Everybody out there is into marketing, even if you don’t know it yet.

For example, lets take the grandmother who has started up her own website about professional wrestling.  Now, she may not be selling any items on that website – but she still has a product to sell.  She wants more people to come and see her thoughts on the most recent wrestling pay per views, or her wallpaper she created because she just loves Randy Orton.  She can use the same marketing strategies that the big business out there use to get more people to check out her proverbial goods.

People from all walks of life come to the internet to share the things they love, or talk about the things they feel passionate about. Thinking about selling as an action that happens between a retailor and customer is dated.  I sell my own good each and every day when you come in and check out the articles I have written here.  While no cash has exchanged hands, I still have found a reason to keep your interest this far – to learn more about what it is I am talking about. 

Don’t allow yourself to get hung up on definitions that have past their prime.  Everybody is a marketer.  Everybody has something to sell.

For those people out there who have read through these posts this month, thinking, "this is lame – I don’t have anything to sell", I want you to compare yourself to the Granny above and see if you can find any similarities in your own life.  Marketing is much more than finding ways to sell people this, that or the other.  It is the art of making good things popular. 

Learn to master the world of Google Analytics with these terrific posts.

Adding Notes to Google Analytics Timeline

Did you know that in Google Analytics, you can easily make annotations for big events happening to your website?  I am going to share with you the very simple way I made note of all my recent website designs in just a few steps. 

Find Your Site’s Best Keywords in Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers a lot of good information, but not everybody knows how to read it.  Today, I will show you how to compare your best performing keywords that bring people into your web site and compare it to the average traffic of your website.

Free Google Analytics Training from Google

While checking out what it takes to become an authorized Google Analytics consultant, I stumbled across a series of videos online that anybody can use to get to know their own Google Analytics account a little better. 

Site Usage in Google Analytics

I have been using Google Analytics since its debut, and love it as a stats tool.  I probably use it more than I have any tools built into a hosting account.  Some people might be overwhelmed by some of the terms though, so to break it down I thought I would take a look at the first thing you see, the Site Usage section.

What to do When You Find Yourself Getting Popular

Looks like my post-Firefox 3 bump in stats is starting to come to an end for Firefox Facts.   While the madness was going on (one post got up to 80+ comments!) I came up with a few tactics to try to milk the proverbial press cow as long as I could.

Popular Posts via Google Analytics

How does one pull up the most popular links on their web site or blog using Google Analytics? This one took me a little while to figure out, but finally found the right way and the quickest steps on how to get this done. I love Google Analytics more so than some of the other web site statistic scripts out there.

Is there anything else about Google Analytics that drives you batty? Leave a comment and let me know. I will try to answer your questions or give you more detail in a future post.

Twitter’s search tools might be nice, however it does not really leave me wanting more.  Rather than it, I have turned towards Topsy.  If you want to know what other people are tweeting about, sharing with friend or anything else this search engine is the best of the best. 

Rather than indexing documents and content, Topsy does things differently.  It instead shows you the who, what, when, where and how when it comes to search terms out there.

You can easily sort search results by month, week, day, hour or choose to show them all.  You see the top authors on Twitter about that topic, the results themselves and how often they have been shared around.  The more something has been tweeted about, the higher rankings it gets.  You can also pull up results by user – here is my own Topsy page as an example:  http://topsy.com/twitter/mitchkeeler

Overall, I would say Topsy does Twitter search right.  Rather than shifting through junk, you get the best real-time results.  Give them a shot over at Topsy.com.

Here are some of the Web’s best tools for checking online popularity.

• PRSearch.net Popularity Tools
• Webconfs.com – Backlink and Anchor Text Analyzer
• Uptime Bot
• Webmaster Toolkit’s Link Appeal
• LinkVendor.com’s Link Popularity and Site Analysis Tool
• MarketLeap.com Link Popularity Checker
• Link Popularity Tool from Iconinteractive
• Webmaster Toolkit’s Link Popularity Checker

Have another search engine optimization popularity checker to add to the list?  Drop in a comment and share with the group!

