Problogger Yuga reminded me of the importance of SWOT analysis when he used it on blogging. Here’s his post on SWOT-analyzing your blog.

For those unfamiliar with the term SWOT, it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It’s a business/project planning technique that helps you get the low-down of thing to aid you in strategies and tactics.

Having worked on marketing plans, I probably have eaten and slept doing SWOT analyses. But since it can generally be used as a planning technique, I have grown to use it on everything that needs planning. I’ve found it to be so flexible that I think it can be used for so many applications. Like Yuga’s take on doing SWOT on your blog.

This here’s a simplified take on SWOT just to get you started. SWOT can actually be divided into 2 levels – the internal and external environments that will and can affect your goal.

Internal Environment Analysis (SW)

The internal environment deals with strengths and weaknesses. It’s easy to define these two:

• Strengths – Traits that help the group reach its goal
• Weaknesses – Traits that deter the group from reaching its goal

This is introspection at its finest. Before you push on a project, you need to do an in-depth look at what you have as an organization. You can subdivide the strengths and weaknesses as minor and major ones. Just be sure not to focus too much on either one.

External Environment Analysis (OT)

Now moving outward, you should be able to know the external factors that might affect your venture.

• Opportunities – a favorable trend which the organization can focus on or exploit to maximize output or profit
• Threat – an unfavorable trend that can affect the group’s output negatively. In some senses this can be bad economic trends or competitors

These can also be rated according to these matrices:

Use

Once you’ve plotted out everything here’s a good mnemonic on what to do with what you have – USED.

• Use your strengths
• Stop your weaknesses
• Exploit opportunities
• Defend against threats