It’s really no longer a question of to blog or not to blog, but rather how and what you do with your organization’s blog. Some choose to use the platform as a news and announcements rundown. Others prefer to let outside viewers in on the day-to-day developments and goings on around the office. Some nail a proper mixture of both.

Any way you present it, your company’s blog should provide an underlying message targeted directly at consumers. Whether it’s the “We’re the fun folks you should do business with because we’re awesome!” or the “We’re very serious people, who do serious things, so come and do serious business with us.” you’re seeking to support a position. However, a number of businesses on the market today are blogging away, but with little measurable return on their investment. So what can we do to further engage audiences, provide them with the right materials, and convert them to repeat visitors (and customers)?

Here are five simple features your blog should have up and running from the get go.

About Us

Perhaps the simplest of all the recommendations, be sure to include a prominent About Us link and page on your blog. If your content marketing guru is doing their job well, you’re bound to have a number of visitors that arrive at your blog, perhaps not even knowing a thing about you or your organization and what exactly it is that you do. It’s a lost opportunity when you leave them out in the cold wondering who you are.

But what should a good About Us page include? It all depends on what your underlying message is. Chances are your marketing and/or PR team has a store of press ready “About Us text” already on tap, so why reinvent the wheel? Take the juiciest bits and pieces of these preformed texts and meld them into a powerful message that gets across:

• Who you are
• What you do
• What you can do for customers
• How to get in contact

Please note the last bullet point, as it is crucial that you provide visitors with a quick and easy way to get in touch with you and/or your organization.

Subscribe

Since you’re putting a great deal of effort into creating fantasic content for your blog, wouldn’t it be nice to have more than the occasional drive-by of readers, but rather a dedicated and engaged community? Let’s be honest, isn’t that the goal of every blog?

The first and foremost subscription feature should be via a prominent RSS button. Today, most relatively savvy Internet users not only know what an RSS icon and feed are, but have a favorite client for managing their favorite feeds. Make it quick and easy for them to continually keep on top of what you’re producing.

The subscribe area or box (preferably located near the top of your blog) is also an excellent opportunity to offer your readers a newsletter opt-in. Again, if they’re hitting the RSS button, they’re obviously interested in what you’ve got to say. If they want to take the relationship a bit further and offer you more opportunities to get your message across, specifically via email, make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Social

This should go without saying, but your blog should contain at the very least the prerequisite Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ social sharing options. Remember, your job is only half finished when you hit that publish button. The follow through involves spreading the message as far and wide as possible, and nothing accomplishes this goal better than a few well placed (and timed) social sharing options.

Depending on your blogging platform of choice, there are a number of social sharing plugins available, often requiring nothing more than 3 clicks to install, activate, and customize. Be sure to look for plugins that scroll along with your readers (see TNW’s option above), and provide a number of platform sharing options. That’s not to say that you’ll need all of them, but if you’re going to become comfortable with one sharing plugin, it’s a nice peace of mind to know that you’ve got plenty of room to expand in the future.

Cream of the Crop

One of the easiest and most effective ways to provide visitors with your very best, be sure to include a prominent “Top Posts” section somewhere on your blog. Personally, I’m a big fan of vertical navigation and love to see everything organized in columns. As a matter of fact…if you glance to the right side of this very page right now, you’ll notice a “Popular,” “Commented,” and “Latest” widget in TWN’s right column navigation. Visitors may have arrived via a social share to an article about XYZ, but your analytics show that ABC article is off the charts in terms of time on page, engagement, etc. Make it easy for new visitors to find the very best of your blog.

Speaking of the very best, don’t forget about your top commenters. Everyone loves to be recognized when they add value, so don’t hold back. If you’ve got a regular visitor that’s dropping pearls of wisdom on a number of your posts, go ahead and feature this regular visitor and provide some linking back to their site of origin.

Bonus: If you’ve got a particularly eloquent and knowledgeable commenter, if appropriate, reach out to them and see if a guest post is in order.

Archived

Visitors to your blog are there for one reason only: content. Granted, content is always relative and holds its place in time, but if you’ve stuck to an overall strategy and underlying message, numbers and figures might be dated, but the information is sound.

