Our Journey...

We are proud to begin changing focus on what and who we are. We were initially focussed on being the 10 Million Dollar Page - a pixel-for-sale style site. However, we are much more.

We have many really good partners on our pages now. If you are planning a getaway, we have partners for Travel, Flights, Hotel Bookings, and Itinerary. If you have a cat or dog, we have partners for pets and pet care. We have partnered with many unique clothing retailers.

The 10 Million Dollar Page makes shopping online easier. Most of our partners offer sales on their products and services. Shoes, Vitamins, Flowers, Geek Stuff - it is all here.

Check out the Black Friday deals. Get ready for Christmas by shopping online.

We have been adding partners and contest winners to the 10 Million Dollar Page over the past number of months. And anytime we make changes to the main GRID image, we record a snapshot of the image. So, for kicks, we put together an animated gif showing all the sites which were added between June 1st, 2017 to November 2nd, 2017 in the sequence they were added / deleted. Please note, that this is not a final animation. Since our site is never stagnant, always changing, there will be additional sites added and/or deleted over time.

Enjoy the show.

Note: We scaled down the animation to 1/4 size (ie. 250x250 pixels). Otherwise the animation would be over 30Meg in size. We may post the full size animation to YouTube.

Hidden within our main GRID on our main page is a hidden gem. Within the blank squares is one special square. It looks no different than any of the other blank squares. It is our easter egg....a small piece of code (or in our case, a link) pointing to a special page.

Whether you are specifically looking for it or came across it accidently, you will be in for a pleasant surprise once you stumble upon it.

Keep in mind however that hidden square is moving every 5 minutes to a new location (you may need to refresh your page if it hasn't moved). Have fun looking for the square.

Hint: If you look at the page source through your browser, do a search for the word 'waldo'.

It has taken a bit of time, but we finally have a Winner in our monthly Giveaway Contest. A special congratulations to thirstywater.ca for being our first winner! More details about the contest can be found under our Giveaway page. Essentially, entrants have a chance of winning 1 month of free advertising on our main GRID for their website. Free advertising! Doesn't get any better than that. And to boot, your website and link are permanently added to our Past Winners page.

Once a website entry is randomly drawn to appear on our main page, we clear the entries for that month. So don't forget to enter every month! Good luck!

We made a cosmetic change to our GRID image. That is the main page image with all the advertisements. When we first started the site, we had initially had the GRID setup as a GIF image. The reasoning for this was it allowed us the ability to create an animated gif if required. We had plans to have either flashing squares, or holiday themes, all possible with animated gifs. However, we had been noticing that some of the more colorful logos of our partners were not looking as sharp as they could. So, in order to have a cleaner and sharper look of our main page, we changed the background GRID image to a JPEG image. We will keep the other image around still (and update it as frequently as we do the main GRID image), but will be referencing the JPEG image.

You can do a side by side comparison, and you can see the differences:

The GIF image (10-million-dollar-page.gif):

The JPEG image (10-million-dollar-page.jpg):

It took a bit of doing (a couple of hours) but our site is now encrypted. We used https://letsencrypt.org. for our certificate. Nice program they have running there. They provide a certificate for 3 months, and free of charge to boot. After 3 months, a job runs on our server which renews the certificate for another 3 months.

Why did we encrypt? Well, the other day we received a notification for one of our other sites from Google. The notification stated that the next version of Chrome will sound a "warning" if a site has information gathering pages (for example our contact page) and the site is not encrypted. We do not want to alarm any of our visitors with such a warning, so it only made sense to upgrade to an https site.

After we implemented the encryption, we are noticing the occasional exclamation mark showing on our browser when we provided links to client / partner sites which are not encrypted. A bit of growing pains, but we believe we can resolve this issue. We know a couple of our partners offer https type ads, so there will be a bit of a migration strategy to encorporate these secure links of the next couple of days.

One of the added benefits to having our site encrypted is that search engines favor encrypted sites when determining SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Ultimately all browsers will display a warning if a site is not encrypted, so we are keeping up with the latest waves of advancement with our page.

https://10milliondollarpage.wbca.ca. Yeah, we like the look of that!

We are approximately 75% full on our main page. That is about 70 links to affiliates, sample pages and demos. We are maintaining a certain amount of spacing and logo sizing with our advertisers. The more we come close to filling the page, the more time we will spend on optimizing the merging of all the advertisers. It is a bit of an art. We do not know ahead of time the size of our affiliate logos, nor the number of affiliates we will have on our pages. This optimization may involve resizing and/or relocating some of the ads, but ultimately the goal we have is to break the main page into multiple pages based on categories.

