We believe that students don't spend enough time researching and thinking about decisions to spend their money.
By showing the consequences of both good and bad decisions when making a large purchase such as a house, we hope to demonstrate the importance of a sound decision.

This is an interactive game where kids walk through real life scenarios that teach them the real issues surrounding money and buying a house.
A friend of mine used to tell his sixteen year old son, "The facts of life have nothing to do with sex".
The older you get the more you realize that his is true.

“Simply fire up Wordtracker. (A subscription is about $8 for a day.) Start looking for related keywords by doing a search for a broad, general, generic keyword in your niche. Then drill down and dig up all the related ‘exact’ keyword phrases that have 9 or fewer competing pages. All that’s left is to optimize a page on your site for each one and presto chango! A top 10 ranking!
See? A surefire formula for guaranteed top 10 rankings. Brain dead simple too.
Now I call such search terms ‘orphan keywords’. Orphans because the search volume is so low they are all but ignored by the fat cats intent on landing the big fish — a.k.a. high rankings for terms that get hundreds of searches a day.
That fact makes these orphans super simple to rank in the top 10 for. Especially since many of the competing pages aren’t even optimized the least little bit.
But hold on. Let’s not high five all around just yet. There’s a tradeoff. As I suggested lack of competition is a sure sign such terms aren’t searched for often. Maybe no more than a mere handful of times each day in Google.
Okay so how do we make lemonade out of those lemons?
The best way to make this tactic work is to find a ton of these terms. And don’t worry. Most niches are loaded with orphan keywords. “
This is a very good article on how to use Wordtracker and reverse engineer your site to snag keyword orphans that the big guys don’t cater too.

Some keyword examples: Amelia Island, Free Grants, Law Office.

"USATODAY.com – Google has a simple proposition for anyone who owns a Web site: Let it put up links to its ads, and Google's AdSense program will give you a piece of the action when someone clicks on them.
It's found money for many bloggers, small e-tailers and huge businesses – from small personal sites such as Giguere's, to those of big-time corporations such as Amazon.com, the New York Times and About.com."
New item…blogging for AdSense dollars in USA Today

How To Make Money With Your Blog Site – a very extensive guide to making money with a content or personal news site:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/2005/02/07/how_to_make_money_with.htm

Adsense Revenue Checker:
http://www.revenuecheckerforadsense.com/

Affiliate Marketing Forum:
http://www.affiliate-marketing-school.com/Forums/

You may be interested in this article about ad positioning and which spots on the page get more eye time: Eyetools Uncover Google’s Golden Triangle New EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through in Google.

"Secret #1: The whole entire thing revolves around bidding on the right keywords!
Most new people will brainstorm a list of 10 or 20 or 30 keywords and bid on them. That's not nearly enough! If that's all you do, you'll only bid on the most expensive, obvious ones. And most of the time they'll be the WRONG keywords.
So for example if you sell hiking boots, you *might* want to bid on 'hiking boots' but… maybe not. A better strategy is to focus more narrowly and / or bid on all kinds of other variations people are searching on:

discount hiking boots
hiking boot review
men's hiking boots
merrell hiking boots
salomon hiking boots
vasque hiking boots
woman's hiking boot
womens hiking boots

You'll get more targeted visitors and cheaper clicks. There are hundreds of possible phrases. If you want 5 and 10 cent clicks, Google's own suggestion tool won't cut the mustard."
This is the best tool to use to find keywords. It will help you discover many that you never thought of.Wordtracker

This is a handy little utility if you would like to see what sort of Google AdSense ads based on content or keywords. Simply enter the URL or keywords in the box below, and you will see up to 20 sample AdSense ads for the URL or keywords.

"Is blogging just an overblown fad or a revolutionary new medium you can't afford to ignore? B.L. Ochman, noted Internet strategist, PR guru and influential blogger gives you straight talk about blogging. She gives you scores of examples of successful business blogs, advice on what to blog about and why, plus dozens of resources you can use immediately.
What could your company do with a blog?
Do you really need one?
Where should you start?
What should you blog about?
Who should do the writing?
Do you need technical skills?
Why do 60 percent of all blogs fail?
How can you build an audience for a blog? "
Story of all the ways a blog could be used by a business.

"Ok, how to create a system…hmm..first just RUN the business, but keep notes. Keep a notebook by the cash register (or wherever) and write down what you do every day. Write down the problems and how you solved them. At the end of each week/month type it all into a document (or type it in directly daily) and you'll start to see common patterns & categories. Soon you'll have an employee manual/systems document. Optimally you want a Management doc. with policies and high level issues (i.e. problem employees, serious customer issues, legal responsibilities), an Asst. Mgt. doc. (How to open and close shop, how to deal with customer issues, when to escalate, how to maintain employee schedules) and an Employee manual (how to run the register, dress code, store policies, hours, terms of employment) Within 1 year most businesses will see all the issues they are going to see. There is still that odd problem that comes up, but you teach your employees when to escalate an issue to you. "
It's all about building a system…my way up to this point has been to succeed only through "heroic effort"…that is why I've never gotten rich. What I remember most about the Rich Dad book is the story of the town that needed water and the one guy carried it back and forth in buckets and the other built a pipeline… so far I've been a carrier.

"Blog Advertising Networks
Aside from Google AdSense and Overture Content Match, what other networks are there that focus on blog advertising besides these?

