Doing a SWOT analysis of your blog

On the last day of our workshop, I was requested to do a session on SWOT analysis of party websites or blogs. All delegates from 10 countries took part by participating in identifying the 4 elements in SWOT analysis. To those who don’t know what a SWOT is a planning tools which means – internal strengths, weaknesses, as well as external opportunities, and threats.

One can do this on a blog too and its a good way to assess its current state for further development. Here’s a sample:

Strength – professional blog theme, regularly updated entries, own, domain and hosting, mostly original content, clear niche, good uptime/fast load time, relevant topics, etc.

Weaknesses – poor & commonly used fee theme, no about page/author, too much ads, no personalized domain, poor CMS/blog software, etc.

Opportunities – add RSS/email subscriptions, forums/message board, regular newsletter, blog contests and promos, schwag giveaways, better site search, other non-invasive monetization options, add a podcast.

Threats – readership retention rate, search engine indexing/delisting, hacking, blog burn-out, etc.

Some items can be a strength if properly done or can be a weakness if not executed correctly. This is somewhat of a bigger overview. If you track back on our previous entries under the problogging category here, you’d see more details discussions there.