If you have been mauled by the economy and are planning an Internet business start up to pick up the financial slack, you have to know how long it will take to start earning .

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

Unless you have cash to invest, 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 Ads. Unless you have a real niche keyword with only a few competitors 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 won't wait, you’re going to need to buy your traffic.

You should – 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 one 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 phrase match searchers will get 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 a few more things you can begin with to check out the relative strength of your competition

Install the Google toolbar on your browser to view 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 have a major 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 site you want to look at). That will tell you which pages 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 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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