As part of the outreach for Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging, I’m hosting a free series of expert calls with some of the top blogging brainiacs out there. Our third call is with Rick Bruner from DoubleClick.

Rick Bruner is research director of DoubleClick, a leading provider of digital advertising technology and services. Rick is widely regarded as an expert in the field of Internet marketing and advertising, a frequent speaker at industry conferences and the co-author of the book Net Results: Web Marketing That Works. He has been blogging since 2002 and is the founder of BusinessBlogConsulting.com, a group blog which focuses on using blogs for marketing.

Our call is going to focus on how to bloggers can use PR for marketing and how PR professionals can use bloggers for their marketing.

I hope you’ll join us for this free call:

Tuesday, January 24 @ 7:30 Eastern (New York)
Dial-in number is 1-712-432-2323 (long distance rates may apply)
Participant access code is 60657

When developing a strategy to market to a specific niche, most large corporations go through a strategic management process that has nine steps.

Identify the organization’s current mission, objectives, and strategies

Analyze the environment
Identify opportunities and threats
Analyze the organization’s resources
Identify strengths and weaknesses
Reassess the organization’s mission and objectives
Formulate strategies
Implement strategies
Evaluate results

(Source Material: Fundamentals of Management: Essential Concepts and Applications; Stephen P. Robbins, David A. Decenzo; 2001; Prentice-Hall, Inc.)

Large corporations who are well established usually have the manpower, time, and financial resources to delve deeply into the strategic management process. However, if you are a yet-to-be-established, or newly-established, micro or small business owner, you may not have the manpower, time, and financial resources needed to fully invest in this process.

If you want to market your business, and possibly market to a specific niche, you still need to invest in some type of analysis. As a micro or small business owner, I would advise starting with a preliminary SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis is a combination of the above steps 2-5.

Strengths: (Internal) As a business, what are your personal strengths, the strengths of your employees, and the strengths of your resources. What do you and your business do well? What skills does your business have that are unique to the market place?

Weaknesses: (Internal) As a business, where are you lacking. What do you not do well and need to improve upon. Are these weaknesses a hindrance to the success of marketing to your niche area?

Opportunities: (External) What are the environmental opportunities available that would make your business successful? Some environmental factors to look at would be economy, location, labor force, social trends, local, domestic, and international events, etc.
Threats: (External) For each of the environmental opportunities, what could be opposite environmental threats that would make your business unsuccessful? Remember, what could be an environmental opportunity for one business, could be a major environmental threat for another.

Once you have completed a preliminary SWOT analysis, you will have a clearer picture of the direction in which you should start. You can then further develop your mission, objectives, and strategies to bring your business to the marketplace. Once this has been developed, implement, evaluate, and if needed, reanalyze and reformulate. Then, once again, implement, evaluate, and keep the cycle going.

Copyright 2006 Naomi Skarzinski, CPVA and Top Shelf VA Services.

About the Author
Top Shelf VA Services is a virtual assistant administrative support service that collaborates with successful and professional small businesses, providing first rate assistance for a virtual world of difference! To sign up for Naomi’s free Top Shelf Virtual Report!, visit http://www.topshelfva.com.