We fired up 5 years ago today at MyStarCollectorCar.com and, in the finest tradition of a Jimmy Buffett song, it’s been a lovely cruise.
The idea of our own online collector car website/e-zine was on the back-burner for several years prior to our April 3, 2009 launch until we found the right guy to build our site.
Clearly, IT guys are different cats, but many years in the bar business dealing with entertainers had already prepared us for offbeat characters.
One guy hijacked our original working title (Average Joe), while another guy (an ex-musician by the way) seemed to fit the bill for us because he was roughly our age.
However, we ended up in a major political debate instead of a process to build our website. Finally we stopped the dead-end approach of bad referrals from other people and just picked a guy out of the Yellow Pages.
There is no blueprint that teaches two relative cyber world newcomers how to grow a website from scratch and into a real force on the ‘Net.
Sure you can get a nitrous boost from a costly Google AdSense program where you pay large sums of dough to get to the top of page one for a brief shining moment similar to a very short fireworks program: over fast and quickly forgotten.
We chose the smart way to build our online presence-which is one brick at a time-if the brick is a car club or show where we took the time to meet the car guys on their home turf. You build your online readership through hard work; that was the first new trick a couple of old dogs like us learned over the last five years.
We have steered into the ditch a few times over the years, including some rookie mistakes where we drifted away from the automotive topic into general topics about the world at large.
Fortunately for us, Robert Farago, the outspoken founder of The Truth About Cars (one of the biggest automotive websites on the planet and one for which we contribute articles) steered us back onto the road.
Robert said; “do NOT stray away from the car angle just to chase hits. Build your site on automotive topics and you will get the traffic”. He used the capital letters on “not” in his email and Robert was right in a big way.
Robert has since moved on to build one of the world’s largest gun websites (The Truth About Guns) and he also sticks to his topic on that site.
We have refined our approach to MSCC over the years and now include more photos in our pieces.
We try to stay within 500-600 words in our articles because that number seems to be the sweet spot for reader interest. Longer articles are a little risky in a new world where people want information in bite-sized pieces instead of giant chunks.
We have built our photo portfolio to well past 120,000 photos and will continue to build that number because you can never have too much of a good thing when it comes to shots of old rides.
We will continue to grow our name at MyStarCollectorcar.com. It turns out we were a custom fit to build a site about the old car hobby because these beauties never get old for us-they just get better.
Plus we really want to tell their story.
Jim Sutherland
