Affiliate marketing is a great way to increase the sales of your site and make extra money. This is both true for the advertisers and the affiliates that use the programs.

Being able to get extra sales with little effort is every shop owners dream. Why market your product when you can get someone else to do it for you. I know everyone has seen those penis enlargement emails and landing pages that have been float around cyber space.

Joomla is a fantastic content management system (CMS). It is one of the most widely used CMS systems in the world.

With all the good, does come some bad. Joomla in its default state isn't the most search engine friendly CMS. The URLs that it creates from the system have variables and values passed through them. This is all well and good for the system but means nothing for a regular browser and in the lines of keywords for search engines.

Now, I can't be too harsh because Joomla does come with a search engine friendly feature where the variables are turned from

index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2097&Itemid=159

/content/view/4682/1/

I love Joomla. I don't know why but I decided to make this blog using Movable Type instead of Joomla but that doesn't matter.

When it comes to search engine optimization, search engines will crawl your site. A search engine loves content and the more there is on a site the better it is. Especially if its well written relevant content.

The Problem

A problem with Joomla is that its default "print" and "PDF" functions for each article causes duplicate content on Joomla sites. This duplicate content at first is good! Lots of content to crawl on your site and all of it would probably get index.

On the downside, search engines will eventually figure out that there is all this duplicate content all over the place and will penalise your site accordingly.

Nothing beats a uniquely designed website. A design that is visually appealing to the users as well as being user friendly in its interface.

So, when is it a good time to use a template? Should a template be used at all? This question comes up time and time again and I believe that there are certain situations where a template can help speed up the development of a website.

Why Use a Template

If you're lacking in the design skills or can't afford to contract a designer to design your web site then you might want to try and get a web site template. There are a few companies out there that make templates.

These include:

• Joomla Shack
• JoomlaArt
• Rocket Theme

Joomla Shack has to be my favourite template developer. I've bought several templates from them and have used them across various sites.