A website that sells ordinary household products has shown how blogging can be good for business. Alice.com launched in June and by July had doubled its traffic to 387,000 unique visitors – and apparently most of this traffic came from word-of-mouth blogs.

While other social media networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, no doubt also contributed, it was blogger.com that was found to be the biggest traffic driver. Blogger accounted for 18% of Alice.com’s referral traffic in July, and that’s before other blogging sites were taken into account.

Of course, to get valuable blog traffic you need to give bloggers something to talk about, and obviously Alice.com – an American site that sells items such as toothpaste, nappies and washing powder straight from the manufacturers – has something that many people find worth talking about.

However, it’s worth remembering that Alice.com will need to keep consumers happy. It would be just as easy for the site to become unpopular if dissatisfied consumers started blogging negative reactions.

Still, this site does go to show the power of blogging as an e-commerce business driver.

More and more searching is now taking place in real-time. These types of searches are based on time/date and the user’s query.

This kind of search is far more basic than Google, for example, as you’re not ranked by relevancy. Really, this type of search is more viral than anything else but it is a useful way to get your articles/content/blogs found “right now”.

Here are a few tips to get your content found in real-time searches.

Keywords: The most important place for keywords is in your titles and updates. If you’re writing an article you should think about what people are going to include in their updates if they share it on a social network, for example Facebook or Twitter.

If the right keywords are in the title, then those keywords are also more likely to appear in follow-up tweets. And if someone searches for the keywords, they will be more likely to find your content in a real-time search.

Make it up-to-date: Write about current events so that any searches to do with that topic, provided the right keywords are used, will come up in the results.

Make pals:  The more followers you have on Twitter or the more readers of your blogs the more likely it is that people will share your content. The more people sharing your content, the more chances you have of your content making it into real-time searches.

Get chatting: A great tip is to start new chats or conversations that people will be interested in. You’ll have more chats, more tweets and more impressions on real-time searches.

So one minute it’s being reported that Twittering is one of the most important social media marketing tools - and the next we’re told that almost half of the Twittering is “babble”.

A new study by market research firm Pear Analytics of Twitter has found that 40% of the messages sent via the service are “pointless babble”.

Almost as prevalent as the babble were “conversational” tweets that used the service as a surrogate instant messaging system.

In fact, the study revealed that only 8.7% of messages could be said to have “value” in passing on news or information of interest.

So it seems that if you are planning to employ someone to do your social media networking you’ll need to make sure that their Twitters are relevant and useful to your particular business.

If you’re looking for more search engine power then it seems that vouchers could be the way forward.

A new report from Hitwise indicates that UK searches for terms including the word “voucher” have risen almost 50% in the last year. (The study took into account 4,500 terms, which is no small number.)

A spokesman said: “UK Internet searches for generic terms such as ‘voucher’ or ‘discount vouchers’ have decreased or remained flat.  The growth in voucher searches has come from people searching for ever more specific deals and discounts for particular products or retailers.”

A new survey into the effects of social media marketing reveals that companies with the “greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement” benefited from revenue rises of 18% over the last year, while those that least engaged dropped 6% on average.

The ENGAGEMENTdb study by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group is the first of its kind to look at how engagement with consumers through social media correlates with financial performance.

Social media channels taken into consideration for the study were Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Wikis and discussion forums.

The brands considered were the 100 most valuable ones as identified by the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking, including the top 10:
1. Starbucks
2. Dell
3. eBay
4. Google
5. Microsoft
6. Thomson Reuters
7. Nike
8. Amazon
9. SAP
10. Yahoo!/Intel (joint)

According to the study results, the companies that scored well have dedicated teams that are active in various social media channels.

A spokesman for Wetpaint is reported as saying:  “The closer any company is to its customers, the better. It’s hard to argue with the ability for social media to create such proximity. In this day and age, companies should feel much more comfortable investing in social media. The correlation to results is so clear.”

So does this mean that every company should have at least one person dedicated to engaging with customers via social media? What are your thoughts?

The internet has changed the way that businesses advertise. Now a survey has revealed that the majority (92%) of advertisers are using Internet advertising in their media campaigns followed by print advertising at 88%.

The LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Poll survey also found that half of those questioned use radio advertising (46%), TV advertising (46%) and mobile advertising (39%).

The survey showed that there has been a rise in usage of internet advertising compared to a year ago. Three-quarters of those who use Internet advertising (74%) do so more often, while 69% of those who use mobile advertising are using it more often compared to a year ago. The largest drop is with print advertising as half (49%) of those who use it are using it less often compared to a year ago while 41% are using it the same amount.

So it’s clear where business feels it should be going with advertising but at the same time the report revealed that internet users find many aspects of online advertising “very annoying”.

The majority (80%) say they find ads that expand on the page and cover the content “ frustrating” while 79% are “very frustrated” by the adverts with a close or skip button that they can’t find.

Other annoyances include Internet ads that automatically pop up, ads that open when the cursor happens to hang over them and animated ads.