Archive for April, 2006
April 3, 2006 at 11:10 pm · Filed under General
If you want to succeed in life, it is important to take stock of where you are at and how you can adapt, improve, and take advantage of the opportunities presented to you.
The SWOT analysis is a powerful tool to help assess your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your opportunities and threats. It can be used for analyzing many situations, both in your personal and business life. In this example, I will be going through some basics of conducting a SWOT for your website. It doesn’t matter if you are using the website for adsense revenue, affiliate marketing, promoting your product / service, business, or personal. This analysis will still apply.
I have included a basic MS WORD version for download, and you can use it as a template for this exercise. Of course, feel free to modify and adapt it for your situation.
Strengths:
What does your website do well?
What low cost resources can you access?
Why do visitors choose to visit your site over others?
What advantage does your site have in comparison to your competitors?
What does your site do better than any other that you have seen?
Consider these questions from both an internal perspective, as well as from an outsiders perspective (customers, visitors). Web site metrics / stats are a great way to analyze some of this info. Also, think about your strengths in relation to your competitors. For example, let’s take a look at affiliate marketing. If your competition (other affiliates going after the same industry / product suite) has great content, then having great content is not necessarily a website strength…it is a necessity if you want to compete.
Weaknesses:
What could your site improve on?
What direction should your site avoid?
Where do you have fewer resources than others?
What are others likely to see as weaknesses?
Again, think about these questions from an internal and external perspective. Ask other people their first impression of your site. You may want to go as far as asking a group such as an online forum to offer feedback on your site (I would recommend that you participate in one before you ask this question though, as some forums don’t like this question if it your first post). Don’t skip over this section, as it is better to address and recognize these weaknesses now rather than later.
Opportunities:
What web trends do you see around you, and how could you take advantage of them?
What are the obvious opportunities facing you?
What is the long term view of opportunity for your website?
How can you turn your website’s strengths into opportunities?
Useful opportunities could be…
Weak competition
Trends in your industry or online that you are positioned to take advantage of
Changes in technology – new tools etc…
One way to look at opportunities is to look at your strengths and see if they open up any opportunities for you. On the flip side, you may also want to check out your weaknesses and ask yourself that if you STOPPED doing any of these things, would it open up an untapped opportunity that you could explore.
Threats:
What obstacles do you personally or your website face?
What industry trends could harm your site?
What is your competition doing?
Is changing technology threatening your site?
Do you have financial strain or cash problems?
Are there any weaknesses that could seriously threaten your website?
Once you have the results from your website SWOT analysis, you will have a great idea of what to focus your energy and what not to. It can also put potential problems into perspective and allow you to deal with them proactively.
Feel free to comment and let me know how this tool helped your website. I look forward to hearing from you.
April 6, 2006 at 11:12 pm · Filed under General
Looking for that perfect website niche topic for your website or blog? Here are answers to a few basic questions on picking the right topic.
What topic should you write about?
I would recommend writing about something that interests you. This statement is especially true if you can’t afford to hire writers about your chosen topic. If you are not truly interested in what you are writing about, the blog or site content won’t have “legs”. You will eventually lose interest and move onto something else. I would also use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker to help you decide which topics people are actually looking for online.
Will the topic convert into either ad clicks or affiliate sales?
I hear the same messages from a lot of Internet Marketers…test…test…test. Once you have your keyword research done, try using PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic to send some visitors to your newly created site. One of the most popular PPC services is Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing). I would recommend that you keep your bids for your keywords low until you know if visitors will like your site and want to click on either an ad or an affiliate link.
How much content should you write?
Some marketers say to use your keyword list and write as many articles as you have keywords / phrases. I would recommend that if you take that approach you stagger your article / blog postings so that you are updating your site on a regular basis. This brings the search engine spiders back to your site to include your new content in the search indexes faster. If you only post once every few months, then the spiders will only come back every few months. They establish a visitor pattern based on your post frequency.
There is also an interesting post over at ProBlogger.net talking about choosing the right niche topic for your blog that I would recommend checking out. It is definately worth a read.
April 6, 2006 at 8:30 am · Filed under Affiliate Marketing, Business
This is an interesting article that pretty much resounds of why I like conducting online business from home.
By Bill Schnarr
We’ve all been stretched to our limits at one time or another, whether our jobs take us to the factory, the office, and even those who work at home. Today’s working parents are under more pressure than ever to work longer, earn more money, and provide a stable environment for their children. At the same time, those same activities that are supposed to be enjoyable – spending time with family, taking the kids to soccer practice, and remembering to phone Aunt Martha on her birthday can easily become part of a hectic, stressful work week that leaves you exhausted and desperate for a break.
With all the stress and hassle of today’s modern life, it’s no wonder that more and more people are turning to alternative sources to generate income and ease the burden of day to day living. For many of those people, working at home on their computers for a few hours a week has become that stress relieving second income. And these people are beginning to see that a home based business can be an alternative to a soul-sucking job that leaves you exhausted and praying for the weekend.
There are a lot of good reasons why you should consider a home based business if you are searching for a way to improve the quality of your life. For example, working at home provides you with the ability to schedule your work around the important things that come up in everyday life, as opposed to waiting for a day off to take the kids to the dentist or missing a birthday dinner because you were stuck in traffic.
In fact, missing anything because of traffic would be a thing of the past, unless you count the line ups at the supermarket or the Doctor’s office. And here’s a little tip: there are no line ups at the supermarket when everyone is at work. It would just be you and a couple little old ladies in a foot race for the two bored cashiers waiting to serve you. Take my advice – a good hip check goes a long way to eliminating the competition, if you catch my drift.
But there are some really important things to consider if you are going to look for a way to work at home and make money on a home based business. For one thing, something like an internet based business can lead to all kinds of goodies. Things like residual incomes and streaming money. Royalties! Yes, your home based internet business will make money for you even while you’re sleeping in or spending the weekend on a romantic getaway with your significant other. Does your job at the toothpaste factory pay you to sleep? (Don’t answer that!)
Working at home on computer can afford you other luxuries as well. You may not have realized this, but an internet based business can be accessed and maintained from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a reliable internet connection and access to your email accounts. That means that you can spend an hour or two on your computer in the morning taking care of loose ends while your family prepares for a day at the beach…in Mexico!
You can work from your time share condo in Florida, your parent’s house in Wisconsin, or even that little two bedroom tree house in the Amazon Rain Forest you’ve always dreamed about…providing you can convince the local monkeys to provide you with some form of internet service.
The opportunity for additional income and freedom from the grind of daily living is sitting in your living room. Working at home is a trend being picked up by men and women every day; professionals, college students, and retirees are all working from home on computers and making money to improve their lives.
If your still considering it, no worries. Hopefully this article will give you something to think about next time your stuck in traffic, sucking on petrol fumes and wishing that monkeys were serving you Pina Colada’s in your little grass hut out in the middle of nowhere.
For more information, see work at home guides.
About The Author
Bill Schnarr is a single parent and freelance writer who works from his home in Calgary, Alberta. As well as writing about the various ways to start a home business and having dozens of online and print publishing credits, you can also look for him in the latest “Chicken Soup for the Single Parents Soul” which was published in February 2005.
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