SWOT Analysis is a tools for conducting an analysis on your Strengths; Weaknesses; Opportunities and Threats. If it a tool commonly used in conjunction with a Strategic Planning as well as Marketing Planning. If you are new to this, read more about SWOT Analysis here . However, if you already know some basics about this analytical tool then the following case studies could be interesting.

SWOT Analysis conducted for a small business do not require as massive effort as in the case of a big business or in a very competitive market. The scope of a small business in this case study refer to a business which is managed by you alone or with a workforce of less than 10 people. Sales turnover is not taken into consideration because a small workforce or sole webmaster can have a big sales turn over due to today’s internet technology.
Below are the example of the SWOT Factors of a Small Business :-

1) Strengths
1.1) Highly versatile due to less people involvement
1.2) Fast decision making
1.3) Less overhead / expenses

2) Weaknesses
2.1) Limited resources such as funding, manpower etc
2.2) Have constraint in multi project simultaneously

3) Opportunities
3.1) Plenty of outsourcing by big companies
3.2) Emerging of Internet Business

4) Threats
4.1) Competition from big boys
4.2) Competition among small business owners

The key is to recognize the Weaknesses and look for ways to improve it. Example: you can look around for a business grant at for the funding start or expand your small business. Below are some tips about Business Grant

What is a business Grand ?
A Grants is a form of fund and generally it is taken as free money. They are made available by usually government bodies to provide financial assistance like conduct research; build a college, launch of a non-profit organization etc.
However, a Business grants is slight different. They are specifically designed to help in business environment such as to start a green business or even for expansion purpose. The amount of the funding can vary from as little as $500 to as much as $5 million.
source: http://www.businessgrants.org

Ever wonder how to perform your SWOT Analysis for your new website or blog? In my previous post, I shared with your the four factors of SWOT analysis for my own blog which helped my blog to rank google page#1 in 1 week. What I did not share with you are the strategies I used for my blog.

While going thru the sample SWOT Analysis factors, you should have examined what are some of the critical factors that can immediately help you in your home business or internet business. One of the key success factors for your home or internet business is constant heavy traffic to your website. Over the year, I had a wrong impression that as long as my website is ranked high at google.com, then I will be profitable. I realized I was wrong after several months of research into different sample blogs and sample Strategies of other blog. I discovered that profitability of a blog come from many other factors. Though page ranking is important, it was indeed the traffic that drives the visitors to the blog. And traffic is influenced by the search volume of a keyword of your blog.

You could have figured out traffic as one of your strategies even before you use the SWOT Matrix example. When you can observe obvious strategy that can be adopted, by all means to assess it and see if it can fit into your own SWOT Analysis factors. Take a few more sample strategies is get the best fit strategies based on similarities between the sample SWOT Analysis and your own SWOT Analysis. You compare both SWOT Analysis to ensure the situations of the sample and yours is similar.

Assuming you agreed to drive traffic to your website as one of the strategy you are going to adopt, then you either do it right away, or if you are not sure what to do, research further from various source of articles about implementing strategies. Do not try to do all the sample strategies you have researched as you will not know which strategy bring in the traffic for you. Do make a record of the results after you have tried all the sample strategies. Always refer to SWOT Analysis Example to get new ideas