As human beings, we search by topic (you do have a search option, don’t you?) and/or category first, and then drill down by date. If you’re simply offering up an endless calendar of posts, you’re offering up an endless calendar of posts, nothing more. Break your archive down by category and make it easy for your visitors to find more information on specific topics you’ve written about. This not only provides a complete digest of your organization’s position on a certain topic, but makes it quick and easy for interested readers to find it.

Bonus: FREE!

Free must be one of the most powerful words in just about any language. People love free stuff. Visitors love your content. If visitors=people, then visitors are going to love free stuff, especially when it comes from you/your organization.

A great way to double down, offer your readers a free content piece in exchange for signing up for your newsletter. They benefit from the knowledge of experts, and you gain another interested party that you can further push your message to. Examples of giveaways may include (a):

• Video Tutorial
• Podcast
• Industry Report
• White Paper/E-book
• Etc.

Sure, the success of your organization’s blog ultimately resides in producing valuable and actionable content the resounds with readers and nurturing a growing community. However, by employing the features listed above, you’re well on your way to expanding your audience, fostering deeper engagement, and ultimately driving more conversions for your Sales team.

With roughly one-third the budget of MIT, the University of Utah was named the number 1 school in the U.S. for creating startup companies. It’s the second year in a row that the University claimed the top spot.

When thinking about startups and technology, MIT and Harvard immediately come to mind, but The University of Utah spun out 18 startups out of its program. The rankings are published yearly by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM).

According to the University of Utah, the startups spawn off from the university have created 15,767 jobs, $755 million in personal revenue, and $76.6 million in tax revenue for the state of Utah.

The survey covers the fiscal year of 2010, and other top schools included Brigham Young University, Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Purdue, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Michigan. The top schools are ranked based on the number of companies that are started due to research and work done at its school.

Here’s what A. Lorris Betz, interim President of the University of Utah had to say about the accomplishment:

This achievement is again a testament not only to our world-class researchers and their innovative discoveries, but also to the university’s unique ability to deliver that life-changing technology to the people who need it most. In addition, the companies we produce give our community a much-needed economic boost, create jobs and grow Utah’s reputation as an innovations hub in the nation and world.

I certainly didn’t know that Utah was such a tech hub. Jack Brittain, VP for Technology Venture Development for the school, attributes the startup success to the school’s culture and strong sense of community:

We have a tremendous culture of innovation that makes Utah one of the friendliest places for inventors and entrepreneurs, and everyone in the state benefits from the resulting economic growth. We are also fortunate to have state and university programs that support technology development so we can create companies in Utah.

The University of Utah spent $450 million on research in 2010, while the number two University when it comes to startup creation, MIT, spent $1.4 billion on research and development.

Here are some more details that may surprise you about The University of Utah when it comes to startups and technology:

• The University of Utah reported 287 active technology licenses in 2010. A technology license is required each time a company or individual wants to use a university technology. The national average was 210 for all institutions.
• The University of Utah collected 208 invention disclosures in 2010. An invention disclosure occurs when a faculty member reports an invention to the university. The national average was 113.
• The University of Utah secured 41 U.S. patents in 2010. The national average was 24.

Joseph Robert Lewis is a writer. He’s not your local Starbucks writer in hipster clothes, staring lovingly at his Macbook Pro and failing to break 100 words a day. He’s a professional.

His experience includes years of writing and editing in the book publishing industry and in online publishing. He’s capable of hammering out book after book without blinking. Right now, you can purchase five of Lewis’ fictions and his tome on presentations digitally. But it wasn’t always like that.

Under the rule of the traditional publishing companies, now slowly losing their grip on long-form content, Lewis hadn’t had any success cracking the market.

“I tried the traditional route for several years: write a book, pitch it to 50 agents and editors, get 5 actual rejections and a lot of silence, and repeat. It became a pretty depressing treadmill, despite some positive feedback and requests to read my books,” Lewis told me in an interview. “It was also difficult knowing that my chance for being published depended on the shifting moods and opinions of a handful of slush readers, agents, and editors who basically answer to a marketing department with a limited budget. That’s sort of silly to me.”