To check out every single post, be sure to check out the archives (all of them are on one single page!)  It goes all the way back to an article that no longer exists anymore.  Fun times, indeed.  If you want to go WAY back in time – check out how things looked back in 2005!

Not old enough?  Well happened to find a version from back in 2004 (the year the Mitchelaneous fun started here):

Want to help celebrate?  Tell your friends, family and your neighbor’s dog they should be subscribing!  Need some help?

Subscribe in a Reader! | Subscribe to Mitchelaneous by E-mail

You can also just copy and paste this into your feed reader of choice too:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mitchelaneous

Thanks for following me for the past 4+ years!  You are the awesome 600+ that keep me going day after day and I REALLY do appreciate it.

You have to get out there and proverbially pimp your goods.

Let people know at least a few places where they can follow you or be your friend, and they are given a few more “gateways” to get back to your blog and content.  Think of it this way, which am I more likely to be friends with:

• The guy who’s web site I never knew about because he doesn’t push it out in the real world
• The guy who is trying his best to make friends, and inform the public he’s out there and ready for his close up

I’m not afraid to mention anybody who wishes to can add me as a friend on:

Twitter | Facebook | Plurk | MySpace | Pownce | LinkedIn | Flickr

Don’t be afraid to promote your favorite social web site profiles.  By not doing so, you are missing a good chance not only to make a few friends but get some free press for your own web site.  Don’t be a wall flower, be that comfy chair everybody likes to sit on. 

Looks like my post-Firefox 3 bump in stats is starting to come to an end for Firefox Facts.   While the madness was going on (one post got up to 80+ comments!) I came up with a few tactics to try to milk the proverbial press cow as long as I could.

Watch where people are coming in.  Via Google Analytics I was able to check out in nearly real time where people were coming in via search, blogs and other places and edit my content to meet the needs of the people. 

Keep an eye on search phrases and the results they get.  For example, if a lot of people were coming in for the phrase “firefox 3 themes” and the story they were getting was about the themes but didn’t give them much selection, I made sure I added a link to a post like this one that gave some new Firefox 3 ready themes for them to try.

Just some handy advice you might keep in mind for yourself next time you see your own web site going through a popularity surge.

Above you can see the results of the Mitchelaneous RSS subscription feed numbers in comparison with my podcast, the Web Hosting Show.  You can also drag over a specific time frame to zoom in on the results.   Now lets see what happens when you compare the Web Hosting Show with The WHIR’s main daily news feed:

The Web Hosting Show is hanging in there – was actually surprised how close we were.  Is this the part where I am suppose to beg you to go subscribe to the Web Hosting Show’s RSS feed so we can beat them?  Ok, well you can – but it is all in good fun.  As you can see, FeedCompare.com can be a lot of fun.

Once you get Link Popularity Check installed, this is the type of readout they deliver to you:

The positive of this program is it gives you a nice visual representation of where you stand out there with some of your competitors. It searches Google, HotBot, AllTheWeb and MSN search. The downside is that you have to put up with some advertisements and be careful not to give your e-mail address to their “newsletter”. As you can see a lot of information there to comb through to find out what is working and what you might need to work on.

The main problem we suffer is that a lot of folks only focus on following the big voices Online. If somebody like Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose or Leo Laporte don’t mention it, use it, or give it a thumbs up you are dead to a lot of the world. That is not their fault, they are just folks Online as well that just happened to get lucky and gain a real voice out there in the geeky world we live in.

Firefox Facts gain most of its popularity because Chris Pirillo really helped inspire and lead me into the entire project from day one. So I have gotten a perk out of this type of popular voices driving the popular vote.

I’ve recently been actually spending money in promoting the Web Hosting Show in new audiences and I have to say it has been paying off a little ‘bit. Most of my projects are done as a hobby though – so not sure if I can count myself.

I do feel sorry for folks out there trying to build a business from the ground up because if your not on the A-list or know somebody on the A-list it is almost impossible to “make it”.