If you have been mauled by the economy and have decided to start and online 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 certainly 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 invest, that might take a while.

In a search query you should be 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 that doesn't have a lot of competition 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 can't wait, you’re going to need to buy your traffic.

The best start – if you haven't already done so – to try and get a feel forjust how competitive it's going to be to get some visibility. Let's start with the natural search in Google – because it's how most of your visitors will find you.

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 two hundred million.

If that's the case search again but wrap your keyword or keyword phrase in quotation marks. It will focus your search down to a phrase match. And phrase match searchers will enjoy 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 too high you might want to re-think your keyword.

Here are some other things you can start 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 to get their site traffic in absolute numbers. Also, the links directed to a website have a large effect on search positions, 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 show the the pages that are linked to the page you select.

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

Louise Collins is the creator of START UP MISTAKES and personally operates a number of ecommerce businesses.. 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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