Car Throttle News - July 2009

It's fair to say that Car Throttle has been through a significant amount of change since we officially launched back in December 2008. At that point in time, we only had James on board as our sole author, there were no road tests, certainly no advertisers willing to spend their marketing dollars with us, and only a small flow of irregular traffic helping to sustain my ego.

In truth, the whole site was intended as an experiment; to see whether a newcomer to the auto-journalism field could break into the ranks of the top car websites and blogs already established on the net, and to engage in healthy competition in the process and to build a real core of dedicated followers. I think that whilst we've only been alive for 6 months, we've pretty much achieved that and yet, it feels as if there is a mountain looming in the distance, ready for the next big-shot website to scale it and conquer.

I've always been a big proponent for transparency. It's something that I practise with my authors in sharing with them vital statistics that form the centre of Car Throttle every month, and now I feel that it's time to share those numbers with my community. Whilst all is available to see on our Advertise page, I want to point out a few awesome stats that highlight the journey we've made:

• 35,000 visitors since January
• Built-up Archives of over 500 posts
• Comment:Post Ratio = 1.2 (Great considering amount of posts we put out)
• 2-5 posts turned out by our team everyday

Those are only a few snippets from our scrapbook story, but hopefully it will be a story which I will start to tell monthly in order to document our successes and hopefully to provide an insight into the running of an automotive journal and blog.

Last month, we were also very lucky to welcome our first sponsors; thanks very much to AmericanMuscle.com and CorvetteGuys.com for starting campaigns with CarThrottle - we're sure that the sites are going to make their investment back many times over.

What's New for July?

At this very moment we have a designer working for us getting ready to turn-out 5 very high-quality and custom wallpapers that will be exclusive to Car Throttle for July. This is really exciting stuff and all you have to do to be able to download them to your desktop is be a part of our mailing list. You can signup by entering your email address at the top right of the right-hand sidebar - don't worry, we'll never spam you or give out your address to any 3rd party.

Expect to see high resolution, natural images of Lamborghini's new Murcielago LP670-4 SV, Mercedes Benz's SL65 AMG Black and Ferrari's 599GTB but to name a few of the supercars we have on offer.

Also coming your way this summer will be the exciting introduction of video to Car Throttle. At the moment, we don't have the resources to be able to shoot high-quality video but this is something we're working on in order to bring us up to the level of the other top-notch automotive journalism sites on the web. We'll also be getting our hands on more automotive beauties in order to give you road tests and reviews that we'll write up to the site.

We Need Your Feedback

Part of owning a website is listening to the community and readers and seeing if there's a niche or void that needs to be filled. That's why we want you to contribute with your own ideas / pieces of constructive criticism that will help us to improve here at Car Throttle. Just leave us a comment below and we'll be sure to check it out and let you know what we think.

Advertising Prices On The Rise

As we start to become more popular and push the boundaries of pageviews, inevitably we will have to increase prices of our image advert spots. At the moment, they're currently priced at only $50 per month, which in comparison to other car blogs is a complete steal. However bear in mind that this price of $50 will be increased in the next few weeks. To take advantage thus of the current price, please check out our Advertising page where you can see details of how to get your company featured on Car Throttle.

So that's our journey so far; if you've been following our progress it would be great to hear from you in the Comments below and I'll try and take the time out to respond to each one of you individually as without you, we wouldn't be where we are today!