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If you have been mauled by the economy and are planning an Internet business start up to help make ends meet, you have to know how long it will take to start earning .

Naturally, the information depends on a lot of things, but probably the most important - if your idea is good for the internet – is how long it will take for your potential customers to find your site.

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

In a search query you can show up 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 with little competition it will take probably several months to work your way up to the first few 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 see just how competitive it's going to be to get some visibility. Let's start with the natural search in Google – because it's the most important traffic source.

Once you've entered your keyword, look at 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 two hundred million.

If that's the case search again but wrap your keyword or keyword phrase in quotation marks. It will narrow your search down to a phrase match. And people who know enough to use a phrase match will get a more accurate result. Now, how many pages results show up? 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 too high you might want to re-think your keyword.

Here are some other things you can start with to look at the relative strength of your competition

Add the Google toolbar on your browser so you can see the page rank of competitive sites. Download the Alexa tool bar for their site traffic in absolute numbers. Also, a sites inbound links have a big effect on where they'll show up on a search, 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 list the sites that 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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