With independent digital publishing, Lewis makes the decisions around his book’s content and the way in which it is sold and marketed. It’s a model that makes sense: the work is the product of his business. Why give the power of CEO over to another party — not least one who will leave you with 8% or less of the revenue?

“I receive the lion’s share of the revenue — up to 70% compared to as little as 8% with a traditional publisher. The only people I have to impress are readers, and so far the reviews for my books (from complete strangers all over the world) have been pretty darn good,” he says.

One of the great business advantages that authors who publish digitally have over their traditional counterparts, according to Lewis, is the ability to move fast and frequently. Lewis can publish a book within mere hours of the final edit on a manuscript via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and a variety of other online retailers, though it will take 24 to 48 hours for them to appear for sale.

Lewis can update the book several times a week, testing different covers and marketing copy, and including things like maps or a sample chapter from a sequel — the sort of rapid iteration that’s simply not achievable with print books. Once they’re off the press and in the reader’s hands, the text is static.

But running active promotions isn’t the key to success, says Lewis. With any business, you need some sort of way to spread the news: word of mouth from an army of friends and family, elaborate advertising campaigns, Branson-esque stunts. Once you have the momentum going, though, promotions don’t do much for sales: Lewis says you may see a brief spike, but there’s very little measurable long-term game to be had from the fire-sale approach.

What does work, he says, is churning out quality work. “The best marketing you can do is to write another book,” says Lewis.

There is a launch process that Lewis goes through each time he publishes a new book. He updates his website and blog with information about the book, which includes links to retailers. He creates book pages on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where Lewis says many of his reviews come from.

Finally, he sends out some announcements — an email release to his mailing list, and a few on various forums such as Mobilereads and Kindleboards for good measure.

The kicker? The entire process of launching a book from start to finish takes him a couple of hours. After that, he’s free to celebrate or get started on the next work. It’s a stark contrast compared with the slow, cumbersome plodding of traditional publishing — and before you ask, there’s no difference in quality between Lewis’ work and the best of bookstore fiction. It’s as good as it gets.

“I’ve avoided most of the online debates about independent publishing and focused on just doing my work and making new friends (writers and readers alike). I’m not here to wage a culture war, just to write stories and help other writers if I can,” says Lewis. “I’ve noticed that quite a few successful indie authors actually have very little online presence, often going without blogs or Facebook pages. Success really does depend on the quality of your books and not on your skills as a salesperson. Which is a huge relief to me!”

There’s still plenty of change that needs to happen in the digital publishing space to make it a sustainable industry. E-readers like the Kindle, which are essentially single-function devices, need to become cheaper. The act of reading on smartphones and tablets, though a long way from where it was just a short year ago, needs to continue its climb. The pricing model amongst digital publishers is a matter of much debate, and that’s one area where Lewis believes publishers need to come to collectively establish a model before consumers, en-masse, will have faith in the stability of the digital publishing industry.

Lewis says we need less DRM, more format flexibility, and few obstacles to international publishing. It’s often difficult for US authors to distribute internationally through the same retailers that sell their work at home. It’s even harder for international publishers to have their work appear in the Amazon Kindle store, for instance: even a solo, impoverished writer getting his bearings has to register a business entity in the US — an expensive and difficult task for a foreigner.

“And critically, we need readers to remain open-minded about independent books and authors in general. There is still some lingering stigma that self-published books are rubbish (and some are, but so are some traditionally published books). In the end, books are books and only readers can decide which ones they like,” says Lewis.

The big question is: will Lewis ever go with a traditional publisher? Right now he’s reaping rewards from his published works, works that couldn’t have been published without mediums that bypass traditional channels. But what happens when the growth of his business hits a critical mass that is simply too time-consuming and distracting from the work of writing?

“Second, there will probably always be authors who prefer to have a team of experts doing the publishing work for them so they can focus on writing. Amanda Hocking is a great example. She became so successful as an independent that it made sense for her to turn over the publishing work to St Martins to allow her to focus on writing. And assuming she has a good lawyer and signed a good contract, I think that’s a very reasonable business decision.”

