Learn the Top Reasons Behind Poor Performance & Availability With Microsoft Exchange
As a professional, your clients know they can depend on you, and that you are there for them. But what happens when your technology is not there for you? Imagine you are on the phone with your client, telling him with great pride that at long last the document he has been waiting for is complete. While you chat, you attach the document to an email, send it off…and wait.
And wait. The email is no longer in your outbox and not in his inbox. You double-check the email address, and as the conversation becomes more and more awkward, you assure the client that the document really does exist and there really was an email sent. He is frustrated and you are at a complete loss. You decide you cannot wait any longer and switch to your personal Hotmail account to resend the document, which may or may not work immediately either. The result is wasted time, and if you switched email systems, you no longer have a cohesive record of the exchange.
Your system administrator will list a number of reasons why this incident happened, reasons that are beyond his control:
- Junk mail folders
- Anti-virus systems
- User errors
- Bottlenecks in the Internet that day
The real reasons may actually run much deeper, which means that this lost email will not be an isolated incident.
Lost Emails Mean Lost Opportunities
Consumers, accustomed to fast responses through websites, are quickly losing their tolerance for slow email responses. Evidence of this can be seen through a recent study by the WAV Group, who claims in the real estate industry, the first agent to respond to a customer email inquiry has a 73% chance of securing the business. The third to respond has virtually no chance.[1] Similarly, a study conducted by Vodafone released in December of 2008 estimates that lost opportunities due to failures to reply promptly to email messages cost businesses approximately $27,000 a year.[2]
What about email that goes missing entirely? This summer Apple Corp admitted to “losing” 10% of their MobileMe subscribers email between July 16th and July 18th.[3] A wave of blog posts have popped up as a result of this problem, with subscribers making claims of everything from lost job opportunities to lost business. We tend to view email as a low cost service, yet clearly when it fails, the costs can be startling. Apple would only remark that the problem was due to a “serious issue.” So what exactly does happen to these wayward email messages, delayed or lost?
The truth is there are dozens of potential reasons for email delivery delays and errors. With complex business-grade email systems, like Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Notes, there are many ways to build and configure a system. Some conform to the highest standards, while others barely meet the minimum requirements. With very little effort, you can determine whether your system had been adequately configured to suit your needs.
High Availability
As the name implies, High Availability is a system or network that is operational, or available, with a high degree of certainty and frequency. Ceryx, a Hosted Exchange provider, has made high-availability one of their primary focuses. With data centers in New York and Toronto, they have developed various technologies to replicate all messaging data in real-time and can fail over to the secondary facility in the event of catastrophe, allowing them to provide a real 100% SLA. While most providers tend to choose between high availability and high performance, all of Ceryx’s Microsoft Exchange deployments have been built to meet the highest standard of availability uptime without sacrificing performance.
One benchmark for testing an application provider’s performance is to log in to the webmail application and switch from the email view to the calendar view. Pick a folder with lots of messages in it and try sorting by “sender” and then clicking through the various pages. If there is a noticeable delay between these actions then your application provider’s performance may not be adequate.
A system’s availability is determined by numerous factors, each of which is examined below.
Architecture
Delays are often a result of high server RPC latency. RPC, or Remote Procedure Call, is how the Outlook client or the Outlook Web Access client (OWA) communicates with the Exchanger servers. RPC latency refers to the delay between initiating a request and its completion. RPC latency, as seen from the client, is a combination of networking latency and server latency. For good performance, the Microsoft guideline is 50ms average latency on the mailbox servers.[4] If mailbox server RPC latency averages much higher than this, the desktop user can experience “pop-ups” and warnings about problems with the connection from Outlook to the Exchange server. In the background, inbound and outbound email is not being processed as the system tries to catch up with other requests. Excessive “pop-ups” can become more than just an irritant; they can slow down a PC to the point of being unusable while Outlook tries to establish a connection to the server.
Ceryx aims to maintain an RPC rate 20ms or less. To do this, they have avoided the tendency of many providers who built their systems with less expensive virtualized environments and network attached storage. Instead Ceryx has invested in server clusters and high-end SANs (Storage Area Networks) at each of their data centers. SANs provide disk access performance, as well as redundancy through RAID configurations and fibre channel connectivity to the mailbox servers.
