My girlfriends at MarketingSherpa have a case study on Ice.com's blogs.
Good news:
Sparkle Like The Stars is currently getting between 10,000 and 15,000 unique monthly visitors, 31% of whom click through to the main Ice.com site. The conversion rate on clickthroughs is about 1%, which Gniwisch says is "higher than many affiliates but lower than search marketing which converts at 2%."
Difficulties:
Keeping the blogs updated using his own time and help from in-house staff was tough after the bloom wore off. One of his favorite independent bloggers agreed to take the job -- posting two-three times per week in exchange for a flat per-posting fee. This effort again had mixed results -- the blogger in question wasn't a professional freelancer (those folks cost much more) and wasn't as consistent as a professional writer might be.
Currently:
As of this date, two of the blogs have not been updated in almost a month and one of them has replaced original content with a feed of previously published posts from the other two blogs. It's late summer and not peak time for Ice.com, so we suspect the situation may change closer to the holiday season.
Other difficulties:
Gniwisch also noticed that it was a bit harder to get significant traffic and hotlinks to his blogs, without a paid ad campaign, than he had anticipated.
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