Money Online

This is part 2 of the post dedicated to SWOT analysis. If you have missed the first part, I strongly suggest you read that first.

II)A swot analysis of a blogger

If you don’t have a blog yet, a SWOT analysis projected on yourself, could help you have an idea regarding your capabilities to develop a successful blog on a specif niche.
However, at this point, the first you need to decide upon the niche that you will want to target, because you must see what are your strengths and weaknesses in direct relation to that. For example, if you want to make a successful blog on science, you will need to have different strengths than for a blog concentrated on poetry or arts. If you haven’t chosen your niche yet, you may find the article choosing a niche helpful.

In order to understand better how you can benefit from a SWOT analysis projected on yourself let’s take hypothetical example:

Our subject
Targeted niche: Cell phones

Strengths
1) Vast experience with mobile phones (due to the daily job as a sales man in a specialized store)
-Quick access to information and documentation for new products launched on the market
-Knows each product with all it’s “ins” and “outs” and therefore able to make good quality and original reviews
-Knowledge of the services that are compatible with each product
2) Passion for technology
3) Medium experience with creating printed layouts and small presentation websites
4) A decent initial budget

Weaknesses
1) Daily job is taking too much of his time.
2) Not very familiar with search engine optimization and website promotion techniques
3) He is not a “popular” name online, doesn’t own other websites, so will not benefit from a starting “boost” in a very competitive niche.

Opportunities
1) Due to his good knowledge of the products that he is reviewing, he is likely to get a lot attention from some “big boys” that could help his blog become popular
2) The possibility of extending his online business to affiliate marketing and even an online store
3) Taking advantage of some periods of the year where the demand (and therefore the number of people interested to know about certain products) raises exponentially (such as Christmas and Easter).

Threats
1) If he get’s fired from his daily job, he will loose the access to information and in a such a dynamic market, his knowledge would soon become obsolete
2) He could loose his enthusiasm soon, if he does not see results within a certain period of time.

The strategy
After having written down all that, it is easy to understand that this guy’s most important strengths come from his day job. Actually the potential success of his blog is based on that. I am sure he would have been aware of the strong points that he had without having to write them down, but probably he wouldn’t have realized that the source of his strengths was so important. Now he knows that the more involved he becomes in some aspects of his daily job, there more chances he has to succeed with his blog.

This is the starting point for developing his strategy. Our subject knows what he’s strengths and weaknesses are, and what are the opportunities and threats that he may encounter during the project.
The next step would be to figure out a way to minimize his weak points. He can do this either by research, or even attending some SEO training, or pay someone to take care of that issue for him. Unfortunately his time is very limited, due to his daily job, and if he goes with the first choice, he wouldn’t have time to develop the actual content for his blog. Further more, search engine optimization does not imply only “on page optimization”. It also requires submission to lots of directories (at least at the beginning) to gain some link popularity in order to get started, and that will take even more of his time.
So naturally, he goes with the second choice and pay for some SEO services and inbound links from high PR directories leaving him with just enough time to concentrate on producing quality content and focus on the opportunities that will come

The wrong way
What approach our subject would have taken without making a SWOT analysis in the first place? Well, it’s hard to say for sure, but a lot of people (not only bloggers) when they discover some of their weaknesses they instinctively try to improve in those areas all by themselfs. Sometimes it can be a good thing but in this particular case, the SWOT analysis proved that it was just the opposite.
Assuming that this guy would have struggled to learn more in order to take care of his weak points himself, he would have faced a serious time management problem. The “next best” alternative would have been to launch his blog a lot later. However, things could have gone in an even worse direction; he could have decided to neglect his daily job, and that could have caused a failure, given the fact that his strengths came mainly from there.

In conclusion, this type of analysis is all about successful planing and making decisions; and it is a lot easier to make a good decision if you lay all the facts on the table (almost like math).
Basically you can compare the SWOT analysis to a map that shows you the way(s) to reach your destination (in our case OBJECTIVES).