Many providers, in an effort to reduce costs, combine the Client Access Server and the Hub Transport Server (servers used to facilitate email delivery) on a single physical machine. This dual role can introduce latency at times of peak usage and throttle the ability to handle large outbound mail queues. Ceryx has engineered the Hub Transport role to ensure message queues can be quickly cleared even during periods of heavy load. By combining multiple, dedicated physical Hub Transport servers with the built-in round-robin load balancing capabilities of Exchange 2007, messages are quickly distributed to their destination on the internet. For legitimate email, hardware load balancing is used to ensure optimal performance of the critical Hub Transport role, which processes every single message that passes through the system.
Monitoring
Most hardware load balancing configurations can achieve both high performance and high availability; however, to sustain high performance and high availability – with a dynamic system like a Hosted Exchange deployment, where usage and load can vary dramatically – you must have an advanced monitoring system and the processes in place to scale the system in response to constantly changing variables.
Some providers install generic monitoring packages that tend to monitor every single metric available, whether the metrics provide meaningful insight to system performance or not. With Ceryx, every aspect of the environment from key metrics around SAN queue length through to standard metrics like CPU utilization and memory usage are closely monitored, trended, and understood. This information is used to develop highly accurate forecasting and scheduled system scaling. Any provider who has not invested in such monitoring tools and resources will just react to spikes in usage and load. Ceryx plans for them.
Breathing Room
Another major reason for email delays and poor performance can again be attributed to basic economics. A “store” is the unique databases for storing messaging data. With Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enterprise, there is a limit of 50 stores per server, with a Microsoft recommended limit of 200 GB for each store. Some providers will try to maximize the number of customers they can support by pushing these limits. Ceryx does the opposite. Ceryx maintains a maximum of 50 GB per store – one quarter of the maximum – in order to deliver the best raw database performance and protect against data corruption, common with larger stores. With these hard restrictions in place, it’s difficult to imagine how some providers – who offer mailboxes up to 4GB – are able to run a sustainable business and maintain high performance and availability.
IOPS
Economics may also drive another cause of poor performance: IOPS, a measurement of the number of times data can be written and read to disk per second, can vary widely per system. With Microsoft Exchange, IOPS capacity is directly related to performance and a heavy user can use up to 1 IOPS under certain circumstances. Each disk has a maximum number of IOPS it can support, so a careful ratio of users per array of disks is essential to maintain decent performance.
Ceryx is careful to maintain a generous ratio of IOPS per user based on real-world metrics monitored from its large user base, taking into consideration peak activities times and not just daily averages.
Routing Issues
To be fair, email delays and errors may occur outside your environment. In the scenario where your colleague was eagerly sitting and waiting for an email to arrive, it may have got stuck somewhere “in the cloud” – somewhere in between both of your email environments.
On a pre-sales and support level, Ceryx has developed a number of troubleshooting tools to help identify potential routing issues. As with any application “hosted in the cloud,” bandwidth is an important consideration when trying to ensure a positive end-users experience. Microsoft Exchange, which consumes 3 KB of a client’s internet connection per active user, is no different. Ceryx has developed a tool that simulates a series of network connections to determine if the client has adequate bandwidth to support their user base. Through this exercise they have discovered that – with any client moving from an on-premise environment to a hosted environment – any increase in bandwidth required is partially offset by decommissioning and offloading SMTP traffic, external connections spam traffic and attacks.
Spam/Anti-Virus
Of course the most notorious place a message gets “stuck” or delayed is in a provider’s anti-virus and spam filtering system. Ceryx runs seven different anti-virus products in its environment to ensure system health and email hygiene. That level of protection could potentially cripple an ordinary system that wasn’t built for high performance; however, Ceryx has not only sized their solution with the performance hit associated with anti-virus scanning in mind, but also closely monitors its environment to ensure email delivery is never compromised by spam and anti-virus filtering.
