Check out our latest blog posts on StartupNation.com, a site devoted to helping entrepreneurs, startups and small business owners build business and achieve success.

Our four most recent posts cover a range of website topics — from innovation to blog ideas to content strategies to conversion rate optimization:

Using Your Website as an Innovation Platform
(Your website is the perfect platform for driving innovation for your business. Learn how.)

Endless Ideas for Your Blog
(Never run out of ideas for your upcoming blog posts with these idea-generation techniques.)

5 Content Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Website
(If you create any type of content, follow these strategies to get more prospective customers to your website.)

Why You Need to be Obsessed with Your Conversion Rate
(Three important reasons why you need to be deliriously obsessed about your conversion rate in order to maximize your website results.)

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Looking to jumpstart your small business? Inject some innovation into what you do and what you offer your customers. Here are three ways to get you started in injecting new, fresh life into your small business:

Think!

Stop! Stop what you are doing right now, put all your paperwork away, and take a full day to brainstorm ideas for your business. Brainstorm new products and services. Brainstorm ways to help your customers better. Brainstorm ways to become more efficient. When was the last time you spent a good 8 – 10 hours just on quality thinking time for your business?

Become Your Customer

Spend a day as your customer. Literally, take the time to put yourself into your customer’s shoes and see life from this alternative perspective. As you move through the day, what objectives arise? What challenges arise? What surprises arise? What is it that becomes critical to your day, in order to make it successful?

Solve Problems

Spend a full hour outlining every potential frustration and problem that your customers face. Go through the entire process that your customers progress through in getting their work done. Break up the process into individual components. Identify frustrations with each component. Figure out better ways to get tasks done at each component level.

Further reading to keep your mind innovative and creative:

–Lateral Action

–Creative Think

–Fast Company * Innovation

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Want to sell more on your ecommerce website?

Elastic Path Software has published a great online webinar "9 Ecommerce Innovations – What’s Now & What’s Next" that provides insights into cutting edge methods for marketing and selling your products on your website.

The nine innovations include various topics that at first glance seem rather commonplace, but the walk-through of specific examples of innovations in action is eye-opening.

For example, everyone is quite aware of the popularity of online video. Elastic Path takes this a step further by walking the viewer through multiple, unique applications of video within the ecommerce context. This includes the video shop-by-outfit feature at MartinandOsa.com where the models move around so you can see what the outfit looks like in an everyday setting from different angles.

Another example is Amazon’s use of video-based product reviews.

Yet another is the Wine Library TV website’s usage of video to provide entertaining content. The online broadcast channel now receives more than 80K unique monthly viewers, according to Compete.

And this is just in the video section alone. There are more video innovation examples to view, and eight other areas of innovation to explore as well.

Check out the entire webinar. It’s well worth your time.

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In a prior post, we wrote about 30 ways to ignite innovation at your small company. If you follow these steps, you’re sure to come up with new, interesting ways to improve your marketing and your business.

Here, we would like to point out yet another way to inject innovation and differentiation into your business. Let’s call it "Cross Pollination."

MinuteClinic is a great example of a business that cross-pollinates two previously distinct industries: health care and retail. The organization brings healthcare to your neighborhood, making the process of getting medical attention easier, more convenient and more affordable, much like ATMs made it easer to conduct simple banking transactions at your convenience regardless of your bank’s office hours.

MinuteClinic make healthcare a little easier for people with hectic schedules (which is pretty much everyone these days). Their certified practitioners are trained to diagnose and treat common family illnesses, such as strep throat, bronchitis and ear, eye and sinus infections. No appointments are necessary, and they are open seven days a week. Taking a page from retail, their practitioners are trained in customer service to try to make your experience as pleasant as possible.

Whereas in the past, if you wanted to seek medical attention for even a minor ailment during off-hours, you would probably wind up at an emergency room and would be forced to wait for an hour or even a few hours. Because MinuteClinic deals with only a defined set of minor ailments, the process of seeking treatment is expedited. And many hospitals welcome MinuteClinic because it unclogs their waiting rooms for the people who really have serious, urgent medical needs. In fact, certain hospitals have installed MinuteClinic stations within their walls for just this reason.

MinuteClinic is a great example of cross pollination that blindsides an industry and helps a new entrepreneurial business succeed. Other examples abound as well:

• Threadless combined the previously exclusive realms of t-shirt design, social networking and retail to form a thriving, fast-growing business. Revenues are reportedly expected to top $40 million this year.
• Kiva (the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website), combined the previously exclusive worlds of charity, micro-lending, entrepreneurship and social networking.

So, how can you apply cross pollination in your business this year?

• If you are a B2B business, what can you leverage from the retail world?
• If you are a B2C business, what can you leverage from the B2B world?
• If you are in professional services, what can you leverage from the manufacturing industry?
• If you are a small retailer, what can you leverage from the entertainment industry?
• No matter what industry you are in, can you cross pollinate your business with a social networking model?

The business landscape is becoming more and more competitive. What’s a small business to do in order to differentiate oneself and beat the competition?

Innovate!

Any small business can innovate. It’s easy, affordable and sustainable. And your competition is probably not spending enough time on innovation themselves, so it would give you a competitive edge as well.

Take a step back and count how many hours you spent in the past month just thinking, brainstorming and creatively enhancing your company? At some firms, the marketing executives block off an hour or two every week exclusively for brainstorming. Have you even spent an hour in the past month doing any brainstorming?

The beauty of brainstorming and creative thinking is that it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s free! And the results can be significant.

Here are a number of ways to get you started towards driving innovation at your company, and leapfrogging the competition:

1. Read 10 magazines that you have never picked up before.
2. Read 10 blogs that you have never viewed before.
3. Review 10 websites of leading companies (not in your industry).
4. Invite someone you’ve admired in your industry to lunch.
5. Invite someone you’ve admired in another industry to lunch.
6. Block off time for brainstorming every day or every week.
7. Invite your customers to a brainstorming session.
8. Invite your vendors and partners to a brainstorming session.
9. Invite the smartest person you know to a brainstorming session.
10. Brainstorm using pictures and drawings rather than words.
11. Host brown bag lunches by inviting local “experts” from various fields to come in and educate your team.
12. Try crowdsourcing through services such as kluster.com.
13. Every morning make a list of three things that your company could do to improve itself.
14. Come up with 10 new ways to segment your audience into narrower and more-focused categories.
15. Come up with 10 ways that you could potentially partner with large corporations.
16. Come up with 10 ways that you could potentially partner with the competition.
17. Imagine you offered your main product or service for free – how could you build your business differently?
18. Keep an idea notebook with you at all times, and jot down thoughts as they come to you throughout the day. (You can use Jott.com for this as well.)
19. Redecorate a conference room into a creative think tank center.
20. Exercise before or after work, or during your lunch break.
21. Take a long walk.
22. Take the day off.
23. Start meditating.
24. Listen to music you have never heard before.
25. Visit a pre-school and remind yourself how youngsters explore everything around them.
26. Spend more time with your customers.
27. Allow all employees to spend 10% of their time on personal projects.
28. Allow all employees to spend a day a month doing charity work.
29. Swap employees for a day with one of your partners.
30. Prototype various ideas and see what resonates with your target audience, and what needs to go in the garbage bin.