If you’ve been wounded in this economy and you’re starting up an online business to contribute to your personal bottom line you need to understand that you won’t be making money right away. But how long will it take?

That depends on a lot of things, but the biggest thing it depends on is how long it will take you to drive traffic to your site.  After all, if they don’t find you, they won’t be buying from you.

In a search engine you can be found on either  left hand side of the page or the right.  That means you can be in the free organic listing on the left that you’ll fight and work your way into or the PPC – Pay per click listing on the right – that you’ll buy.  The left hand side takes time and work but the right hand side can produce immediate returns – as long as you can afford it.

To start – do you know how competitive your main search phrases are?  Start with Google – your biggest volume source.  Enter your keyword phrase (if you’re searching on a single word you won’t be working with a buying term)  and look at the  blue bar appearing under the logo. You’ll see “Results” 1-10 of about…..  That number  might look a little crazy – like one hundred million. If  so, try again but wrap your keyword phrase in “ “.  That narrows the search down and produces a more accurate  result.

The number of result pages probably dropped a lot and if it’s less than 300,000 you’re playing in market that you CAN compete in (even if it doesn’t  seem that way).  It’s it’s still over a million – start looking at other high volume keyword phrases that might not be as competitive.  (High volume keyword phrases are found with different keyword tools or reverse searches.

Install a Google toolbar on your browser to view site page ranks. Download the Alexa tool bar to show traffic.  Go  to yahoo.com, enter link:http://www.sitename.com to see how many other internet pages are linked to the page you select.

Once you start to promote your site, you’re going to put a lot of work behind supporting your pages with specific keyword phrases.  It’s very frustrating to throw away a few months of work becuase you find – after the fact- that you made a bad choice. (Hah! Trust me on that one!)