Beware of any provider who either ignores this potential performance hit or, worse yet, removes backend anti-virus all together. Removing anti-virus may appear to be a good way to control costs, as high-end solutions can be very expensive, but removing them allows viruses in, and once in, are often hard to then find, never mind remove. Ceryx’s system scans incoming and outgoing messages as well as messages in the store on a scheduled basis. A regular scan of mailbox databases is just as important as gateway anti-virus to reduce the instance of catastrophic failure.
Mobility
The benefits and usability of the Ceryx architecture can be measured not only on the desktop level but for mobile users as well, who share the same highly optimized and redundant environment. Ceryx also maintains fully-replicated BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Servers) in both its environments to maintain maximum mobility uptime as well. Forum Oilfield Services, out of Houston Texas, currently has 600 employees using the Ceryx Hosted Exchange solution, with almost 100 mobile users.
Beware of “Bargains”
Unfortunately the market is crowded with Hosted Exchange providers who are not as concerned about delivering a dependable and resilient solution as they are about keeping their costs low and selling high volumes of mailboxes. Providers that offer 3 or 4 GB mailboxes are ignoring the commonly held understanding that mailboxes of this size do not perform well and are highly susceptible to data corruption. That corruption is not limited to just the user in question, but can impact all users on that store, potentially even the entire server.
These providers can only offer mailboxes of this size at a bargain price if they compromise on some other expense – dedicated servers, SANs, anti-virus solutions or a fully redundant architecture. Of course the much greater expense is the lost productivity and opportunity that results from using a solution that was designed with the primary goal of meeting the lowest possible price point to compete with free solutions in the market, and not delivering Enterprise performance and availability.
Ask all potential vendors for the following:
- Customer references
(Quiz the references about any down-time they may have experienced) - The SLA
Have a close look at the financial penalties if high availability is not maintained. Professional hosting providers, confident in their systems ability to maintain high availability, will include clearly worded conditions in their SLA around the exact fees that will be paid to a customer should they not maintain an acceptable level of up-time.
How Do You Measure Up?
A lost or delayed email could be viewed as a nuisance or as a warning. Purchasing decisions need to be fiscally responsible, but often, seemingly bargain solutions can have a devastating and costly effect in the long run.
So how does your system measure up? Using Ceryx as a control, measure the speed, versatility, and resilience of your system.
Ceryx
SLA: 100%
Latency: < 20 ms
GB / Store: 50 GB / Store
IOPS per User: High
Bandwidth Sizing Tools: Yes
Spam / Anti-Virus: Gateway + Mailbox Server, Integrated
Mobile Device Access: Redundant BlackBerry, ActiveSync
Ceryx customers share the belief that their data is their companies most valued asset. As the most used collaboration tool in business, an individual Microsoft Exchange account typically contains a blueprint of an employee’s tenure: their schedule, correspondence (and commitments), contacts, contracts and much more. Ceryx customers trust that this real-time journal is safe, available and always accessible.
Footnotes:
[1] The Wav Group: Gaining an Edge in Real Estate with Smartphones http://wavgroup.com
[2] The Open Press: http://www.theopenpress.com/index.php?a=press&id=42004
[3] Apple Support Forum: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1953
[4] Microsoft Exchange Team Blog: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/09/28/411674.aspx
[5] Microsoft TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738147.aspx
John Carthy
http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/learn-the-top-reasons-behind-poor-performance-availability-with-microsoft-exchange-751535.html
Low Cost Website Traffic: Proven Methods To Generate Low Cost Website Traffic
There is only one main source for making any income from a website and that is a constant stream of targeted traffic. These days almost anyone can build a website, even an outstanding website but with no interested visitors, it just sits there. As the saying goes it takes money to make money and that holds true with Internet marketing and website traffic.
There is hope however, because it does not take a substantial investment to generate targeted traffic to your website.
Many of the high traffic websites online are employing multiple marketing tactics to generate traffic. Some invest a lot of money in advertising campaigns and other costly marketing methods. They are spending large sums of money to make even bigger money. Great for them but what about the rest of us who need low cost website traffic?
Some of the top low cost website traffic tactics also produce some of the most targeted prospects to your website, so at the risk of throwing another cliche’ at you. It’s not the quantity but the quality of the traffic that matters most.
