Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Examining Examiner.com

Examiner.com certainly seems popular among writers. If you don't believe me, check out this thread at the forums of Absolute Write. You'll see that a ton of writers there have signed up to work as Examiners.

Well, I have, too, of course. And what have I learned? Writing for Examiner.com is easy. Really easy. But lucrative? Not yet, at least not for me.

If you don't know, Examiner.com touts itself as an online newspaper. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a newspaper, though. There's precious little "news" being reported on here. I'd call it more of a collection of bloggers from around the country.

Each Examiner is assigned a particular topic. For instance, I write about telcommuting from my home city. Others write about traveling to Orlando. Others write about raising autistic children. The list is pretty endless.

For me, the telecommuting site made sense. I've telecommuted for about eight years now. I know the subject. That means I don't have to waste much time on research. I can write about my own experiences, and hammer out a 200- to 300-word post in about 20 minutes tops.

Examiner pays by page views, not ad clicks. That's one benefit over sites such as Suite 101, where you can have thousands of visitors who don't click on your page's ads. Unfortunately, Examiner pays a cent per page view. That's fine if you're bringing in loads of visitors. I'm not, and my pay has been rather paltry.

I began writing for Examiner.com on Feb. 21. I've since posted 20 times -- again, none of these posts took me too long to write. Some of them I even enjoyed writing -- and generated 777 page views. That comes out to a grand total of $7.77. Wow!

To be fair, the last two weeks I've generated far more page views. I feel kind of foolish for saying this, but if I can generate 100 visits a day -- or $1 a day -- I think I'd be happy with Examiner. I'm not sure where else I'd be able to post my telecommuting complaints and whinings and get paid even a dollar for them.

Much like Suite 101, Examiner.com pays investigation. There's little guarantee that it'll result in big bucks anytime soon. But you never know what'll happen.

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