Write Your Online Business Plan

S.W.O.T. Analysis

S.W.O.T. Analysis helps you launch your business with a full understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Armed with an understanding of the condition of your industry before analyzing the strengths of your business may uncover more services and products for you to offer. Acknowledging your weaknesses places you in a position to protect and improve your online business as it grows. Recognizing opportunities prepares you for a successful launch. Identifying internal and external threats equips you to respond before systemic inadequacies develop.  

STRENGTHS

Every aspect of your business before you launch is based on what you can do to attract and keep a potential client. Here is a list of ways you can identify your current strengths:

• What do you do or will you do faster than competitors?
• What do you do or will you do better than competitors due to
  • Experience
  • Innovation
  • Patents
  • Creativity
  • Location

• Make a list of positive attributes based on what you plan to offer
  • Blogs:
    • Creative content
    • Original content
    • Exclusive access to influencers or celebrities
  • Products:
    • Efficacy
    • Convenience
    • Cost
    • Patent protected
    • Proven success
  • Services:
    • Response time
    • Efficacy
    • Proven success
    • Innovation
    • Reliability
    • Professionalism

WEAKNESSES

Protecting your online business from weaknesses requires being able to identify them. Here is how you can identify what areas you’ll need to improve as you grow:

• What content, services, products are you unable to provide due to:
  • Size
  • Location
  • Time constraints
  • Lack of resources

Responding to the initial weaknesses of your online business is found in your business plan. You can protect your new company by building a strategy that lessens the impact of the weaknesses. An effective response to your weaknesses lies in properly planning:

• Based on your short-term business objectives
• Based on your initial budget
• Based on taking full of advantage of your non-monetary resources

OPPORTUNITIES

With your strengths and weaknesses in perspective, you’re able to research opportunities for your online business. Here is how you identify opportunities:

• Perform a Google search based on phrases potential clients would enter to find your content, product, or service
• Return to your list of competitors in your industry
  • Read the comments, reviews, and BBB complaints for the last three to six months. Pay close attention to comments that include:
    • Product failures
    • Inflexible TOS (terms of service)
    • Ignored customer suggestions to correct simple service misunderstandings
    • Customers looking for additional product capabilities that aren’t offered by the competitor

• Read articles by thought leaders that focus on :
  • Emerging trends
  • Industry-wide problems that need to be eliminated
  • Forecasts of new customer expectancies
  • New advancements in technology they consider “promising” or “game-changing”

THREATS

Identifying short-term or long-term threats to your online business can also be achieved using online research. Here is a list of research you should do every three to six months:

• Research competitors’ blogs and press releases for:
  • Announcement of planned products
  • Announcement of new services
  • Current products or projects in beta testing
  • Shuttered or discontinued products and services

Every company regardless of size, industry, and location has at least one strength, weakness, unexplored opportunity, and possible threat. Performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis before you launch your online business is an investment in your short-term and long-term success. Executing a S.W.O.T. Analysis on a consistent basis is one of the most strategic ways to grow your business and offer your best to clients.

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