Charl Norman is a web entrepreneur behind local social networks Blueworld and Zoopedup, he also owns a network of leading blogs including Car Blog and Bandwidth Blog, writes for tech and auto publications such as Leadership mag, guest lectures at UCT/CPUT and does the occasional public speaking event. More >
I just uploaded my Springleap video interview onto Blueworld. Eric Edelstein ‘surprised’ me at our Blueworld offices in Cape Town. I gave a short tour of our offices, introduced the brains behind Blueworld and answered some of Eric’s questions on how I won the competition.
Popularity: 20% [?]
It’s been a crazy year. I’ve managed to launch a few projects with exciting partners and learnt a lot about the web, getting investment and startup life. Each year I start off by thinking “this is gonna be a big year”.. Finally, 2007 has been huge for me and I look forward to the exciting opportunities that lie ahead in 2008.
Here are some of the stuff myself and my partners have been involved in the past year -
My Blogging network
My network of blogs have grown its readership considerably over the past year – I started Car Blog last year and managed to squeeze in a redesign with Adii just before year end. Car Blog has done great over the past months growing to a 1000+ uniques a day. In the beginning of the year I launched Bandwidth Blog which has also done great year end. Some of the posts I wrote on Bandwidth received some good traction – One made it to the Digg homepage and the other was published in print.
CarBlog’s growth from Jan-Nov 07
Finally, I bought two blogs from Adii, SA Rugby Blog and Daily Glamour, then revamped both with a new look and got writers for each. Both blogs are growing steadily and I look forward to managing them in 2008. My adsense earnings, mainly derived from my blogs, have also grown exponentially over the past months.
Blueworld Communities
In January this year I joined a company called Blueworld Communities (Pty) Ltd. which owned one website – a night club photography service called Blueworld. In Feb 07 we sold a big stake in the business to two Jozi based businesses, Teljoy and The Creative Counsel. They sat on the board and funded the business 100% allowing us to focus on building our technology. We managed to relaunch Blueworld as a open social network featuring a blog platform, user profiles, video and photo sharing.
During the year we aligned our strategy to create niche targeted audience social networks and launched Zoopedup and GayPeers. With GayPeers we teamed up with a gay ad agency (Pink advertising) and gay magazine (Wrapped mag) to help promote and monetize the network. All three social networks are growing very well and I have a huge announcement to make about our company in the coming days.
Popularity: 16% [?]
I published a blog post yesterday on BandwidthBlog aimed at generating traffic from social bookmarking site’s like Digg and Delicious. I wanted to tap into the ‘list link bait’ success so I combined the Digg communities love of photos with the list blog post concept and a popular buzz word at the moment -web 2.0- the result – The offices of today’s leading internet companies
I planned to submit the post around 9pm +2GMT when the Americans started waking up – by then Digg would be serving peak traffic and I would’ve managed to get 30-40 votes from my Digg friends which would lead to the post appearing in the “hot upcoming” area.
Unfortunately, I made a mistake by submitting the post to Muti and my Twitter followers which led to blogger, Paul Jacobson, picking up on my post and submitting it to Digg. This wasn’t a issue as the article still made it to the Digg homepage. But initially I was pissed as I had a top 10 Digg user linedup to submit the article which would lead to Diggs in the beginning.
Around mid night +2 GMT the post reached the front page of Digg and within two minutes about 8000 people navigated to bandwidthblog – this was very resource intensive and eventually took my server offline for two hours. I tried prepping for the “digg effect” but to no avail -
Digg effect is “the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic.”
Next time I will be ready after reading these resources -
Here is some ‘digg effect’ tips and info
ReadWriteWeb – Digg effect
Surviving the digg effect | creativebits
Wikipedia entry
High traffic tips for WordPress
How to prep for the Digg effect
Here is some ‘link bait’ and link building tips
From the Filthy Linking Rich to the Art of Link Bait | Threadwatch.org
Link Building for New Blogs
SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting by Matt Cutts
Making Link Bait Work For You | WebProNews
5 Link Baiting Methods – Blog Tips by Tihomir – Make Money Blogging
Screen shot of my post as it hit the Digg homepage
The post on my delicious – saved my 19 people so far
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My brother and I formed a company called Shizzle promotions last year named after the cocktail bar (Sh!Zzle) we ran from October 06 to May 07. We use the company to promote rock shows and psytrance parties.
On the 21st of June were hosting another event at Townsquare Fusion Bar in Somerset West. (outside Cape Town) Check out the party discussion on Bomelakiesie here.
If your in the area come by if not just enjoys Foxinni’s flyer art work. (;
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Over the past few months I’ve been working hard with Adii improving my network of blog’s overall quality. Adding cool plugins, removing some third party services that slow down loading times, driving traffic and improving the blogs design. Basement Guru was one of the blogs under the knife and received a major overhaul and now features a three column K2 solution.
I have also completed a blog purchase which I’m very excited about, The Cool Crowd is now officially in my stable of blogs. I bought the blog from Adii and have already scouted a writer for it. The blog is a little out dated so it’s loosing traffic fast but we will resurrect this with some fresh posts and cross blog network advertising.
We also introduced a new way to promote the network of blogs – In the past each blog’s rss feed used to display the latest five posts on every blog in the network. The contextual advertising experiment didn’t work and resulted in little click throughs. So now we have gone the themed ad block route which will hopefully grab the visitors attention.
Here’s an example of the ad blocks on Bandwidth Blog advertising Daily Glamour, Sa Rugby, Basement Guru and Monkeys Fist.
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Over the past year, Facebook saw an 89% increase in unique visitors to the site at 26,649,000 uniques, with a 143% increase in page views at 15.8 billion. The site’s stickiness has increased and then tapered off at about 190 minutes per average user. The site has also seen a demographic shift toward teens and older internet users as Facebook moves out of the college crowd.
Check how the older crowd is dominating Facebook.
[Via: TC]
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My older brother Andrew’s latest venture is a classy restaurant on the tip of Bikini beach, Gordon’s bay. Naturally, my web design company was commission to take care of the restaurant’s website and logo design.
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So I decided to finally get my personal blog going again. I used to be on Blogspot when I discovered blogging some time back but lost interest in the project as I had too many others to attend to.
This blog will launch sometime this week but I thought I would put something up as I’ve noticed the “who’s who” of local internet has popped in to see what’s up. Vinny, Mark, Vince, Tyler and Justin.. (Mybloglog)
Here I will be reviewing web 2.0 startups and post continues updates on the progress of my own companies. You will also be able to find out a little more about me, view press I have received for my work and check out some of my freelance journalism.
Give me a few days to rustle up some quality posts and check back..in the mean time shoot on over to some of my sites listed top right.
Nuff said…
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Photos from my trip to Silicon Valley for the MIH Tech conference.
I appeared on channel MK TV's new hip hop and car show WOELAG. They interviewed me on our automotive social network Zoopedup.
I have been nominated for ICT Young Entrepreneur of Africa 2008. Now to even be nominated is a great honour for me seeing as last years winner of the award is internationally renowned Vinny Lingham.
