Story in a nutshell: I wrote CMS to make pages about bingo cards, got a teacher to use CMS to create pages and attendant bingo cards, used this as bait for long tail searches. They look for very specific things, I generally have exactly what they are looking for. This is my Rumpelstiltskin machine: in goes straw, out comes gold, or at least a modestly successful business selling niche software to a few hundred thousand visitors a year.

Close variations of this technique have worked for businesses with diverse interests not limited to elementary education. (Their stories are not generally mine to tell, but Thomas has shared on HN that this was a win for Matasano.)

The reason this is motivational for non-toy businesses is that a one-time software investment plus minimal management overhead plus money equals scalable customer acquisition, and money to scalable customer acquisition is a very motivational formula.