• AdBrite

from AdBright:

If you're a publisher, use AdBrite to set your own ad rates, and approve or reject every ad that's purchased for your site. AdBrite enables you to instantly sell ads to your visitors via a "Your Ad Here" link, in addition to selling through AdBrite's marketplace and sales team.
Our revenue split is 75/25 in your favor. Through a small snippet of HTML placed on your site, we handle serving, scheduling, billing, customer service, and sales. About half of AdBrite's sales are generated from our marketplace and sales team, while the other half are generated from users clicking "Your Ad Here" on our publisher's sites.
While AdBrite can provide publishers with more revenue and better ads than traditional ad networks such as Google AdSense, we work fine along-side them as a simple way to generate additional ad revenue by selling ads directly to your visitors — something the other ad systems don't do.
If you're using AdBrite in addition to another ad network, you can turn off AdBrite's "run-of-network ads" and AdBrite will only display ads that have been approved by you. If you have no ads running, AdBrite will display nothing but "Your Ad Here", so no real estate is wasted and you have nothing to lose.
AdBrite doesn't display the big "brick" of ads that you're used to. Rather, AdBrite gives publishers full control over the look and feel of their ads so AdBrite can be integrated seamlessly into any website.

• BlogAds

How: Want to give advertisers access to your unique audience? We make it easy to sell and display ads. Simply create your own kiosk through our one-page form, then cut and paste a javascript into your site. You'll be done in five minutes or less.

If your blog does have a laser-sharp focus and more than 1,000 visitors a day…

• BURST! Media

The process is simple.

• There are no costs to you as a member.

• Everyone starts out on a non-exclusive, month-to-month rate, and may maintain that rate indefinitely.
• You control which campaigns run and where they run on your website.

* Represent specialty content. Portals, search engines, and sites of links to other people's content generally do not fit our definition of specialty content.
* Be live and have current traffic of at least 5,000 page views per month. Sites that are incomplete will not be accepted.
* Be in English. BURST! will not allow any of its ads to appear on foreign language sites.
* Have an active, publicly stated privacy policy. Click here for more information about creating a privacy policy.
* Agree to post our Demographic Survey somewhere on the site. For more information review our complete Eligibility Requirements .
* Reside on its own top-level domain. No sites hosted on free providers (such as Geocities, Tripod, etc) will be considered.

• CrispAds

sample ad:


Place ads in your blog articles wherever your want
Ads also appear in your RSS or ATOM feed!
95% of advertiser click-thru revenues flow to you
Get paid via Paypal at the end of every month (when your earnings are over $5.00)
Just generate code and place into a blog article!
Automated tracking system to track earnings

• Pheedo

Tools to grow your traffic and monetize your content.

Because we focus on RSS and weblog publishers, we understand the unique facets of your business. We developed our tools and services with this in mind.

Pheedo Feed Manager
Efficiently manage, serve and report on content and ads in your RSS/Atom feeds.

Pheedo Blog Network
Provides the tools and control you need to create an instant revenue stream from your blog.

Blogsnob Traffic Exchange
Free service to promote your blog and discover new blog content.

• Kanoodle's BrightAds

* Clearly Defined Revenue: BrightAds are text based, revenue-per-click (RPC) sponsored links. This means advertisers pay every time a visitor clicks on the links – and we'll pay you a 50% share of the charge.
* High Revenue-Per-Click (RPC): Kanoodle's RPCs are highly competitive, with many topics monetizing at a rate significantly higher than our competitors.
* PayPal: BrightAds offers easy payment via PayPal.

• Affiliate Sensor (get my own affiliate id)

Affiliate Sensor's new context-relevant, text-link affiliate ad blocks let you choose from ClickBank's over 10,000 products by copying and pasting a little JavaScript onto your web pages.
You show only context-relevent, highly targetted text ads that you have control over.
The ads you display are sorted to show the best performing affiliate links on top.
You can make up to $75 per sale or more!
Real-time reporting, including clicks by domain, page and referrer.
An easy-to-use script building interface that lets you fully customize your ad blocks.
You only have to modify your ad code one time to update that same ad on all pages using that ad block.
The database is updated regularly so the best ranking programs always appear in your results.
We give you 5% of the impressions of every account that signs up through your "Ads by.." link.
We have all of the adformats supplied by Google AdSense, so you can use our ads to replace the Public Service Ads (PSA's). We even have a special link format that you can add directly into the google_alternate_ad_url line of your AdSense code.
There are no up-front costs to participate.
Now, even if you don't have a website, you can refer visitors to our ClickBank Mall using your login and receive the same commission structure!

"
Some alternatives to AdSense…these should be worth checking out as is Rick Bruner's site that I found them on.
A great article idea would be to do a comparison of these services.

"Some categories will reap a disproportionate amount of the spoils as online ad spending increases to $16.1 billion by 2009, according to a new report by JupiterResearch.
Double-digit growth is expected in four categories, including automotive, which will grow 33.8 percent; health (19.7 percent); travel (18.3 percent); and household goods (15.1 percent).
Those categories will be growing the most, percentage-wise, but others will command the biggest total dollar amounts, researchers say. Media and entertainment are expected to take the lead position with $2 billion; financial services second with $1.7 billion; automotive third with $1.4 billion; and travel fourth with $1 billion. "