Nathan Waters

As you may have noticed in the forums and on this blog, I’ve been adding little teaser snippets of this so called “pixel advertising site”. After around 4 months of off-and-on work, a lot of coding and a lot of cursing, I have finally finished it! So without further ado, here it is:

Where?

Oh you want to see it? … www.pixTower.com

PS, if there are any issues with displaying the site, please let me know

What?

pixTower is a novelty project that has potential to be successful if not in producing some nice revenues, then definitely in building a profile for myself in the wider community.

If you haven’t worked it out yet, pixTower is a tall virtual tower made up of smaller apartments. The apartments (pixPartments) have been designed and created by either an individual or business and in the form of isometric pixel art. If you hover your mouse over each pixPartment you can see the details of that particular resident or advertiser. Click on the pixPartment and checkout that advertisers’ website… simple.

How?

How did I come up with the idea?

Essentially it is a mashup between the infamous Million Dollar Homepage and an awesome site I found a few years ago called Mr Wong’s Soup’Partments. Checkout the pixTower About page for more details.

So combine them and you get a tall virtual tower (pixTower) onto which people can purchase an apartment (pixPartment).

Why?

Everyone knows the MDHP success, but many clone sites have failed to see their mistakes in entering an over-saturated niche with an idea that lacks any innovation or uniqueness.

Despite this I have noticed that some clone sites have managed to make upwards of $145,000. (makes you think twice before dissing some kid for releasing a mdhp clone :D)

The thing that I saw these clone sites failing to noticed was why Alex Tew’s MDHP actually was a success.

Traffic.

How’d he get traffic? Well in my opinion it was not because people continued to checkout his site because they wanted to look at the ads and click the links… that may have been their second action when visiting the site, but not the reason in visiting it in the first place.

I believe it was because they wanted to see how many pixels he’d sold… i.e how much money he’d made. That and the curiosity factor achieved through word of mouth. (If someone told you a uni student was planning on making $1million dollars and everyone was talking about it, could you hold yourself back from visiting the site? … Probably not.)

To receive traffic to your website you need something to attract people to it. Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but MDHP clones have and continue to fail to see this.

Now Mr Wong’s tower was begun and “terminated” sometime back in 2002, which is a long time ago when looking at Internet trends in places such as online advertising (Google Adsense was only introduced in 2003!). But that tower managed to house 406 residents which is a great achievement. The site has no ability to click on the apartments, website links are displayed as images, there is no blog, there is no newsletter etc… and yet it reached 406 residents before the project was terminated (reason unknown to me). I’m sure the site also received a nice flow of traffic in its day, simply because if you begin to look at the interesting and plain crazy apartments it becomes addictive!

Fast forward to 2006, pixTower is fresh and exciting, riding on the back of the ripples of a potential tide rise (waves have passed). Add linking, hover and descriptions to each apartment, add a blog which helps with SEO, add a newsletter which is a great marketing tool… package it all up, add a few competitions, hit the marketing/advertising solid and hopefully traffic will flow to checkout the buzz and hopefully get addicted enough to maintain steady traffic and give advertisers no reason to backoff paying the small cost for permanent exposure.

Where to from here?

Now begins the advertising and marketing stage … in some ways the fun part compared to the tedious coding of the last few months.

In writing this I am still yet to send out a press release, and yet requests for apartments are rolling in due to an email out I did to those on Mr Wong’s tower (sadly most emails were invalid due to the age of the site). If you’ve noticed that some of the pixPartments are the same as a few on his tower it is because they specifically gave me permission to use their apartment on pixTower. I will make sure I mention this on the pixTower Blog to avoid any possible rumours from spreading :).

I have written a press release and getting ready to send it out to a bunch of online PR sites and also do a few printed copies and send them to local newspapers.

After that I have a 4 page list of other things to do and places to promote pixTower. If the steps in this prove to workout, I’ll be sure to let you guys in on the “secrets”. As again, subscribe to the blog and I’ll keep you posted.

On a side note, I think I found that post very easy to write. Why? … I just checked my feedburner stats for this blog and in the last two days subscribers have shot up from something like 4 to 16! Wow! … It could just be a sudden influx of readers due to pixTower announcements, but having actual subscribers is a great motivator. Thanks for reading guys!

Nathan Waters
pixPreneur or pixCrazy?