Once again, stay tuned. More affiliate additions are happening almost every day. Once our main page is filled, more website redesigning will be underway.

Something we should have added fairly soon in the game but added it today. A collection of "Share" buttons to popular social media sites. We have added social media buttons to other sites before, but this time it was added a bit differently.

We used a technique called "sprites" which has all the icons in 1 file. We had initially set up the icons the old fashioned way as we have always done by having 1 image per icon. After setting up 8 social media sites we noticed 8 additional hits to our site per main page visit.

This is expected, but not acceptable. We need optimization with our site because of the volume of traffic expected. We had heard of the sprite technique before but never had a chance to dive into it. Now it is done.

So, to help our customers / viewers share our site with their friends, we have include easy to click buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Pinterest, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Digg.

Aside: Not too sure if this should have been under the Marketing Category of our blog because it is also marketing we are doing. Since it turned into an optimization task, it made more sense to add it to Website News.

Is the 10 Million Dollar Page created by Al Paul an alternative or clone to the Million Dollar Homepage created by Alex Tew 12 years ago?

The answer is neither yes nor no.

Yes. The pages and layout are similar. Both have a pixels-for-sale philosophy. Both are 1000x1000 grids of pixels broken into blocks of 100 pixels each. Both offer(ed) advertisers an image and a link. Both are successful in that both sites have participating merchants displaying their ads.

But that is where the similarities end. In addition to the image and link, the 10 Million Dollar Page offers a popup. This popup provides the consumer a sampling of what the merchant has to offer. The image and the link are not fixed on the 10 Million Dollar Page. The 10 Million Dollar Page is designed so that it can change every hour.

The Million Dollar Homepage is stale, with over 1/5 of its links stagnant. The 10 Million Dollar page is fresh with active, current merchants. Its links will never stale out, by design.

The Million Dollar Homepage filled in every available block and did not require a minimum purchase. This resulted in a somewhat cluttered look. The 10 Million Dollar Page is providing the merchants with decent size footprints on its Grid. There is also spacing between all the merchants, provide a more open look and feel.

The Million Dollar Homepage made its owner $1,000,000 dollars upfront from their advertisers. Alex trumped the market with that feat! The 10 Million Dollar Page gets its owner revenue through affiliate marketing (percentage of successful sales).

The 10 Million Dollar Page was written with the advertiser and the consumer in mind. It was tailor written for the most popular ad types. It is scalable with an expansion strategy.

In conclusion, although both websites are very similar to one another, they are not a clone of each other. Each one is unique enough to make its own distinct mark with the internet community.

Feel free to leave your opinion by contacting us

We know, what type of title is this. On July 17th, we posted The Woes of Getting the Word Out. In it we mentioned how search engines are ignoring our front page image because it is a "Background" image. And it is true. When we search the internet with all major search engines, we do not see a single image of our GRID. So, without further ado, we are leaving a permanent mark by posting an image of our GRID, so search engines are happy (and more so, we are happy :).

Note: Since this blog is "home grown", the image below will always be a current snapshot of what the current GRID image is, so don't let the date of the blog throw you off.

And to leave an additional mark, here is a reference or download link to our GRID image. 10-million-dollar-page.jpg

We will be attempting to get the word out a number of ways. We will be leaving pitches with various online news agencies.. Here is the general wording for our pitch:

Million Dollar Page Revived?
The Million Dollar Homepage was hugely popular 12 Years ago. The original creator said it was a one time phenomenon. Many have tried since and failed. Now, the 10 Million Dollar Page is starting to take off with advertisers coming on board daily. Will it overtake the original in popularity? Time will tell. Check out the 10 Million Dollar Page at https://10milliondollarpage.wbca.ca.

Note: I am the creator of the 10milliondollarpage.com. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at my personal email (xxx@xxx)

We will see if this sparks any interest.

Firstly, thanks to all the partners who have joined our site. It is really exciting seeing the page filling up. But now to explained the title. Our goal was always to go with organic search engine results. An "If you build it, they will come" philosophy. However from a SEO point of view, our site means nothing. Our main page has grown tremendously since June! Our main page is THE page, the 10 Million Dollar Page. But from a SEO perspective, it has not changed a bit. There is no "content". The main grid image on our home page is actually a background. The links and advertisements are all javascript based. As such, most search engine bots do not see much changing on the page because many ignore or at least do not put much importance into backgrounds, and many do not run javascript. Search engines love content.

