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First of please introduce yourself and your site to our readers?
We are a mother-daughter duo, more informally known as Jenn and Patti. One of us is 17, while the other one of us chooses to have her age remain a mystery.
These sites are our idea and our creative way of trying to raise money to help victims of cancer, as well as victims of natural disasters, such as Katrina. These sites are not just here so we can get money to put towards whatever we want; these sites are here so that we can help others and, hopefully, raise money to help me, Jenni, pay for my college tuition and help my parents save our home. Our personal goal is to donate $200,000.00 to The American Cancer Society and to Katrina relief.
Having gone through the sudden death of my grandfather, as well as becoming a victim of foreclosure, my family and I feel that by donating some of the money that we earn here is not only a good deed, but also something that, we feel, is expected of ourselves. We honestly want to do anything we can to help those people who have or are going through hard times. Hands down, no questions asked.
Most people have been inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage, where did you get your inspiration from?
Well, my Mom started a couple of websites awhile ago; one is technology-based and the other is all about books. My mom is writing a cookbook, a children's storybook, and a horror novel. (She loves horror stories.) A few months ago, my Dad and my Mom thought about putting up a website for advertising space for reviews but I can honestly say, though, that we did get our final inspiration from the Million Dollar Homepage. We did, however, put a little spin on things that were influenced by our own daily lives.
The idea of the three websites came out of really wanting to help others and also wanting to acknowledge the people that have helped or are helping other people; hence the names "The Road to a Home", "The Road to Help", and "The Road to School". Since I, Jenni, am in high school and, hopefully, on my way to college, "The Road to School" is really for acknowledging students of any age that are helping others.
What software do you use to run your pixel page and why did you choose it?
We use PHP to run the three websites. I, Patti, felt that PHP was the most viable option over Javascript due to some of the security issues. It took me about a month to code these three sites - I was just learning PHP. When it came time to coding the contact form and newsletter subscription form, well, I just had to ask for help. I found Russell Robinson, one of the founders of www.tectite.com, to really be an invaluable resource and help. Without his FormMail php script and his help, I'd still be coding away.
What makes your site different or special, what angle have you taken for your Pixel page?
Most importantly, advertising on our websites helps others who are in need. We're not here to just give back to the community; we're here because we really want to help. Having "been there", we understand the importance of obtaining help, being provided with help, and how difficult that can be.
We also wanted to provide our customers with options and flexibility:
Our customers can choose to advertise their logo on 1 site, 2 sites, or all 3 sites. We've implemented a discount plan so that if a customer chooses 2 sites a 15% discount is applied. If a customer chooses all 3 sites, then a 30% discount is applied in which case they only pay $0.35 per site. That's just $105.00 for 5 years of advertisement space on 3 homepages!
What's important about our discount structure is that these discounts are applied to same number of blocks purchased across all sites, so a customer's best ROI is to purchase on all 3 sites.
All these benefits put together really do provide our customers with additional advertising flexibility and helps gain more exposure and increased traffic to their websites and business.
Our customers will have their logos on our website homepages for at least 5 years; however, in the very near future we plan on upgrading our hosting to a total of 10 years, at no additional incurred cost to our customers. This provides our customers with a very economic advertising plan.
The original pixel page generated traffic mainly through viral marketing mainly spawned by media interest, how do you generate traffic to your site?
Generating traffic is the most difficult task that a webmaster faces, particularly when you're just starting out and virtually unknown. We spent a couple of months wading through all the hype trying to gain an understanding of how to honestly market our sites.
Our budget doesn't include pay-per-click marketing, so, for now, we're using press releases, directory listings, and word-of-mouth. It was, I believe, a couple of weeks after we really started marketing the sites that we got ranked by Alexa.
More importantly, however, website owners such as Russell at www.tectite.com are helping us get off the ground by linking to our websites.
What do you offer potential advertisers, how much do you charge and how much traffic do you envisage an advertiser could generate by advertising with you?
We offer our customers three purchasing options and tiered discounts:
What this does is allow a customer to submit different logos and even different sized logos, providing increased marketability and reduced investment. Also important in this type of scenario, is the fact that by allowing our customers to submit different sizes and change their logo(s) at any time, a customer can track critical marketing statistics based on their type of logo, size, and image and how that impacts their traffic and purchases of their products and/or services.
Insofar as envisioning how much traffic our customers will receive, well, that's really hard to say at this point.
Currently the top 5 Alexa ranked pixel sites enjoy a lot of interest from the public. How long do you think this will last, is there a long term future for pixel pages?
It is difficult to say, at the moment, if there is a long term future for pixel pages. We think by using effective marketing, our customers will find value in using our sites, based on the number of people who visit it and the number who use it for advertising.
Like any business, websites that evolve and grow with their customers and their needs will maintain a lasting relationship and presence. For us, what that means is to ensure that all of our customers are 100% satisfied, maintain a 99.99% uptime, and keep improving on our sites with the suggestions and help of our customers. For us, our customers include the charitable organizations that we will be donating money to.
Besides your own pixel page, which other pixel page do you secretly admire and why?
We really haven't gone to any other pixel sites other than the MillionDollarHomePage site. What we really admire, though, is creativity and ingenuity, which Alex certainly had.
Thanks for your time in answering these questions. Before you go are there any comments you want to impart to our pixel hungry readership?
Jenni and I loved creating these and marketing these sites. The one thing that I, Patti, learned along the way is this: Don't be afraid to ask for help. Some will say no, but the ones who say "Yes" are worth their weight in gold. Thanks, again, Russell and Sue!
If you have any questions, please feel free to visit our Contact Page at any of the three sites: www.theroadtoahome.com, www.theroadtohelp.com, www.theroadtoschool.com. Jenni and I will do our best to reply within 24 hours.
I, Jenn, just want to say "Thank you for your interest in our websites. A lot of hard work went into it and I hope it is successful in the future.". As Jenni says, "Join us...$200,000 will be donated to help victims of Katrina and cancer...together, helping each other help others.".