Exchanging links with other related websites is one of the oldest and proven traffic generating methods online. However this method should be more than just creating a link page with tons of other websites plastered on it.
A good quality link exchange should be more than that. Perhaps a section of your website touches on a subject but is not your main niche, you could then link to another website for more in-depth information in return for them doing the same. This also provides added value for your visitors.
A key qualification in exchanging links with other websites is having similar content. They should share a general subject so that there is continuity in the information provided and helps target your traffic.
Link exchanges will also help raise your page rank and increase search engine listings. Search engines will rank sites higher in their listings that have quality inbound links from other related high-ranking sites. Its no secret that ranking high in search engines is the most effective way to generate low cost website traffic.
Traffic exchanges are another great low cost yet highly targeted traffic generating method. In fact you can join most any traffic exchange for free. You submit your website to the traffic exchange, and earn credits to get your website shown while you view other websites. You can bypass most of the drudgery of clicking by upgrading your account or buying credits.
Some may discount traffic exchanges as a waste of time or money but if used effectively it can drive highly targeted traffic to your website. Usually a short effective splash page or lead capture page are much more effective that just placing your sites main page into a traffic exchange. Remember the surfers are doing this to earn credits not necessarily to look at your site, so you must command attention with a good page to get the click to your site.
Traffic exchanges are also a great way to learn different marketing techniques. Keep en eye out for the pages that grab your attention and study them to learn how to create more effective lead capture or splash pages.
Article writing and submission is probably the most effective low cost website traffic generating method. There are thousands of websites that provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you are uncomfortable writing articles there are many freelance writers who are willing to do it for you for a small charge, but to save money, it is wise to learn how to write your own articles.
Your article topics should be focused on the theme of your website or about solving a problem that can be provided by visiting your website. Be careful not to blatantly plug your website or product in the article. Provide good tips and information on the topic showing off your expertise on the subject.
Including a resource box at the end of your article is how to get the targeted traffic to your site. You already proved your expertise on the subject in the article body, and if the reader got to this point now its time to get that click. Provide a short informative sentence about yourself or your website, while enticing them to learn more about the subject by clicking the link in the resource box.
Submitting your articles to as many websites as possible has two major benefits both providing low cost website traffic: Your article can be picked up off the article directory sites and used on other sites and passed around online. This gets you the advantages of inbound links described earlier and even more chances of targeted traffic after those website visitors read your articles.
Participating in online Forums only requires some of your time and nothing else. As you share your knowledge and proficiency in the subject of the forum with others online your reputation as an expert will grow. As you build your reputation in these online communities so does the reputation of your website.
Be careful not to spam any forums with outright ads for your website, and follow the forums rules about posting links. Most forums will only allow links in your signature, similar to an articles resource box. Most forums will always welcome new members as long as you don’t just blast on the scene with both guns blazing throwing links all over the place just promoting your website. You will have much better results by keeping it low key and adding valuable input when you feel others will benefit by your contribution.
As you can see there are multiple ways of generating low cost website traffic. Start out with what you can afford and use your profits to invest in some of the more expensive methods when you are generating a positive income.
Jeffrey Houdyschell
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/low-cost-website-traffic-proven-methods-to-generate-low-cost-website-traffic-108589.html
Getting Traffic To Your Web Site
Traffic, traffic, traffic. Any article you care to read about having a successful web site will always stress the importance of traffic. It is absolutely essential if you want to succeed in any internet based business. You can have the best designed web site, a great product to promote or sell, but without traffic, you have nothing.
Whether you already have a web site and not getting enough traffic, or thinking about starting up one, traffic has to be at or near the top of your list of priorities.
To help you generate more traffic for your web site, here are some surefire ways to increase your traffic.
1) Invest in ppc (pay per click) advertising with the major search engines.
Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very popular and assure you targeted traffic. While this is a surefire way to generate traffic, the downside is the expense which can be quite considerable if you are in a very competitive niche. While some shy away from spending money to increase traffic, this is a guaranteed way to bring potential customers to your web site.
2) Exchange, trade or buy links.
