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What Each & Every Internet Business Start Up Must Understand
If you have been mauled by the economy and have decided to start and online business 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 probably the most important – assuming that you have a good business idea for the internet – is how long it will take for your customers to find you.
Unless you have money to invest, 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 among the Pay per Click 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 three 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.
It would probably be a good idea – 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 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 huge – like three 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 be rewarded with a more accurate result. Now, the number should be smaller. 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 too high you might want to re-think your keyword.
Here are a few more things you can use to look at the relative strength of your competitors
Install the Google toolbar on your browser to see the page rank of competitive sites. Download the Alexa tool bar to get their site traffic in absolute numbers. Also, a sites inbound links have a big effect on search 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 tell you which pages are linked to the page you select.
There’s a lot more to it. 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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