Greetings Blog Family,

Today I want to talk to you about the SWOT Analysis. This is business planning tool that I picked up while studying marketing and want to help you apply it to your business as a blogger.

This is a very basic exercise designed to flush out your thoughts and details. The SWOT puts them in front of you and allows you to understand and navigate your future.

What Does SWOT mean?

It is an acronym.

S  - Strengths

W - Weaknesses

O - Opportunities

T - Threats

The SWOT analysis gives you a chance to critically assess yourself as the proprietor of your blog business and resources. It is important to find out where you stand, how you can improve, and what opportunities are in your future.

How to Use the SWOT Analysis

Ok Blog Family, let’s get down to business. You can download the sample SWOT here and use it or get out a pen, paper, and/or your computer to create your own.

If you are creating your own, draw four cells large enough to accommodate your handwriting or font if using the computer. It should look like the one below. Truthfully, it can be as big or small as you like. This is an internal document, so be honest. No one has to ever find out the contents of your SWOT Analysis.

Each box represents one word in the acronym, like illustrated here. I think you know now know what comes next, but I will provide some commentary.

Strength

List your strengths as a blogger, organizer, researcher, coder, marketer, and business owner. What are your strong points? List them here. It could be great depth in a subject. This could be a niche in the future. Do you have a Word Tracker membership, access to a theme library? Are you a good writer, editor, or a funny person? Do you own video equipment, editing equipment, certain software products? Write it all down.

Some of my strengths are writing, researching, determination,

my blog network (What up Hood Family?)

Word Tracker

Blog Flipping Blueprint membership

I have an MBA

Background

Appraisal business owner

Credibility

I have been studying the net since 2004….but I just recently got serious about it.

Weaknesses

This is the same exercise, but it’s important you be honest. Remember, this is an internal document that will only be seen by you. It’s important because it will tell you where you can improve, get better and grow your business.

Again, some of my real examples:

Coding. I know basically nothing.

I lack a formal plan, although I am working on it almost daily.

My graphic design skills are suspect

Traffic generation

How to utilized social networks

Rash decision making

Inconsistency

Lack of follow through.

Ok, that is enough. I have to stop before I get depress and begin to try and convince myself that I should stop now. Hopefully, you are getting the picture that you should list everything.

Opportunities

This is the funnest box to me because I am always considering future opportunities. Important to write them down because you can map your couse to get there. We will cover this in another lesson.

The opportunities are all the possibilities that you see for you and your business AFTER having some initial success in your chosen direction. It is important to have some general success before branching into to many directions.

As an example, here are some of my opportunities

Squidoo - Word Vixen swears by it.

Twitter - Brilliant Jeni is addicted

Affiliate marketing - Normal Joe is always in my ear about this

SEO - Jarret Cade is my source for this information

Niche Sites

Blog Flipping

Joint Ventures

You could go as far as writing specific niches, join ventures and more.

I know I just about named every Internet marketing opportunity out there, so what am I doing now….Learning and building. I have a long way to go, so there is still a tremendous opportunity out there for me…and you for that matter.

Threats

Finally, let’s identify the threats facing your future. Doesn’t mean your scared, just not naive to believe it is going to be easy sailing all the time. So, that means you have to identify the treats. So, here are mine:

Arrogance over small success

Change in Technology

Economic instability

Bigger competition moving into my niche

Sure there are more, but that is enough to keep you up at night reading, studying, growing and doing/building your business. it’s enough for me and to keep you hungry.

Conclusion

The SWOT analysis is an excellent business tool that you should utilize to get more intimate with your blogging and business future. Planning is half the battle of success and this is a tool that you should utilize.

Have you ever used the SWOT Analysis or having any suggestions on how it could be utilized better in the business of blogging.

Thought is Possibility 

First in the Mind, then in Reality!