Dontcha love it when Internet marketers reveal their numbers? Well, leading technology business blog, TechCrunch, has revealed some traffic statistics based on its Google Analytics data.

According to TechCrunch, total unique visitors to all its sites (including TechCrunch, CrunchGear, CrunchBase, MobileCrunch and TechCrunchIT) were 69.5 million in 2009, up 55 percent over the 45 million unique visitors in 2008. Page views were 228 million, an increase of 90 percent over the 120 million the previous year.

AOL owned Surphace is a tool that lets bloggers and other online publishers add related content links to their articles and posts. These typically appear below or alongside an article or blog post as a list of links to other articles that relate to the given article or post.

To date, Surphace has provided large blogs and publishers – from TMZ to Engadget to The Wall Street Journal – with the ability to tailor the list and types of related content links offered by Surphace, whilst smaller sites were restricted to a standard format.

Internet marketing strategist Rich Schefren reckons he knows the secrets to writing a blog post that generates a ton of traffic. Indeed, one of his recent blog posts generated more traffic in one day than his blog got in the previous three months.

When Rich followed up with two more blog posts over the next couple of days, traffic more than doubled again, and engagement – in terms of comments – exceeded the level of engagement over the previous seven months.

So what caused the surge in traffic and engagement?

MeFeedia’s ‘State of the Vlogosphere’ research shows that the number of online videos has exploded in the last two years. In 2007 MeFeedia tracked 20,000+ vlogs; now it tracks more than 110,000.

Tracking the trends in online video consumption, MeFeedia reports that in 2009:

Recent research by Novarra, which delivers mobile internet access to two thirds of U.S. mobile phone users and over one billion globally, indicates that mobile web users are increasingly using their smartphones for shopping, microblogging and social networking.

Novarra’s recent analysis of mobile shopping in the U.S. and U.K. on Black Friday (the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday) and Cybermonday – November 27, 2009 and November 30, 2009 respectively – reveal that traffic to a sampling of mainstream U.S. retailers increased by 388 percent on Black Friday and by 160 percent on Cyber Monday.

Meanwhile, Novarra found a 1,068 percent increase in micro-blogging click-throughs during the first three quarters of 2009 and a 190 percent increase in mobile social networking site page views.

According to PostRank, the level of social media conversations and discussions regarding the 1,000 ‘most engaging’ blog and news feeds has grown 30 percent year over year since 2007.

According to PostRank, not only are more people participating in social media, but the “‘share, and like this’ phenomenon sweeping through Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social hubs, are all facilitating this trend”.

A few days ago the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced that it had finalized its revisions to the FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – the FTC’s guidelines on how advertisers should keep endorsements and testimonial ads compliant with the FTC Act.

We’ve previously discussed the FTC’s proposed changes to the Guides (last updated in 1980), but these latest revisions include additional changes not included in the proposed revisions released in November 2008.

The changes affect EVERYONE involved in publishing endorsements, advertisements and testimonials – web publishers, advertisers, email marketers, bloggers, social networkers, merchants, affiliates – including Internet marketers located outside the U.S. who market TO people within the U.S.

While the media – and, in particular the Internet marketing media – is ablaze with talk of how to get traffic from Twitter and Facebook, Web Pro News’ Chris Crum reminds us to remember the power of the humble blog.

Referring to a website called Alice.com, Chris Crum says that, according to Compete, the site gets 387,000 unique visitors, 18 percent of which comes from Blogger.com

BloggersBase positions itself as an online magazine that enables multiple bloggers to contribute to specific topics. What’s more, it’s looking for new bloggers to join, promising a competition to entice the best bloggers, as well as links to contributors’ sites.

Basically, BloggersBase gives bloggers the ability to publish their writing on the site with full attribution and no content or link restriction.

A ‘manifesto’ written by 15 German bloggers has just been translated into English and aims to address traditional journalists’ criticisms/concerns about online journalism. Think of it as a bit of a ‘So there!’ to all old-school journalists (to put it nicely).

Click here to read the 17 declarations of the Internet Manifesto – they are thought provoking at the very least.