What Every Internet Business Start Up Should Know

If you have found yourself negatively affected by the economy and are planning an Internet business start up to pick up the financial slack, you ought to know how long it will take to start making some money.

Naturally, that answer depends on a lot of things, but one of the most important - assuming that you have a good business idea for the internet - is how long it will take for your potential customers to find your site. Unless you have money to spend, 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 in the pay per click advertisements. Unless you have a real niche keyword that doesn't have a lot of competition it will take at least a few months to work your way up to the first few pages and your real target is page one. So, if you don't want to wait that long, Sennheiser shotgun mic you're going to need to buy your traffic.

It would probably be a good idea - if you haven't already done so - to try and get a feel for 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 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? 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 on their own searches will be rewarded with a more accurate result. Now, how many pages results show up? If it's under 300,000 you're playing in a reasonable universe (although it might not seem that way) and if it's still over a million, you'll have your challenges.

Here's a few more things you can start with to look at the relative strength of your competitors:

Install a 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, since the number of links going to a site has a big impact on where they'll show up on a search, go to rel=nofollow http://www.yahoo.com and enter link: sitename.com (sitename being the name of the competitor 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 writes about internet business and MAX GXL and other health supplements and products.