Corporate branding is the process of establishing a name and image for your business. It is something, which should be done by every organization, and establishes a name for your product or service.

While you can have a successful business without the use of corporate branding, it is much harder to remain in the minds of customers when you do not have a brand or logo for them to associate your business with. Corporate branding begins with the designing of a relevant logo, website, business cards, letterheads, and any other promotional materials that you might need.

One of the biggest features that Blogger.com had over other free blogging sites is the ability to publish files to a website via FTP. This allowed site owners to have a blog in a directory on their site without having to install and maintain software on their web server.

Unfortunately, on March 26th, Blogger.com is shutting down their FTP functionality.

Blogger claims that only .5% of their users use this feature and that it’s a big strain on their engineering staff to keep it working like it should. So they are shutting it down.

So you want to develop a Web video campaign to put on your website and add to YouTube and all the other Web video directories. Maybe you even want to create a new video micro site to promote that hot new product or service you’re about to launch. You want it done right, professional, slick, and you want it to be effective. Well of course you do.

Although email newsletters are one of the oldest forms of marketing, they are still effective. As seen below, popular blogger Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net, says this about utilizing email, “…email is really the way that most people, young and old from different generations [and] different backgrounds, access information on the Web.”

He goes on to explain how email is now one of his most effective forms of marketing. If you want to have an effective email program like Rowse, you have to provide good, quality content in your newsletter. Many times, email newsletter efforts are mistaken for spam since some companies use newsletters to only talk about themselves.

What is DMOZ?

Dmoz is a human edited directory that has been running since 1998. It was created as a cooperative environment that would allow volunteer editors to keep up with the internet explosion. Way back, Yahoo used to be a directory - not a search engine - and Dmoz was an (eventually bigger) alternative to this. The only difference of course is that we are now well into the Google era of information at your fingertips. Dmoz on the other hand, is pretty much where it started.

Refusing to sit still long enough for anyone to catch up, Google has rolled out another Labs experiment to the public. Google Social Search Beta launched last October, hard on the heels of Personalized Search. But this week, Google graduated Social Search out of Labs and into the public sphere.

What Is Google Social Search?

As we become increasingly connected online, we start to build around ourselves a community of people that we have regular contact with and websites where we spend much of our time. This is called our social network. Now Google has worked out a way to measure and leverage these individual social networks so they influence the search results we see. Those results therefore become more relevant to us and more influential over time.

In the Small Business Opinion Poll from EMPLOYERS, small business decision-makers indicate that it will require over 12 months for their businesses to return to pre-recession levels, in terms of annual sales. In addition, 41% say it will be more than 10 months before they start hiring.

“Even as key economic indicators such as consumer spending and new home sales are beginning to show signs of recovery, EMPLOYERS’ latest Small Business Opinion Poll reveals small business decision-makers are still apprehensive about 2010,” the firm says. “And as credit markets remain tight, 40 percent of small business decision-makers reported the recession negatively impacted their access to credit.”

Don’t exactly know what it is about starting a new year of marketing online, but I always stop and take a hard look at all my marketing tactics and methods. Article marketing is always at the top of my list, mainly because it is and has always been the cornerstone of everything I do on the web.

By cornerstone I mean it is the key to basically all of my online earnings. Without article marketing I wouldn’t be a full-time online marketer - it’s as simple as that. No articles, no income.

We all make New Year’s resolutions - some are personal, some are business or professional in nature. Even if we don’t actually make New Year’s resolutions, we engage in formal and informal “planning” as we look ahead to the new year.

If you operate a website, you’re probably aware that your website operations are now highly regulated. And the pace of legal regulations continues to accelerate.

Which means that you face an increasing risk of legal liability.

So, it’s a good idea to give your website a legal check-up and to update your site before it’s too late.

It seems like just about every online thing is becoming “social” these days; Google Reader tries to recommend users’ lists to each other, blogs utilize Facebook Connect, and CNN.com even quotes Twitter users. Which sort of raises the question of whether social networking features could make system administrators’ lives easier.

Online forums have long proven immensely useful; there’s all sorts of information about cars, guns, and, well, everything floating around out there. Twitter and Facebook can be handy in a similar fashion while allowing people to provide even more immediate responses.