The new year already started and and now is a good time to work on your 2011 microstock strategic plan. SWOT analysis is a very useful tool that can help you with that by identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
In the following paragraphs I will give some examples to illustrate how a SWOT analysis can be applied to a portfolio.
- Strengths and weaknesses
These are by definition internal factors that you can impact on. I suggest first to step back and have a critical look at your portfolio to identify its strengths and weaknesses. For this it is very important to collect as much data as possible by for example look at your sale statistics and your ranking (if available) in the different agencies.
You can found out for example that one of your strength is few strong best selling images in your porfolio.
- Threats and opportunities
Threats and opportunities are by definition external factors that are not under your control. Threats can arise for example from mergers/acquisition or bankrupcies in the microsock industry that may decrease the value of your portfolio. Opportunities can be new microstock or midtock agencies that you can start contributing to, new microstock tools that can improve your productivity, or submitting videos to footage agencies.
A SWOT analysis alone is not very useful, so once you are done with it , you will have to define actions by applying the following rules:
- Capitalize and develop your strengths
- Eliminate or limit your weaknesses
- Invest in opportunities
- Identify threats
- But also match strenghts and opportunities and try to offset weaknesses with strengths
A more detailed version (5 pages PDF, $ 5) is available for download in the link above that will help in your SWOT. At this end of this guide you will be able to list a series of actions to increase your productivity and earnings