When you exchange links with other sites, both of you benefit from those exchanges as the traffic one site generates can flow on to the other. This is especially beneficial to you if the other site has a higher page ranking. The search engines crawl high PR sites regularly and will follow the links to your site and hopefully rank your site higher as well. The more links you trade with other sites the more traffic you can expect. Just remember early on in your traffic generation program, to keep the links within the same or similar niche.
3) Use Viral Marketing.
Viral marketing allows you to advertise your company or product with minimal or without any cost at all. This method involves attaching your link to a variety of media such as a funny video, entertaining games, interesting articles or a gossip. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium and pass it on to others. Your link will be seen and investigated.
4) Search Engine Optimization.
Ensure that you use proper keywords/keyword phrases that relate to your site’s content when you design your web site. Search engines look for certain keywords that they show in their results page. Having the right keywords/keyword phrases is a high requirement in ranking well in search engine results and thereby getting lots of traffic.
5) Write and submit Articles
Submit your original articles to article distribution sites. You can write these yourself or have others do it for you. Make sure that you attach a description as well as a link to your web site in the resource box at the conclusion of your article. As well as directing readers to your site, you will also get backlinks to your web site which will increase your web site’s ranking.
6) Join forums and contribute to discussions.
Show your expertise and credibility by making constructive comments. People will begin to trust you and your site will benefit from the traffic of those wanting to visit it to get more information about you or your product.
These are just a few methods you can use to generate traffic to your web site. Obviously there is a limit to how much detail can be explored and each of the above topics merits an article in its own right.
I will be launching a website in the near future to provide substantially more information on this topic. Keep a look out for it in links within my other web sites listed below.
Alexander Kent
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/getting-traffic-to-your-web-site-90192.html
Free Traffic Ideas for the Low Budget Online Business Entrepreneur
The predicament every new webmaster faces is “How do I get Free Traffic to my website?” This becomes even more critical when you work with a low budget.
Webmasters know the value and importance of traffic. They know only too well that the very success of their online business depends on the volume of targeted traffic they can generate and if they can find ways and means of obtaining free traffic, then why not!
There are several tried and tested Online and Offline methods that can generate free traffic to your website.
Online Free Traffic:
The easiest and simplest method is to include your website URL in your signature in e-mails.
Write articles and submit to article directories on the theme of your website and related topics that will display your expertise. It is important that you have a link to your website in the Resource Box at the end of the article. This is considered to be the best way of attracting free traffic especially if you are working on a low budget.
Regularly visit topic related Forums and make useful contributions, give valuable advice and ensure that you place your signature in the forum posts.
Actively participate in reciprocal link exchange with websites that are relevant to the theme of your website and preferably of higher page rank.
Optimize your website for the search engines especially Google, Yahoo and MSN with the most relevant keywords or keyword phrases that will ensure that your website will appear high in the search results when these keywords or phrases are searched in the search engines.
Have excellent and unique content and constantly update them. This will entice visitors and the search engines too, to make frequent visits to your site.
Submit your website to high quality topic related directories that accept free submissions.
Advertise in free classifieds sites that cater to the category to which your online business website falls.
Submit a press release every time you introduce a new product or make changes in your business which will create interest in your customers or attract new customers.
Submit your website to social booking sites whenever you update your site. Useful information is shared by people and this will bring you a stream of targeted traffic.
Start a Blog on your website. Search Engines especially Google love Blogs that are frequently updated and make regular visits to these Blogs.
Offline Free Traffic:
Word of mouth is considered to be one of the best offline methods of generating free traffic for your online business. Pass the round to your friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives about your business.
Put your website URL on all printed material that goes out of your office such as letterheads, envelopes, invoices, faxes, labels and anything and everything you can think of.
Print Business Cards with your website URL and exchange cards with others at seminars, conferences, trade fairs, parties and other functions. Business Cards project your image and credibility.
Distribute Flyers with a description of your online business, your physical address and your website URL. This is one of the cheapest and low budget ways of promoting your business offline.
Write articles about your business in the local community newspapers with your website URL in them.
Place bumper stickers or magnetic signs on your vehicles displaying your website URL and your phone number are a free or an inexpensive way of promoting your online business Offline.
