I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about where freelance writers can work online to actually make money. I’ve been writing for Examiner.com for about a month now and am already very pleased with what I see.
Writing for Examiner.com is fairly easy. You select a topic you feel passionate or informed about and that will make it even easier to create a solid body of content. Individual posts do not have to be very long so I can take one 600 word article I would have published somewhere like Suite101 and turn it into two or three posts for Examiner.
While they do ask you to publish 3 or 4 posts per week, I am able to write all my posts for the week in a single day, save them as drafts, and then it is easy to go and set them to publish every other day. The hardest part for me has been finding photos to go with my articles! *laughing*
What does Examiner.com pay?
OK – that sounds good, Angela. But what does Examiner pay? The exact rate varies according to what they bring in from advertising. They pay strictly based on page views, however, the exact rate isn’t known upfront. I will say, the amount of pay per page view hugely trumps what I am making at Suite101.com right now and after only 1 1/2 months writing there I have already earned my first payout at the $25 minimum.
What Rights Does Examiner.com Keep?
None! That’s the other thing that I love about Examiner.com. I can repost my material to my blog if I ever decide to leave, send a feature article to a print magazine, or compile the pieces into an ebook.
How do I Join Examiner.com?
Visit this Examiner referral page and apply for a topic in your local area that sounds interesting to you! If you decide to give it a try, please use my referral number #2287 when you join. 
See my Alternative Medicine Examiner Column.
P.S. For my Suite101 Friends – I am averaging about $10 for every 1,000 page views, or slightly higher.
Updates!! I’ve just posted a new blog post – Re-examining Examiner to discuss the changes, my findings and feelings after a year, and how I feel about writing with Examiner still.
Hi D.N.
No the $300+ I made in my first month with Examiner.com was not a false statement, nor was it made with fraud of any sort. The field that I write in is popular. It is a celebrity news Niche and because this is a news site and gets indexed with Google News and many other places online, I received a lot of views.
One of the reason I gained so many readers in such a short amount of time was that I wrote a news article comparing two pop singers. The fans on both sides came to the website and their love/hate relationship turned into gold for my Celebrity page. In fact, when the celebrity news is particularly hot I can see $80 to over $100 a day from my Examiner page from all the people who have seen post on news sites.
However, I’m not saying Examiner is perfect or that everyone who joins will make tons of money right away or ever. I have online writing friends who took months to get enough money to reach the minimum $25 payout.
Either they did not write very often or they write for a small niche.
Certain pages on Examiner are very profitable. For instance, the Twilight Examiner rakes in hundreds and sometimes well over $1000, yes I said over $1000 a day.
Furthermore, I was surprised to receive another $400 when 8 fellow writers decided to try Examiner and used me/my site as a reference (Referrals are $50 each).
However, I would not want to write for Twilight/Harry Potter type pages because when the movie/actors fall out of favor, your left with a dead site.
I was very excited to see that kind of pay my first month on Examiner alone. I was not trying to brag, exaggerate or lie to anyone here. I was simply giving information for those who were thinking about signing up.