Internet and Businesses Online

SWOT Matrix is a template that helps you to formulate strategy ?for many business situation. As a continuation to my earlier published article, you can study a real life example how to use it for an Internet Business.

In the previous article, you have read how to use the SWOT Analysis Template to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You can click SWOT Factors to review the full list. With the long list, your task is to reduce them to 2-3 items per factor. You may be wondering why only limit to 2-3 items? You will get to know it in my next article on SWOT Matrix Part 2. Meanwhile, let's work on this number first. Shell we?

To be realistic, it will be very lengthy for me to do a complete SWOT Analysis in this article but a summary of it as an example will suffice for now.?

?As you may know, there are several strategies to start an Internet Business. Here, let's consider "Traffic" is one of them. One of the ways to drive traffic is to be ranked high in google page#1. In order to rank high in google page#1, you ought to compete with my competitors already ranked high. You need to know your Strengths and Weaknesses as compared with those competitors. Unfortunately, I have limited information about them.?

To illustrate how to narrow down the list, you pick 2-4 websites highly ranked as your competitors for comparisons. What you do is to create a STRENGTHS Matrix to list all your 8-9 Strengths factors indentified earlier. Then indicate the level of Strengths in comparison with the competitors. You rate yourself high if you are better than the competitors and vice versa. After you have completed the rating, you take the top 2-3 items that are "worst off" and keep the list. Say, you have identified the 2 "worst-off" Strengths as below:-

1. Advanced user of computer
2. Some knowledge in website / webpage design

Use the same matrix to do the same for Weaknesses factors?

The next step is use an Opportunity Matrix to narrow down the list for Opportunities factors. Similarly, you list all? the Opportunities factors into the matrix and evaluate the probability of occurrence and its impact to you (to start an Internet Business), and multiply the two to get a score. Do that for whole list. At the end, you should have a list of scores for the list. Now do a ranking with 1 for highest score and so on. Next pick 2-3 items that ranked 1 to 3 and keep it. Example:

?OPPORTUNITIES: ?

1. Government provide incentives for IT investment ?
2. WIFI or internet access is available everywhere?

?Next use the same matrix to do the same for THREATS factors

Once you have completed the four steps procedure to narrow down a long list of SWOT factors. You are ready to input them into a SWOT Matrix to formulate your strategy. ?Read full article of SWOT Matrix?with graphic illustration.? Look out for how to "Use SWOT Matrix to formulate strategy for you Internet Business (Part 2)" in the next issue.