Lewis isn’t done yet — not by a long shot. A few days ago, he released his newest book The Broken Sword, a sequel to The Burning Sky. The third book which will form the endpiece for Lewis’ Halcyon trilogy will be out later this year.

Lewis is publishing a series of short stories called The Tale of Asha, about two women solving paranormal medical mysteries in India, and working on a fairy tale for his daughter, a work inspired by The Last Unicorn but reminiscent in motive of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Most exciting — at least to me, a big fan of Lewis’ hard sci-fi novel Heirs of Mars — are hints of a sequel to come next winter.

Joseph Lewis hits the nail on the head when he sums up the advantages of the digital publishing game, which has the capacity to allow more players to profit sustainably from smaller niches.

“I may never be rich or famous, but I’m doing much better now on my own than I ever was trying to break into the industry. And I literally have the rest of my life to continue building on my successes. I’ll never be bumped off the virtual shelves to make room for another author. There’s room for everyone now.”

Let me repeat the question: Would you turn your house into a billboard to live mortgage free?

Yes? You are in luck! Because one advertising company named Adzookie is doing just that: turning homes into billboards and helping homeowners pay their mortgage. Adzookie was first a free, mobile advertising company, but they’ve decided to take a bit of a pivot So far 223 homeowners have contacted them as well as 12 businesses, 7 restaurants and 1 church.

“Adzookie.com is a free mobile advertising company. We help local businesses reach new customers by placing free advertisements where ads get noticed the most, on smart phones,” says Romeo Mendoza, Adzookie’s CEO. “Promoting our business in a way that’s outrageous and fun just make sense.”

Mendoza says he was inspired while driving his daughter home from school.

“I saw signs outside homes saying ‘bank-owned’ and suddenly I felt for the families I imagined lived there,” said Mendoza. “I was trying really hard to think of ways to help …then it hit me. Our company buys advertising all the time. We could buy ad space on their house and pay them for it.”

To qualify, you must own your home; no renters or leasers allowed. Adzookie must be able to paint the entire outside of the house, minus the roof, the windows and any awnings. Having your house painted takes about 3-5 days. In exchange, Adzookie will pay the mortgage every month for as long as the house is painted, up to one year.

Interested homeowners apply here and please, please send us pictures. All hilarity aside, Mendoza is serious about this house painting business. And in the end, isn’t the whole promotion a great way for him to get the Adzookie name out there?

Ah, the crazy world of advertising. Interested in outdoor advertising? Don’t miss our recent interview with NYC’s disruptive darling, AdStruc.

Was there a Kindle or iPad under your Christmas tree? Statistics point to yes!

Publisher’s Weekly is reporting preliminary estimates from the Association of American Publishers that e-book sales from 16 reporting companies jumped 115.8% this January, totaling $69.9 million in the U.S.

And it’s bad news for paperback book publishers. Paperbacks were down 30.9% from the reporting companies, falling to $39.0 million, $30 million below the sales of e-books. Hardcover sales fell 11.3% in January.

At the end of January, we reported that Kindle e-books sales had overtaken paperback books on Amazon.com. We’ve been tracking the rise of e-books over the past few years, and so while we’re not altogether surprised by this announcement, it’s a massive milestone.

What’s happening? The way we devour content is changing. We no longer want to commute or travel with big, paper bound books when we can simply tote along a Kindle. Reading isn’t dying though, far from. Think of all the different kinds of information you consume, reading while waiting for the subway train, in line at the grocery store, on your computer at work and curled up at night in bed on the iPad. The iPad, the Kindle, these are devices of leisure. They’re large enough to consume Tolstoy but small enough to slip into our purse.

If you’re interested in getting involved in the eBook scene, be sure to read up on EBookling, the disruptive darling of indie online book publishing.

American Express has been running a fun promotion with iTunes to get you to switch over your credit card account to your AMEX. Today is the last day that cardmembers can get any 5 songs on iTunes for free. If you’re a music lover with an AMEX, it’s really easy to setup and download a couple tracks for free. I know ripping music is easy off the Internet, but I always feel more respectable buying tracks legitimately on iTunes.

