Yeah, I'm an Examiner Too

"Have you heard about Examiner? Maybe you should be an Examiner!" That's what is on the fingertips over every Web writer, both pro and amateur, these days. If you haven't yet heard about Examiner, you will. Actually, you just did. I wrote a general explanation of the company and sites that might clear it up.

I've been hearing about it for about a year pretty much non-stop. I turned down a national position from them last year because I didn't think it would amount to much. Remember how crazy people were when Bukisa started? Yeah. No thanks. But over the past month, more and more people have been saying that they're doing pretty well from it. All together I've heard results coming in about evenly- about half say it's very little per article over time and about half say they are doing great with it and are moving more and more of their time there. One person said she's has stopped writing for private clients and is exclusively writing for Examiner.

After all of the hoopla, I finally decided to try again and I got accepted for another national position. I actually suspect that as long as your writing samples are in decent English and you pass the background check you're pretty much in. Did I say background check? I totally did. They conduct a background check to see whether you're a criminal. I think that a criminal would likely know just as much, if not more, about my topic as I do, so I don't really see the point. But, that's the way it is.

I decided a little over a week ago to give it one month- one month of actual effort in order to see whether or not it's worthwhile. I've only been there for eight or nine days now, so it's hard to say much about the money you can make there. I think it has a lot to do with the topic chosen and how often you post articles. I chose a national position rather than a local one because I figured it would bring in a wider audience. Then I chose a topic that I already have useless knowledge about and that everyone is interested in for some reason in order to make the articles easy to write and the audience even broader. Foolproof, eh? So far, not so much.

The traffic has been extremely slow and at least one day there was none at all. It's a little after 5 p.m and my nine articles have so far gotten one page view today. I realize that I have only given it a week, and it was a holiday week at that, so I'm going to put in more effort to see what materializes. So far, the money earned with Examiner has not been worth it, but it is a residual site, so the effort put in up front could be worth it down the road. We'll see.

Actually writing for Examiner is about as easy as writing blog posts and easier than writing for an article directory. Their publish tool is a little awkward, but there's no annoying editor to harass you and ask you why you didn't use X phrase X number of times. You can pick your own topics and post more than their recommended number of posts, three to four a week, if you like. I do like jobs where there's little contact with other humans, as unsociable as that sounds. The creativity simply flows better that way and the annoyance stays to a minimum.

If you want to try Examiner, there are actually referral codes for joining. I'm not sure how I feel about that, since I think it might influence others to make claims of more money than they are making in order to refer others. I'm also not sure how it bodes for the site itself if they have to get their writers to recruit others. This is the only review I've done so far of writing for them and I don't plan to promote my referral code other than right here: 15559. If you want to join, you can use that as your referral code and I'll be rich and famous, or maybe they'll just give me a stick of candy or something. I forget which. Actually, I think you get a decent amount of money per referral but I haven't looked into it much yet. I do know that some Examiners make more for their referrals than they do for their page views. I don't know how long Examiner could keep that up, but it sounds good for the time being.