• by August 25, 2008

Users were spending just four minutes each on this makeup brand's Web site - until it launched Ask Achelle, a beauty blog about products (including those outside the e.l.f. line), fashion, pop culture and more. Time spent more than tripled to 13 minutes. Individual posts can rack up hundreds of comments, with a total of up to 1,000 a week. The site already had respectable traffic, but now it draws 700,000 unique visitors a month and 30 million page views. About 1.6 million people have signed up for the newsletter.