Receiving feedback, ideas and constructive criticism from others can be enlightening. It can open  our eyes to things in plain sight that we just couldn’t see. It can reveal possibilities that we just had not explored.

And so it is with your website.

Although it’s important to define our corporate identity and stick to it to the end, gaining outside input can help us gain new perspectives on what is working with our website, what is worth testing and what needs to be jettisoned altogether.

To that end, here are 5 critical things that you can do in 2010 to ensure a more successful website, all revolving around the exploration of new, outside perspectives:

5 Keys to a Successful Website

1. Ask Your Prospects

Who better to ask than those who are in a position to purchase your products and services? By far and away, this is the most important group to engage in soliciting feedback on your website.

2. Ask Your Clients

Getting input from existing clients is also invaluable. When soliciting feedback, though, remember to keep digging. Because you already have a relationship with them, they may initially hold back their deepest criticisms.

3. Ask Your Employees

It’s amazing how many companies do not ask their employees for input on their website. Employees can have keen insights into the market given the frontline nature of their roles, yet often this wealth of expertise goes untapped with regards to the company website.

4. Ask Your Mother

Ask someone from a different generation. It really doesn’t matter if you ask your mother, father, grandmother or grandfather. The point is, different generations interface with the web in different ways. Seek out the opinion of someone from a different generation to help you make your website easier for everyone to navigate and to use.

5. Ask a Pro

Get the opinion of a professional. Ask a web designer or usability expert. Ask a web marketer or website consultant. Here at Website Marketing NOW, we review and evaluate a steady stream of websites. Whether through a Website Audit or Website Consulting, we are continuously finding ways for websites to achieve greater monetization, and can help you take your website to the next level as well.

The point is, ask, ask, ask. Hear what others have to say. You do not have to implement every single recommendation that crosses your desk. However, by learning additional perspectives on your website, you will be able to improve and refine your site to ensure a much more successful year in 2010.

Is your website ready for 2010? Are you planning ahead and proactively ensuring your website success? Have you taken the time to plan what you need from your website to maximize your business results in the coming year?

To help you get the most out of your website in 2010, here is a list of 10 keys to website planning.

Website Planning – 10 Keys for 2010

1. Goals

Be sure to identify, clarify and document the annual, quarterly and monthly business goals of your website. The more specific your goals, the more likely you are to achieve them.

2. Audience Segmentation

Be sure that your website is set up to target and resonate with very specific audience segments. You’ll have much more success by targeting your best prospective customers than by trying to be all things to all people.

3. Differentiation

Too many companies ignore differentiation and think that anyone visiting their website will of course understand why they should purchase from their particular company. Wrong. Make sure that your differentiation is very clear, right from the home page.

4. Customer Voice

Consumers and business buyers are now expecting a voice in the conversation. Empower them with multiple ways to communicate with your business, whether through online forms, toll-free numbers, email, online chat, forums, surveys, polls, Q&A, crowdsourcing, etc.

5. Customer Value

Make sure your website is truly serving the needs of your prospective customers, and not just “selling” to them. People are tired of being sold to. You should offer real value throughout the year. Identify how the needs and wants of your prospective customers change through the different seasons, quarters and months of the year, and align your website updates accordingly.

6. The WOW! Factor

Remember that your customers are real people with real emotions. Part of their decision to purchase from you or to do business with you will come from their emotions. Be sure to include some great “WOW!” elements to your website to evoke a positive emotive response in your site visitors. These could range from an amazingly useful eBook to a fantastic blog to a special, seasonal offer.

7. Budget

Remember the basics when you conduct your website planning. How much money will you dedicate towards website improvements and upgrades in the coming year? How will these funds be allocated throughout the year? Are your budgets aligned with your priorities?

