Overall, it’s been a lovely cruise for MyStarCollectorCar during the past 10 years and we learned plenty along the way.
One of the lessons that comes to mind is the race has been a marathon and not a sprint for us at MSCC.
We were not exactly an overnight sensation because MyStarCollectorCar was no threat to go viral right from the day we fired up our website/e-zine on April 2, 2009. It takes time for most brand new websites to build momentum and our success still requires a daily injection of a new article to move forward in the cyber jungle.
I mentioned in Part 1 that we started MyStarCollectorCar as a static monthly media platform during the first 2 months because we decided to mirror the monthly print media game plan. This was not a brilliant plan and held us back from return traffic so we added a new article every day to move up the Google food chain.
It took nearly two years for MyStarCollectorCar to reach 1 million views and now we can blow way past that 1 Million (and more) number every month-plus we still have plenty of pedal left in this department. We have set the bar higher every year when it comes to site traffic and 2019 will obliterate our 2018 traffic because our first three months of this year are all new records.
As mentioned, we had to learn we were in a marathon and not a sprint when it came to site traffic. One of the major changes occurred in August, 2015 when we finally got rid of our original MyStarCollectorCar platform and built a new WordPress platform based upon the same basic format as every major online journal in the world.
The photos were bigger and we also added a printable feature so proud owners can print their vehicle articles right off our site. I recall an incident from that month when a car guy approached me and said how much he liked our site-except for the smallish pictures in the articles.
I was happy to tell him that he would see a major change if he went to our site later in the day because that particular Saturday was the first day of our new reader-friendly WordPress website. It was also the first day I began to describe MyStarCollectorCar as an e-zine because it was now formatted just like most popular e-zines of the 21st century.
We have always gone to car shows over the decades and enjoyed every minute of our time at these events, even the rainy ones, long before we fired up MyStarCollectorCar. We have arrived at car shows armed with a camera and writing pad for the past 10 years but it still feels like play–and not work–to attend them.
The main reasons are the people and cool vehicles that are a fundamental part of every show. We have attended everything from small shows with a handful of vintage rides to large shows with thousands of retro rides and have left with the same very positive experience from all of them.
That is the nature of the beast when it comes to car shows because you meet great people and get blown away by their stories about their beloved vehicles.
I want to close Part 3 of this article before it morphs into Part 4. There are so many highlights to the past 10 years that I would be unable to list all of them in 100 parts so I will just say thanks to all of our loyal readers and ad clients who helped MyStarCollectorCar become an online force in the vintage vehicle hobby.
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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