If you have been hurt by the economy and have decided to start an internet business to help make ends meet, you have to know how long it will take to make money.
Naturally, it depends on a lot of things, but probably the most important - assuming that you have a good business idea for the internet – is how long it will take for your customers to find you.
Unless you have cash to invest, that might take a while.
In a search query you should be on the organic left hand side of the page or on the right side among the PPC ads. Unless you have a real niche keyword that doesn't have a lot of competition it will take many weeks to work your way up to the first three pages and your real target is page one. So, if you can't wait, you’re going to need to buy your traffic.
The best start – if you haven't already done so – to to test outjust how competitive it's going to be to to be found 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, notice the blue bar that runs just under the logo. You'll see Results 1-10 of about….. So, what's the number? It might be huge – 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 be rewarded with a more accurate result. Now, how many pages results show up? If it's under 300,000 you're OK (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 some other things you can start with to evaulate the relative strength of your competition
Install the Google toolbar on your browser to 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 large effect on the rankings, go to http://www.yahoo.com and enter link:http://www.sitename.com (sitename being the name of the competitor you want to look at). That will tell you which pages are linked to the page you select.
Your work has just begun. But, it's a start.
Louise Collins is the creator 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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