To get your music, simply enroll your American Express Card and pay for any 5 songs with that Card, and then AMEX automatically refund your Card account for 5 songs.

- Go to the iTunes Store (U.S. only)
- Click on “Account” and sign in
- Select “Edit Payment Information” and be sure to set the American Express Card you enrolled as your form of payment.

Happy times purchasing free tunes!

And if you work in public relations, you’ve probably been either ignored or rudely answered by countless writers.

But aren’t we meant to work together?

David Spinks is a serial entrepreneur living in NYC. He’s the co-founder of u30pro, Scribnia and now BlogDash, a new site that’s dedicated to connecting PR professionals with the appropriate and relevant bloggers they’re trying to reach.

The site, which launches today, is similar to a media database with a filter system that aims to be a huge boon to both press and public relations.

“The site will help bring bloggers more targeted opportunities,” explains Spinks, “And we will help businesses find the exact bloggers they are looking for.”

It’s free for press: bloggers fill out a simple profile, optionally link Facebook and Twitter accounts, then choose their pitch preferences, such as –email, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, “in person” or “never pitch.”

In then asks you 10 specific questions like “Are you open to receiving money for writing a blog?” and less morally concerning questions such as “Are you open to receiving invitations to cover events?” You can even write in little comments like, “Only if there’s booze.”

Once logged in, bloggers can direct companies who pitch them to BlogDash and share their past experiences of working with certain businesses. Businesses can also write up and review bloggers. In addition to signing up, blogger names will be pulled in by partnering with other databases and by manually gathering publicly available information about bloggers like through LinkedIn and Twitter.

To start, BlogDash will offer a simple $99 per month plan (per user) for public relation companies and businesses. The site will also include an email feature in the near future. Bloggers will be able to manage pitches through the site or via email. PR companies will not be allowed to mass message on the site.

BlogDash’s team includes co-founder Mark Duquette, who is based in Montreal, and a remote team of designers and developers in different countries, including a development team in Romania. The New York staff works out of New Work City, a co-working space in SoHo of independent entrepreneurs. Prior to BlogDash, Duquette ran an ad network, Hispano Click. Its sale funded BlogDash in addition to private donations from friends, family and a few small angel investors.

Why create BlogDash? Founder David Spinks is not only an entrepreneur, but a blogger in his own right, who’s hoping to put forth a product that will make the lives of both press and PR less tiresome.

BlogDash is how Spinks will monetize Scribnia, his year and half year old blogging community, an organized way for others to learn about blogger’s biases, backgrounds, and abilities. Scribnia enables readers like yourself to rate writers that they love and those you cannot stand.

If you’re a blogger would you use Scribnia or BlogDash? Tell us why or why not in the comments.

As reported by the Atlantic, The New York Times has snuck in an update to its hyperlink feature. The new feature allows users to link to and highlight individual sentences and paragraphs in its web stories. While it could be a tad complicated for an average reader, it’s a great tool for writers and bloggers who frequently link to NYTimes stories.

Here’s how it works. Take the base URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html

• To link to a specific paragraph, simply add a “#” and the number of the paragraph, e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2
• To go a step deeper and skip to a particular sentence, try e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2s2
• And where it gets really gets cool: To highlight that section, simply switch the p to an h. e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#h2s2
• To simplify things, if you hit your shift key twice on a Times story, small icons appear next to every paragraph. Click on one of them and it’ll place the paragraph linked URL up in the address bar of your browser.

Using the Times’ new hyperlinking system might mean a little more work for the linker, but I like how it adds a new layer of specificity and clarify to a linked post. And it is definitely cool to see that the hyperlink is still evolving.

“Father of RSS” Dave Winer was the first to include the feature in his posts and has done so for so some time. What the NY Times has done is take it that bit further and assuming it isn’t a nightmare for the its writers, it’s rather impressive. WordPress users, you can find a plugin here that provides similar functionality, however Winer himself has warned that the extension works but if you’re one to frequently update a post – it’s best to stay clear – the links break on update.