With all this talk of Twitter, Facebook and social media, you may think that blogging is a thing of the past. Well don’t! Blogging can in fact be a part of social media because the ability to comment on blog posts leads to engagement between the author and user.

Blogs can still drive big-time traffic to websites and an example of this has recently been illustrated by the launch of e-commerce site, Alice.com.

Alice.com sells everyday household items right from the manufacturers, rather than through middleman retailers. When it launched in June 2009, by July it had doubled its traffic to 387,000 unique visitors, according to Compete.

Guess where the majority of that traffic came from? Well, according to Compete, it came from word-of-mouth from blogs. In fact, its number one traffic source was Blogger.com. Not Twitter. Not Facebook. Not search.

Blogger accounted for 18% of Alice.com's referral traffic in July and on top of that, Compete says Alice's conversion rate jumped to 3.5% in July as well.

Of course, you have to give bloggers something to talk about to get valuable blog traffic. It's no different than getting people to talk about you on social networks or through any other form of word-of-mouth marketing. It starts with your product. Clearly Alice.com, had something that many people wanted to talk about.

As long as you can keep your bloggers (consumers) happy, your business too could enjoy a successful future.