If you have been hurt by the economy and have decided to start an internet business to help you get by you have to know how long it will take to start making some money.

Naturally, the information 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 business to find you.

Unless you have money to spend, that might take a while.

In a search query you will eventually show up on the organic left hand side of the page or on the right side in the PPC 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 can't wait, you’re going to need to buy your traffic.

You should – 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, the first place to look is in 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 a crazy number – like three hundred million.

If that's the case search again but wrap your keyword or keyword phrase in quotation marks. It will refine 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 begin 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 to see their site traffic in absolute numbers. Also, a sites inbound links have a significant 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.

Your work has just begun. But, it's a start.

Louise Collins is the writer 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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