Place your Ads in Community centers, Bulletin boards and other places that provide the opportunity to place free Ads.
All these methods will bring to your online business a stream of free traffic that will boost your confidence and keep you enthusiastic and motivated even if you working on a low budget.
Kanaga Siva
Increase Web Site Traffic in 5 Easy Steps
Web site traffic is the flow of browsers and visitors that goes in and out of your website. The more you can increase web site traffic, the higher the chances you can get to make a profit out of your website. Ideally you want to find a traffic builder that gives you instant traffic with little work.
Web site traffic is important for websites to function. No particular site will exist without having web site traffic and more importantly – targeted traffic; there is no point really of having a site without anyone going in. Owners of a website are continuously running the online business because of the profit they got from the traffic. Even the most optimized site will not be successful unless you can increase web site traffic.
There so many ways to get targeted traffic to your website. Most of them do not require out right money but guarantees to give you profit in time. There are many ways to get good targeted web site traffic as well. The methods are reduced to five ways to increase web site traffic
• Forums
You can host a forum or community that talks about any subject you can visualize. Search for the forums that can be added to the topic that you wish to promote. Carefully study the entire discussed topic and relate it to the questions asked during the discussion. The discussion can also answer personal questions. Make sure that in every discussion made, you put a small resource box at the end of it to serve as a link to your particular site. You must not advertise other sites, if you advertise it you will be banned from joining the forum. It is necessary to put your bio in every end of your postings. Do not pursue with some of the forums that do not allow the posting of a resource box.
• Make your own content
You can pass an article or web content in many websites. Usually, these sites are free and if you are cash tight, you can pass your own made web contents initially. Writing your own web content can give you enough money saving. Even if there are many freelance writers that are willing to give you articles for small fractional cost, making your own article still counts. Therefore, it is wise to do your own article. The article that you will be writing must match the topic of your website. Put knowledge that you know into every writings, you can discuss tips, tricks, guidelines that you get from your own life experiences. This will encourage your visitors to frequently visit your site.
• Exchange links
This is the most effective way to increase web site traffic. This is a careful study of all the links shown on the search engines. It is important to secure the sites that are linked to you to have topics same to your website. Targeted Traffic is generated if the same subject is seen on the recommendation by the site that you share your subject with. There will be an increased chance of reaching the highest rank with the benefit of linking with other site or search engines. Both sites exchanging links will benefit from this exercise.
• Newsletter
If you have regular visitors, you must send them newsletter regularly. It is either on weekly or monthly basis. This can be a tiring effort, as you will be writing many articles, but with the freelance writers that will offer you free articles, this will never be a problem. You should only put a small resources box after every article. The small box will serve as the link to your site if viewed and clicked by a visitor. Include all your promotions and freebies to the newsletter you will be sending to your regular visitors. This will surely bring much traffic to your website. If your customers like it, they may even recommend you to their friends, relatives and colleagues.
This is another form of exchange links allowing the member to view each other’s web pages by surfing. By surfing to the web pages, you are gaining points, the more you surf the more points you receive. You are also given an option to gain credits. This will not produce much traffic but it will obtain the names for your visitors by using squeeze pages.
Any of this method will increase your web site traffic. These five ways are proven to attract traffic in your website successfully. You can count on an increased web traffic and soon enough, an increase in profits with these traffic builder techniques.
Richard Legg
http://www.articlesbase.com/sem-articles/increase-web-site-traffic-in-5-easy-steps-96295.html
The Beauty of Free Traffic
When I was getting started in the Online Business world, I had barely enough money to afford the domain name, much less paying for traffic. So, I spent quite a bit of time looking for ways to get free traffic. There are a ton of free traffic exchanges online, but some of them are as useless as a solar-powered flashlight.
What you want to be sure that you’re getting is targeted traffic. Otherwise, you just have people using up all your credits, when they’re not even remotely interested in what you have to offer.
The way most free traffic exchanges work is a 1:1 or 2:1 exchange, meaning that for every site you view, one person views your site, or for every two sites you view, one person views your site.
