So I'm complaining to my buddy Brian last month about how much I'm paying for private high school for my son and how much college tuition is likely to be. He shows me a tool to use to help pay for college. The tool was recently featured on CNN.
Brian has four girls and his kids are about a year older than my four. I've got 3 boys, the girl is the youngest. My oldest son is a senior in high school. Brian's oldest girl is a freshman at Mizzou.
His younger girls go to a very good public school, so he doesn't have to worry about affording high school tuition. But he asks me for my plan on how to pay for college.
I thought, "How to Pay for College?" I can barely afford high school. I've saved some money in a 529 college savings plan, but after the stock market plunge of 2008 I will be lucky to pay for one semester, much less eight.
There's not much savings elsewhere in our household with all the private school tuition I've paid over the years. My wife had college loans when she graduated, and it took us many years to pay them off after we were married. I don't want to saddle my oldest son with a bunch of debt when he finishes school. But, he's the guinea pig and I am open to all ideas on how to pay for college.
So, how will you pay for college? Brian's question was still ringing in my ears when he tells me how he is paying for college for his oldest daughter.
"She's making money giving away a free web application", he says.
Well, my son wants to go into a health-related field, I tell him, and he doesn't want to sell anything and he's not very tech savvy.
She's not selling anything, he tells me.......she gives it away for free. Its a web application that saves the user money on their online shopping. The software creates pay-per-click income which is helping to pay for college.
The free web app is downloaded in about 30 seconds and saves the user time and money on whatever they are searching for online. It works with Google, Yahoo, and any other major search engine. It was featured on CNN not long ago, he says.
I was big time skeptical, but I've known Brian for almost 20 years. So, he emails me the link for the free web app and I installed it on the family computer upstairs. We've only had it a few weeks, but have already saved money on a number of things, including ink for the printer, an aluminum baseball bat for my little leaguer, and an external hard drive for my son's laptop.
The web app is called FREE GENIE ONLINE It contains no adware, spyware, malware or anything else that interferes with the operation of your computer or your privacy.
It instantly scans the internet for whatever item you type into Google or Yahoo. A little toolbar pops up at the bottom of your screen with Amazon, Costco, Walmart, eBay, and other comparison sites. You can easily and quickly identify the lowest price on that item!
Click here to watch the CNN video (2 minutes).
This is the coolest toolbar ever! I tell Brian, OK I'm convinced......its definitely a money-saver, but how is it helping you pay for college if you give it away for free?
He goes on to explain that the free software has been around for a couple of years, but the recent addition of pay-per-click money has made this free web app ideal for students as a way to help pay for college.
The money works like this, he explains.......for every free web app given away, the student can expect to receive $1 to $3 per month on the Pay-Per-Click income the web app generates.
Now I had heard of the term, pay-per-click before, but never really understood how it worked. And $1 to $3 bucks wouldn't pay for lunch the first day. Boy, was I wrong.
This is how Brian described pay-per-click.......there are thousands of online stores on the internet that will pay money for bringing a prospective customer to their website. These online merchants pay nickels, dimes, and sometimes quarters on the clicks their websites receive. They pay whoever sends the traffic (customers) to their online store.
The free web application acts like a traffic director, sending online shoppers to the best deals on the internet for whatever item they are searching. When these shoppers click a link from the web app toolbar, those online stores pay for that traffic. The traffic is measured in clicks.
The web app is individually coded to track whoever gives it away. It looks like this:
Let's say your college-bound student, Rachel, gives the free web app to Kim, her RA at the dorm. Kim downloads the free tool in about 30 seconds and decides to search Google for a mini-frig, or an ipod, or a necklace, or anything. The toolbar pops up on Kim's computer and she can instantly check prices from hundreds of online stores for her searched item and identify the best deal.
When Kim clicks Amazon, or eBay, or Buy.com or Walmart, or a comparison site from the web app toolbar, those clicks are earning the license owner (Rachel) 5, 10, or 25 cents at a time.
Hint: The best deals are often found by clicking the compare button.
The pay-per-click money is split 50/50 between the license holder and the software developer (I guess that's why its free). Rachel, the license owner, can expect to receive $1 to $3 dollars per month on her portion of the pay-per-click income generated by Kim's clicks, and every other free web app Rachel gives away.
One to three bucks a month didn't sound like a lot when Brian mentioned it, but it really adds up. With the social media on the web now, and especially with students who live on the internet anyway, its quite simple to give away a money-saving download.
Brian's daughter uses email, blogs, her FaceBook and MySpace accounts, Twitter, and other web forums to invite her friends and acquaintances to download the free web app. After the user learns how to save time and money on their online searches, they go back to the shopping toolbar over and over again, which generates nickels, dimes, and quarters one click at a time for college tuition.
"She's averaging between 50-100 free downloads a month", he tells me. After a full year, she expects to have given away about 1000 of the free web apps. At $1 to $3 per month each, she should be earning about $2000 monthly to help pay for college.
I have to admit, its a clever and unique idea on how to pay for college.
What are your options? How will you pay for college? Grants, scholarships, and work-study programs all help, but for most people that still leaves a large gap on how to pay for college. Student loans are the only option left.
I think giving away this free product is a better idea. Consider some of the benefits:
First, unlike a part-time job or a work-study program, the income generated from giving away the free web app recurs monthly. An hour spent at a student-job might earn your pupil $10. An hour spent giving away this money-saving software to just one person will double (triple?) that over a year's time. Spend that hour learning how to put your link on FaceBook, MySpace, and Twitter and you've increased that many times over.
Second, it gives your student some responsibility when paying for his/her education. It gives a young adult an opportunity to earn some nice income without burdening them with the rigors and time constraints of a part-time job......its much more flexible.
Third, it doesn't cost a lot of money to launch this plan to pay for college. Download the free web app and save some money on your online shopping.....you won't be sold until you do. The license for your student-coded web app is only $199. There is a $29 monthly charge to keep the software continually updated (adding more online stores) and for tracking the pay-per-click money. The $199 license fee is one-time only; there is no annual fee required to renew the license.
Lastly, its a great deal for whoever downloads the free web app! With what our family has saved already, I'm sure we'll save close to a thousand dollars a year on our online purchases using this tool. If you don't have the free web app installed on your computer, you are not finding the best prices the web has to offer.
That's it! I hope you are as excited as I am on this unique way to pay for college.
Obviously, anyone can purchase a license to give away this free technology, not just students. The way high school and college kids communicate these days on the internet makes it very easy to give away this free web app by the hundreds, or even thousands.
To learn more about getting your own individually-coded software license, click here.
All the best.
