site, and Joomla's pretty well tailored to helping that happen (hint: use keyword and description META tagging, post regularily and turn SEF on!), but you can also do more to promote your site by empowering your community.

For a long time, mambo/Joomla's had the ability to let users email short messages to their friends specific to the content they're browsing - its stock with a base install and can be turned on/off from your general configuration settings in the back-end. I recommend you leave it on.

Additionally, there are a few extensions you can use to create specific areas on your site to Spread the Word about your site in general.

Here are a couple of options:

com_invite is a great component that can be installed with a special module to invite people to your site. The component offers a page through your site's front end which people can enter an email address into and an optional message to send to someone. The optional message closes smoothly via AJAX and you can configure the aesthetic of the page via an HTML file in the component's directory (components/com_invite/tmpl/). Get this - the component also integrates automatically with Community Builder and lets you set a maximum # of email sends/day to avoid spammers abusing your site! Slick.
A simpler option that you can get going in a sec is what we're currently using on WhyJoomla? - Recommend 2.2 by Saka straight-up gives you a little email form that you can bounce to a customised message after the email's sent (eg. to thank users for 'spreading the word').