The good traffic exchanges will offer more than simply Surf-for-Credit. Check out the unique features of each traffic exchange you find. What makes it different? What will make it work for your site?
You can find my list of favorite free traffic generators by clicking here, or you can view the front page at Insane-Internet-Income.Com
Well, that’s all there is to it. Just remember, with most successful online businesses, what you’re looking for isn’t traffic, it’s targeted traffic.
J.r. Mathis
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/the-beauty-of-free-traffic-85190.html
Top 5 Ways to Generate Low Cost Website Traffic
There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money.
BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.
Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.
You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.
Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.
Exchange Links
This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.
A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.
Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.
Traffic Exchange
This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.
traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.
Write and Submit Articles
There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.
Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.
Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.
Make a Newsletter.
This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.
As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.
Join Online Communities and Forums
This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.
Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.
Read more at http://about-scams.blogspot.com
Nikos Apostolou
http://www.articlesbase.com/home-business-articles/top-5-ways-to-generate-low-cost-website-traffic-81566.html
Internet Marketing – 15 Result Oriented Ways to Bring Traffic to Your Website
Every website owner wants to believe that their site is unique but for the most part there are hundreds of sites selling the same products or services with very little uniqueness between them. The key to uniqueness is in your internet marketing campaign. You must not only tell your potential customers what you have to offer that’s unique from others, you must also offers something they need to change a personal situation. All of this begins by first getting traffic to your website. For more info login to :www.inside-the-minds-of-winner.com.Every website achieves this in their own way. Here are 15 ways to bring traffic to your website.
1. Submit to the search engines – There are many big search engines including Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, AltaVista, Alexa, and more. You can either submit manually or you can use a paid service. Don’t multi submit the same site in a short period of time as this could get your site blocked.
2. Submit to Google Reader – Submit your site ’s RSS to Google reader and it will quickly be crawled by the Google Blog Search.
3. Use My Yahoo Service – Here you can submit your website ’s RSS feed on My Yahoo to assist your website in quickly getting indexed.
4. Submission to web directories – Submit to the top web directories like Yahoo Directory, or dmoz. There are other directories so hunt them out.
5. Use pinging services – Use a pinging service such as ping-o-matic each time you add new content to your site.
6. RSS Submission – Add your blog or website to the many RSS submission directories and search engines. You might not be able to submit to all but you should be able to submit to plenty..
7. PPC Programs – Pay per click is a form of advertising that can get great results for your site. When you use PPC your site gets listed in the sponsored sections on the search engines. All of the search engines such as MSN, Yahoo, or Google offer this type of advertising.
8. Comments on blogs and forums – Making comments on the other blogs and websites of others is a nice niche that allows you get some very valuable one way links to your website. These comments need to be of value or you can expect webmasters to quickly remove.
9. Article submission – this is one of the fastest grown components of bringing traffic to a website. It brings in one way links too.
10. Squidoo and Hubpages – You can go to these sites to create your hubs and lens. In under a half hour you can get this up and running.
11. E-mail signature – Linking back to your website using an email signature. You can use this signature on all your outgoing email. It ’s a great way to create a traffic flow to your site and it ’s completely free.
12. Social Media Marketing – This is one of the fastest growing forms of internet marketing. Sites like Digg, Facebook, Reddit, My Space, and Newsvine all offer great opportunities for your website.
13. Press Releases – Are free and a great tool for building traffic to your site and branding your name as well as what you offer. If you think this has to be complex you’d be wrong. You simply have to be able to write good copy that gets printed.
14. traffic exchange Programs – There are all kinds of traffic exchange programs on the net. For more info login to:www.outsource-beginners.com.All you have to do is a quick search on one of the search engines and you’ll have a long list. It ’s a good way to get traffic to your site.
15. Yahoo Answer Services – Answerbag and Allexperts are question answer systems. You can go through the posted questions and when you provide an answer you get a link. This is a terrific internet marketing.
PARMOD BANSAL1
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/internet-marketing-15-result-oriented-ways-to-bring-traffic-to-your-website-673284.html
Build the Links Get the Traffic
One of the best ways to get high targeted traffic and one way links to your site is to write articles and submit them to Article Directories, Ezine Publishers, and High traffic websites that accept article submissions.
