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If you have found yourself negatively affected by the economy and have decided to start an internet business to pick up the financial slack, you ought to know how long it will take to make money.

Naturally, it depends on a lot of things, but one of the most important - once you have a viable business concept for the internet – is how long it will take for your customers to find you.

Unless you have money to spend, that can be a while.

In a search query you will appear on the organic left hand side of the page or on the right side among the Pay per Click Ads. Unless you have a real niche keyword with only a few competitors it will take at least a few months to work your way up to the first three pages and your real target is page one. So, if you won't wait, you’re going to need to buy your traffic.

The best start – if you haven't already done so – to try and get a feel forjust how competitive it's going to be to to show up Let's start with the natural search in Google – because it's the biggest engine and it can drive the most volume to your site.

Once you've entered your keyword, check out the blue bar that runs just under the logo. You'll see Results 1-10 of about….. So, what's the number? Chances are it might look a little insane – like one hundred million.

If that's the case search again but wrap your keyword or keyword phrase in quotation marks. It will focus your search down to a phrase match. And people who know enough to use a phrase match will enjoy a more accurate result. Now, what's the new result? If it's under 300,000 you're looking at a term where you should be able to compete (although it might not seem that way) and if it's still in the millions, you're looking at a very tough slog

Here are other measures you can start with to look at the relative strength of your competitors

Upload the Google toolbar on your browser so you can see the page rank of competitive sites. Download the Alexa tool bar to give you their site traffic in absolute numbers. Also, the links directed to a website have a big effect on search rankings, go to http://www.yahoo.com and enter link:http://www.sitename.com (sitename being the name of the company you want to look at). That will give you a view of which other internet pages are linked to the page you select.

That's just the very tip of the iceberg. But, it's a start.

Louise Collins is the Author of START UP MISTAKES and personally operates a hand full of store websites. START UP MISTAKES, is a summary of the mistakes she made in her first year of business and what they cost. When she realized that the total out of pocket cost of several wrong decisions had, in fact, lightened her wallet by over Twenty thousand dollars, Louise decided that this was valuable information for new entrepreneurs starting small business

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