What The New Internet Business Start Up Has Got to Know
If you have been mauled 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, that answer depends on a lot of things, but certainly the most important - once you have a viable business concept 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 will appear 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 probably several months to work your way up to the first front pages and your real target is page one. So, if you won't wait, you’re going to need to buy your traffic.
The best start – if you haven't already done so – to to see just how competitive it's going to be to to show up 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? 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 phrase match searchers will enjoy 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 in the millions, you're looking at a very tough slog
Here are a few more things you can start with to evaulate the relative strength of your competitors
Install the Google toolbar on your browser to find 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 significant effect on search rankings, 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 give you a view of which other internet pages are linked to the page you select.
This is only the beginning. But, it's a start.
Louise Collins is the Author 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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