So even though the content is changing, almost daily, none of the search engines are recognizing these changes. So, in order to get the word out, we have to now look at other techniques. One was the campaign which launched last week (Social Media via Facebook). We have some additional ideas in mind, so once again, stay tuned.

We have now a good number of partners on our site. Now to start with one of our campaigns. One of our partner sites, Rainbow Loom Patterns is featured on our site. Their facebook account has 2000+ friends. Rainbow Loom Patterns posted publically and to their friend list on Facebook that they are on our site. They also linked backed to our site. This should spark some interest in the 10 million dollar page.

We have been adding affiliates to our site gradually over the past month. We are currently sitting at 12 affiliates. Our goal is to have about 30 affiliates before we start another campaign. The goal of our previous campaign we had near the beginning of the year was to get clients onto our site. This time the campaign will be to get visitors to our site. We have plans for this. As normal, we will release details in our blog after the campaign has launched. But first, more affiliates.

Back on December 6, 2016, we mentioned we had implemented some additional logging to the website. We had to revert those changes. The premise of those changes was anytime a customer would click on a link, we would perform a double redirect. Firstly to a script which tallied the information on our site, then secondly to the client's destination. It turns out however that some of the affiliate sites we go through do not like this double redirect, and they lose some vital information of where the traffic had originated from. So for the time being, this additional logging has been disabled.

Our site needs a slogan or catch phrase. 10 Million dollar page is easy to remember initially, but after a while, you may think it was 10 Million dollar site, or 10 Million dollar homepage, or 10 Million dollar 'something'...but that's where 10mdp.com comes in. 10milliondollarpage.com is synonymous with 10mdp.com. If you remember 10mdp, then you will remember our site. That is also where a slogan or catch phrase kicks in. After a couple of weeks, 'Easy to remember even if you forget' will result in search engine hits to our site as well. Not to mention we have tenmdp and tenmilliondollarpage coming to our site. We've got you covered...wait...another slogan?

We have partnered with another marketing firm. This one is Commission Junction, or cj.com for short. More potential affiliates to add to the site. Exciting times.

We know, weird title. But that's how we feel right now with our popularity. In order for some partner sites to come on board, we need to be more popular. But in order to be popular, we need more partner sites. We would like to thank some of the recently added partners for accepting our requests for partnership. We would also like to thank some for proactively asking to be on our site.

We are starting to populate our site with some partner links and advertisements. We need to point out these are not direct sales of pixels, but rather an alternative method of providing advertisements for our partners. We have partnered with Rakuten Marketing for affiliate sites. We had to make some adjustments to our site and to our terms and conditions to accommodate these types of ads, but nothing too major. The layout of their ads works nicely with our site. It will be fun setting this up, and exciting to see additional products and services being added to our site. Thank you to hotelwiz.com for being the first to come aboard.

Our initial campaign results from January were unfortunately not very promising. The campaign consisted of a letter we mailed out to 150+ potential clients. Yes, a letter. Old fashioned snail mail. From the 150+ letters, we received responses from 2 potential clients stating they were not interested at this time. Thank you for the responses. The rest, well, it was a black hole. No acknowledgements or responses. There was even some doubt in our minds whether the letters even made it out. But then, a small portion of letters were returned with a 'Return to Sender' stamp because of an invalid address. My bad. In my defense, some of the potential clients did not have mailing addresses on their websites, so I did the best efforts with the resources I had available.

Are we discouraged? Yes. Are we giving up? No. As the title says, 'Initial' campaign. There will be more.

After we added the previous blog comment about our campaign launch, we realized we are in our third year of blogging. So to make things easier to search we added an additional filtering parameter called Yearly Archives, and changed Archives to Monthly Archives. Not much of a change, but you know what they say about websites. They are never truly finished, there is always some room for improvement.

It is finally here! Our marketing campaign launch. During our campaign, we will be reaching out to some pretty big companies. Top Brands! These companies you definitely would have heard about.

We will not go into the details at this time, as we wait to see how successful the campaign will be. This could be the 'make or break' time for the journey, but too early to say. Stay tuned!