Technorati Tags: Blogging, business blogs, SWOT analysis for blogs

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

In my next series of posts I will try to adapt some basic principles of marketing and organizational psychology to the actual requirements of an online business. Because of the fact that the term “online business” can be too general, I will just focus on adapting those principles to make a blog successful in terms of generating income.

The first thing that I will try to discuss is “Establishing your goals (or objectives)”

SMART OBJECTIVES
This is actually the starting point for every business plan. No matter how simple this may seem at a first glance, setting up your objectives in the correct manner may prove crucial for the success or failure of any kind of business (blogging included). How do bloggers set up their objectives by the way? I have seen a lot of them who state loud and clear that their goal is to “make money on the internet”. That’s a start… but if you leave it like this it would be to impossible to follow.
How much money do you want to make online?
Is this really an attainable goal?
How long will it take?

These questions represent the basis for defining your goals; which in the are known by the name of S.M.A.R.T objectives. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.
Following these questions, a better way of putting it would be: “I want to make 1 000 000 dollars from ONE blog this year“. It is specific, measurable, time bound, but is it attainable?

For some of you it is, for some it isn’t, depending on how much you are willing to invest in advertising, work force, etc. However, one of the most common mistake is to set your objectives way too high. Don’t get me wrong, setting them just a little higher than you actually think it’s possible, is a good thing, especially because it motivates you to work hard and triggers the urge of self improvement, but setting unrealistic goals will make you loose your enthusiasm within a short period of time. Further more, higher goals involve a lot more work to be done, so if you don’t have the means to do it, you will either quit or come up with low quality products (or content, since we are talking about blogging) which will eventually translate in failure.

Divide your main objective into smaller, more specific ones
So we have talked about specific, measurable, attainable and timely, but why did I leave “Relevant” in the end?
Actually it has been some debate around this part. Some say the R stands for “Realistic” and some say it stands for “Relevant” In my opinion it should definitely stand for “relevant” since nothing that is already “Attainable” could be unrealistic. But how should we translate the term “relevant” into our discussion? Well, an achievement of a specific objective needs to contribute to an achievement of a bigger objective.
So, assuming our main objective would be to earn 100 000 dollars (I know, I have cut a “0″ in order to make it attainable:) ) from ONE blog within a year, we will have to analyze what smaller objectives we will need to accomplish for that. You must take into consideration absolutely everything, starting from registering the domain and buying a hosting package (unless you plan to use some free services) to designing the blog, driving traffic, earning objectives for each income source (contextual advertising, selling advertising space, etc). All these small objectives are relevant to the main goal.
You might have to go through them several times because you will find out that one may be attainable or not, depending on a choice you have made for another. For example, if you choose a cheap web hosting package you will only have a rather low bandwidth limit, so you will not be able to make your blog visible for the amount of readers needed to accomplish your main objective. Although there is always the possibility of upgrading, make sure you anticipate as much as you can, so at least you will have an idea when the upgrade will be necessary.

A million dollar journey starts with a cent
For better planning, at least at the beginning the best approach would be to set up smaller specific goals to be achieved within shorter periods of time, goals which are relevant to the main objective. In our example about blogging you should concentrate on setting a “schedule” of objectives for generating traffic to the blog, since it is probably the most important and the most relevant. You can start by setting goals for week 1, week 2, week 3 and so on. You will also have to decide when you will start to implement sources of income to your blog, what type you would go for, and what impact they will have on your visitors.

Don’t be scared to make changes along the way
During a project, if you realize that your objectives are either to high or to low, don’t panic, and don’t be too stubborn to follow the initial plan. You can always tweak your goals along the way taking into consideration how well things are going at a certain time. Most bigshot executives do that also (in some cases). Keep in mind though, that if things don’t go as you have planed (no matter if they are different in a good way or a bad way) you have probably not taken into consideration all the factors that influenced their evolution, so try to do a better job each time you make adjustments.

All this may sound a little complicated and/or useless, but if you manage to pay attention to setting up your goals in the correct way, you will have higher chances to succeed. Blogging for income is actually a business, and since every successful business starts with setting up objectives, there is absolutely no reason for you not to treat this part seriously. Once you get the hang of it, you will realize that it proves very useful.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, business blogs, setting objectives for blogs