Amanda Webb, founder of Feelgood Organic Hampers had a problem when her website first went live four years ago. For some reason Google wasn't indexing it. So she tried to discover ways to get people to visit her site without having to search.

She had an extensive mailing list built up during the business planning stage, and she found her friends were very good at passing on mail outs to their friends.

Next she joined a few internet forums, dipping her toe in the water she found several that dealt with food and green issues. The one that drove most traffic to her site and the one that was most useful was www.irishbusinesswomen.com an online community that supports Irish Business. It has been a longstanding relationship and many of the people she met on-line there have become firm 'real life' friends.

Luckily it wasn't long before her SEO issues were addressed and her site was finally listing on Google and other search engines, but Amanda had learned a lesson and was determined to continue to use other channels to drive traffic to her site.

The next step was to start a blog, which again saw an increase in traffic to her site. Writing about organic food, recipes, gardening, eco and green issues meant that the hits she was getting were more qualified. Her target customer had an interest in the blog and was more likely to click through, bookmark and buy.

Two years on from starting the blog and social media marketing was exploding. Amanda had opened a personal Facebook account to keep in touch with friends in the UK. As she was putting together her Christmas range last year she began to post on Facebook about what she was doing and was surprised at the reaction that she got from friends that she would meet socially who had been following her updates. Links to her blog posted on her personal Facebook account were also generating lots of traffic and it was at this point she decided to start a business page for Feelgood Organic Hampers.

She soon found that those same friends that had been so generous with passing on her email when she first started the business were now becoming fans and sharing her page and their comments with their friends.

It was too close to Christmas to really see the effect that the new page would have but within a few days of launching the new product range to her Facebook fans she had already made her first sale directly through the page.

Over the last year Amanda has been learning how to make the best of the Facebook page. It is her belief that email marketing is slowly dying, she still sees a return on investment on her mailing list but believes her Facebook fans are her new mailing list, they are customers and potential customers that she has the opportunity to engage with every day. It is also very satisfying to see the hits come to the website and blog from Facebook.

In February, coming quite late to the phenomenon, Amanda joined Twitter, again she saw an instant increase of traffic to her website. The benefit of Twitter as she sees it is that it has helped expand her network, making new business contacts that were geographically too distant to have met otherwise. Meeting new people has meant she has been able to form new alliances and make sales.

Using these internet social media marketing tools and others such as Linkedin and PRzone.ie has been a massive influence on the success of Feelgood Organic Hampers and Amanda found herself advising and assisting others in setting up their own social networking pages. It seemed a natural progression to offer these services as a solution to other businesses and that is how Spiderworking.com was born.