Keep you web site content fresh and exciting to your viewing audience. When search engines rank sites they look at many different factors, they look at content, links, continuous content that keeps visitors coming back for more, concentrate on this points and your site will take off. Good web site content (next to keywords) has been and always very important for marketing your website and being successful, if you don’t market your site will suffer. When you’re trying to develop a successful web site you soon realize that your web site content is an important part of your success strategy. If you are looking to get traffic the natural way via the search engines and you have a lot of patience it will take time to get traffic, but if you have money to spend you can shortent the time to get traffic, it will cost you but the traffic will come quite quickly. Warm up your customers by providing great content and they’ll be more likely to make a purchase.
Another important factor is on page keywords, you need to choose relevant keywords and put them in the body of your text of the site, when you choose the right keywords they become relevant to your site and search engines favor this, the relevant keywords are keywords that are found in the body of your text on your website, keyword weighting in the body of your content is important and, keyword proximity is going to be the difference of your site being listed on page 50 or on page 1 of the search engine results. Put keywords in the headings and sub headings so that the Search Engines have an easier time indexing your pages.
Reciprocal linking involves you trading links with other webmasters, be sure that your website topic is relevant to link partners site. Depending on the conditions, some Adwords members pay more for actual purchase made from links from Adsense users.
Websites with PR3 and over that have high traffic and exchange links with them. This includes your bio, contact information and links to your site.
When looking at how much time you spent on promoting and marketing your website, you could make a graph to show the sites growing traffic and the effort you put into your site (link building, article writing, optimization and reciprocal link exchange) the curve of the graph would be an exponential curve. This is why so many people give up in the early phases of search engine optimization and traffic growth – they simply don’t see the results that they feel their effort should have earned them. Ad website optimization techniques, promotion and submission to all types of search engines and you can find your marketing techniques will boost your traffic.
In order to drive traffic to a website, getting the website listed in the search engines, either through search engine optimization or through pay-per-click advertising is pretty important.
David Marc Fishman
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/build-the-links-get-the-traffic-102086.html
Advanced Website Traffic Techniques
Advanced website traffic tactics may become daunting, but if you use low cost strategies you have nothing but a win-win situation.Use the below mentioned low cost advanced
website traffic strategies and you’re in for a huge online success.
You might ask ‘What are these low cost advanced traffic techniques anyway?’ Surprise yourself by finding out that
some of these strategies you can use without having to spend one red cent!
1. Use an article.
You write an article, mention your site, submit it to e-zines and garner traffic from curious visitors. It’s as simple as that. Don’t just stop at one website – post your site anywhere possible! Who knows how many hits this low cost advanced website traffic tactic will bring!
2. Exchange links with other webmasters
Never underestimate the power of link exchange. This is a low cost advanced website traffic tactic that people tend to overlook. How to find out where to do the link exchange? Easy: type your website’s keywords in a major search engine, visit each and every of the top results and ask for the link exchange.
3.Participate in forums.
Look for forums highly related to your website and make your presence known. Make online friends and let them know about your website. This is an advanced website traffic tactic that advertises subtly but works effectively. Good thing about this is it doesn’t cost you anything at all!
4. Use advanced tools
The www world is rich with tools that churn out impressive results. Software to try out are those which take care of links and keywords. Once this is taken care of, the rest of this internet marketing job will be easy!
5. Meta tags-use it effectively
Meta tags are what search engines are looking for so it can include your site in the top results. Putting up meta tags in your HTML code is an advanced website traffic tactic that must not be missed! Low cost you ask? Oh yeah!
6.Submit to directories.
Keep submitting your site to directories like there’s no tomorrow! Just take a look at your website and see if it’s directory-worthy. Web directories don’t waste their time on poorly-done websites.
7. Conduct surveys.
Visit a site similar to yours and announce that you have a survey they can answer. The site and yours reap results so no one’s on the losing end here!
There are sites available that specialize in low cost advanced website traffic tactics. Search for them online and let your site rise to online popularity!
Manoj.r
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-business-articles/advanced-website-traffic-techniques-51462.html