8. Schedule

Many companies update their websites randomly. Don’t fall into this trap. You’ll enjoy much greater success by allocating set times in your schedule for continual website updates. Remember to allocate time for keeping up-to-date on the latest web capabilities and trends (e.g., real-time search) as well, and to incorporate changes to your site accordingly. Remember also to include a testing schedule in your calendar, to ensure that you are consistently pushing to achieve the full potential that your site has to offer your business.

9. Resources

Plan ahead to ensure you have all the resources you need to maximize your website results in 2010. There’s no need to feel that you have to take it all on yourself. Hire expert marketers, designers, programmers, copywriters and blog specialists to help you achieve your website goals.

10. Plan

Take all of the above and document a solid website plan for 2010. Documenting your website planning will ensure that you have thought through your site visitors’ needs upfront and have all of the time/money/resources you need to execute successfully throughout the year.

It’s as simple as this.

A person, let’s call her Jane, comes to your website. She reads through your web pages. She reads through your blog. She searches “your company name” on Google to find out more about you.

Then…she does the same exact thing for your main competitor.

What do you think happens next? Is it easy for her to make the decision to contact you or purchase from you? Or, is it nearly impossible for her to figure out how you are any different than your competitor.

Face it. One of the very most important things you can do to improve your website and build your business is to DIFFERENTIATE.

Don’t believe us?

Well, think about Jane. Think about how many times she’s purchasing from your main competitor rather than you. Think about all the Janes out there who rightfully SHOULD be purchasing from you, but instead are taking that money and funding your main competitor simply because they don’t see how you are different? Think about if even half of the Janes out there currently purchasing from your main competitor switched to you.

Now, that’s a lot of money. And it’s money that is driving your competitor’s growth today, rather than yours.

Want to change things and start driving increased sales for your business? Differentiate. Make that differentiation crystal clear in your website.

Leave no doubt in Jane’s mind.

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Want your site visitors to stick around a bit longer on your site? Want them to spend more time with your brand? Want them to understand more ways that you can help them?

Try this:

• Go into your web analytics package.
• Review the Exit Pages data. (An Exit Page is a web page from which your site visitor left your website.)
• Identify the top 3 Exit Pages on the site.
• Spend time studying those pages.
• Ask customers (and prospective customers if you can) to take a look at those pages.
• Ask colleagues and friends to take a look as well.
• Identify a few ways that you could intrigue your site visitors on these pages, compelling them to click through to additional information. For example, this could include special offers, limited time offers, upsells, cross-sells, complimentary information products, interactive tools, answers to their questions, exclusive research, etc. Whatever you believe your site visitors would value most.
• Implement the update on these three pages.
• Track the results in your web analytics.
• Rinse and repeat.

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Get better results from your website by asking yourself these 5 questions:

1. What’s the one thing I can do today that would have the biggest impact on my website results?

2. What’s the one thing I can do longer-term that would have the biggest impact on my long-term website results?

3. How can I improve my home page?

4. What’s something new that I can test today on my website forms or Contact page?

5. When was the last time I not only analyzed my web analytics data, but then also changed something on my website accordingly?

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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 latest posts are as follows:

Going Beyond the Website Conversion to Measure Success
Look beyond a single website conversion event to measure success. Aim at maximizing lifetime value to generate higher returns for your business.

23 Google Tools for Your Website
Check out these 23 resources from Google to increase the performance of and to promote your website.

5 Killer B2B Digital Strategies
Who says business-to-business companies cannot leverage the digital channel to fuel growth? Learn five important B2B digital strategies.

Improve Website Navigation & Improve Your Conversion Rates
By improving your website’s navigational structure, you are sure to increase your conversion rates and generate more results from your website.

Next up on StartupNation will be Website Marketing NOW’s Landing Page Tips series, starting today. Be sure to check out the series and generate more leads, orders and sales from your Landing Pages!

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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 two latest posts are as follows:

Website ROI – 5 Secrets to Success
(Make sure your website is working hard for your business. Read this if you want to increase the return on your website investments.)

7 Tips for Better Product Pages
(Here are 7 tips for any small business selling products online to improve the product pages within your website to drive more sales.)

