This is the second part of my series of posts dedicated to adapting some basic principles of marketing and organizational psychology for successful blogging.
Today’s post will be about SWOT analysis. If you have missed the first one (SMART OBJECTIVES) I strongly suggest you read that first.
What is SWOT analysis?
In case you haven’t heard about it until now, “SWOT” is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is a very important tool that will provide you information regarding your position on the market, where you need to improve, what you are really good at and what external factors could influence your business. Organizations and individuals have been doing this for years in order to capitalyze their strengths, minimaze their weak points and anticipate what the future might bring under certain circumstances.
I) The SWOT analysis of an existing blog
Each one of the items listed below may be a strength or a weakness for your blog. You are the only one who can judge that but keep in mind that it is in your best interest to be realistic. Compare your blog to other more or less successful blogs in your niche and decide if they represent advantages or weaknesses.
1 Content (Is your content original? How often is your blog updated? If your content is based on news, are you among the first that provide it? What impact does your content have on visitors and how relevant is that for your purpose?)
2 Design (is your website layout appealing to your visitors? Do you use a color scheme that goes well with the topic that you are blogging about? What about the graphic symbols that you use?)
3 Navigation (Is your blog easy to navigate? What is the medium depth of your deep links? How easy it is to navigate from one topic to another?)
4 Traffic (How many visitors does your blog receive, compared to the leaders in your niche?)
5 Value (What is the average income that your blog brings you per month?)
These are only general examples; depending on your niche you might have other important assets, such as quick access to reliable sources of information, that others might not have, lots of documentation in your book shelf, etc. Even a friend that is an expert in the area that you have chosen to blog about is an important asset that you must take into consideration.
For the other 2 (opportunities and threats) things tend to be less accurate and it all depends on your ability to anticipate trends, of your sources of information and on how well you know your niche.
For example, an opportunity for a niche blog could be a potential increase of the market due to several external factors such as new investments in research, new “big players” that might decide to invest in that market, increased demand for some products or services etc.
A threat could be represented by the possibility of over saturation of the niche that your are concentrating upon, or even financial problems of the company that produces the products that you are blogging about.
Attached is a basic example of SWOT analysis for a generic blog, based on what I have said above. It’s just a guideline to give you a general idea regarding how to represent it graphically for better organizing your work, so you must add all factors that you think are relevant to your blog. Think of it as a “template” and adapt it to your needs.
Why should you use this SWOT thing for blogs, anyway???
As I have mentioned at the beginning of the article, this type of analysis is an instrument that is widely used in the business environment as an important planning tool to identify, in a systematic way the strong points, weak points, opportunities and threats of an organization. I hope that so far I have managed to explain how to actually perform a SWOT, but by now, some of you may ask why is this tool really important for blogs.
Well, the importance comes from several points:
1) “Systematic” approach is THE KEYWORD (and I am not talking about SEO stuff here 
) Lots of people do an analysis from time to time, especially if things don’t work out the way they initially expected, but if you don’t know how to do it properly you have every chance of missing important stuff that might prove crucial for your success. Also, there are some bloggers that limit their marketing efforts to establishing goals; if they fail to meet those objectives they will not know what went wrong, or probably take the first reason that comes in their minds and blame all on that. However, if things go wrong again and again, their will reach a point of frustration and probably won’t find the resources to look further.
2) One of the main advantages of the SWOT analysis is that it forces yourself to think about external factors such as opportunities and threats that might occur. The strengths and weaknesses (internal factors) are more often to be taken into consideration but external ones might influence your success or failure a great deal.
3)Why should you use it for a blog you say? Well, why shouldn’t you? If you want to make money from blogging it means that it becomes a business. Heck, even if you don’t want to make money from it, you still need accomplish something (you want to become famous, you need to be heard by certain people) and that it still a business… non-profit, but still a business. So why shouldn’t you take advantage of instruments like SWOT (and others) that have been used successfully for so long?
In my next post I will talk about the “SWOT analysis projected on the blogger”, so if you enjoyed this one, I hope you will enjoy the next as well
Technorati Tags: Blogging, business blogs, SWOT analysis for blogs
