Joomla Form - Admiring and inspiring good form with Joomla

This article assumes that you are offering a product or service that is of particular value to the Joomla! community, like commercial templates, template clubs, commercial components/modules/plugins, search engine optimiztion, etc. If you do not fit into any of these categories, some of these steps might still apply to you, so read on!

Marketing a Joomla-based site is surprisingly easy, and it can be done with little or no up-front cost. Just follow these steps:

1. Submit an article at Joomla.org (http://www.joomla.org/component/option,com_submissions/Itemid,75/)
2. Submit the same article at other Joomla! news/fan sites like Joomlaya.com, JoomlaTribune.com, JoomlaHut.com, Joomla-Themes.co.uk, etc. I'm sure there are many more that are willing to post news about your site for free, especially if you offer free services to the community.
3. If your site is particluarly well-designed, submit it to showcase sites like JoomlaForm.com, JoomlaBeauty.com, and even sites like CSSMania, UnmatchedStyle, CSSBeauty, etc. Getting featured on a non-Joomla! design site would really boost your traffic (and promote Joomla!) to the world outside of the Joomla! community.
4. Start an affiliate program. Most of the successful commercial template sites out there (JoomlaShack, PixelsParadise, RocketTheme, etc.) and commercial component sites (iJoomla, etc.) all have affiliate programs. There are tons of sites out there that would be more than willing to promote your site if they know they will get paid even as little as 15%.
5. Submit your site on the Joomla.org forums in the "Site Showcase" forum.
6. Start a blog; offer an RSS feed to your blog, and keep it updated regularly.
7. This probably goes without saying, but make sure your site is search engine optimized. There could be a whole series of articles about how to do this, but we'll just leave it at that for the sake of keeping this list short.
8. Every time you come up with a new product or service, do 1 and 2 again to promote that specific product or service. Some sites might be reluctant to do this for you, but it doesn't hurt to try.
9. Add links so that users can bookmark your site on Del.icio.us, Digg.com, Technorati.com, etc. Social bookmarking is not the wave of the future. It is happening right now! Get on board. The rest of the web world is!
10. Get an account in the Joomla.org forums; add a link to your site in your signature, and start posting. If you have a lot of valuable advice that you can offer the community, offer it. The more you post, the more there is a link to your site in the forums. If you offer help in the forums, that lends to your credibility as a member of the community. I would caution though not to post for the sake of posting. Take the time to make legitimate contributions to the community.

Follow some or all of these steps, and you'll definitely get your site's name out there. After that, you can look into Google ads or things like that. For JoomlaForm, I have not spent any money, mainly because I am not making any money on the site. It is not necessary, especially in a community like Joomla!, to spend a lot of money to promote your site.