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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 two latest posts are as follows:

The Mid-Year Website Checkup
(If you expect to get the most out of your website this year, you really can’t miss this!)

11 Reasons Your Business Needs a Blog
(If your business does not yet have a blog, read this!)

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StartupNation.com, a leading online content and community resource for entrepreneurs, has published the 2nd series of articles by Website Marketing NOW to help entrepreneurs build successful small business websites. The new series is titled Take Your Website to the Next Level. The four articles in the series are:

–Drive Website Conversions
–Go Beyond a Product Website
–Energized Engagement
–A Fantastically Fun Website

The first series, Marketing Fundamentals for Website Success, was published in July 2008.

Check out the articles! And while you’re on StartupNation.com, you should check out all the other extremely useful content they offer. The site is an invaluable resource for any entrepreneur.

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In its July 2008 issue, Inc. magazine reviews four start-up businesses in the article The Get Ahead Guide: The Ultimate Start-Up Reality Check. Each entrepreneur presents the plan for growing their business in the article, and a domain expert provides their feedback. In parallel with the industry expert’s review of the business, Website Marketing NOW is conducting a super quick evaluation here in our blog of each entrepreneur’s website. The bottom line is, how will each of these companies leverage its website to maximize business results.

The first website evaluation was of the BabyCakes NYC website. The second website evaluation was of the ScanDigital website.

The third that we will evaluate in this series is that of LiaMolly, a designer of cotton and wool blend sweaters in New Orleans. Note, this will be the final installment in this series of website evaluations, as the final company profiled in the Inc. article, KickStartr.com, has only a one-page, temporary placeholder for its website at the moment.

The LiaMolly website is clean and easy-to-navigate. For a clothing designer’s website, photography and imagery are extremely important, and LiaMolly comes through with beautiful photos of its fall and winter ‘08 collection of sweaters. Outside of the collections themselves, the photos represent the designer well.

So, how can LiaMolly take its website to the next level and ensure that the website is driving more traffic, customers and fans of its designs? How can it drive more traffic from retail buyers who could introduce the sweaters to new audiences?

Build Content!

There is very little content on the current website outside of the photos of the fall and winter ‘08 collections. This might have been sufficient for a website a decade ago, but in today’s business environment you need to have a robust website with layers of information that answer the site visitor’s questions. LiaMolly should add more information about its designs, designer, materials and vision.

Where can the site visitor purchase the sweaters? Which stores carry the brand? Is it possible to purchase online? All of this critical information for the end customer is missing.

What about any press that the brand has garnered? Have any fashion magazines or websites covered the designs? Have the designs appeared in any movies or TV shows? These elements can help a new designer establish credibility.

Provide Relevance!

On the home page is a video titled "Banco Ballante." What is this? Why is it here? Why does LiaMolly want the site visitor to watch this? What will the site visitor get out of the video? In other words, what’s in it for the site visitor?

Instead of just stating "Watch Video," the home page should briefly explain what the video is and the benefits of watching it.

The video is actually a nice addition to the website and helps develop and support the brand personality. It’s artistic choreography is entertaining and lends a new flavor to the sweaters that the site visitor cannot find elsewhere on the site. Unless LiaMolly helps the site visitor understand this, though, many people who come to the site are going to skip it and never return to it.

Focus on the Customer!

Currently, there is no information on the website about LiaMolly’s target audience. Who should buy these designs? Who would find them most appropriate for their lifestyle and wardrobe? Who would get the most out of them?

And this type of information would be helpful not only for the customers themselves, but also for retail buyers. Speaking of which, how about some helpful information for the retail buyers?

For both the end customer and retail buyer, the site could offer suggestions for complete outfits that complement the sweater designs, or even just accessories suggestions.

The site could look inside the customer’s lifestyle and suggest specific designs for different types of occasions, such as outfits for a night on the town, a leisurely afternoon with girlfriends or a day at the office.

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