If you have been hurt by the economy and have decided to start an internet business to pick up the financial slack, you should know how long it will take to start making some money.
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 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 with the Pay per Click Ads. Unless you have a real niche keyword with only a few competitors it will take many weeks to work your way up to the first front pages and your real target is page one. So, if you don’t want to wait that long, 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 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 search by 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 over a million, you'll have your challenges.
Here are other measures you can begin with to evaulate the relative strength of your competitors
Install the Google toolbar on your browser to view the page rank of competitive sites. Download the Alexa tool bar for their site traffic in absolute numbers. Also, the links directed to a website have a significant effect on the 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 list the sites that are linked to the page you select.
This is only the beginning. 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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