Did you once write for examiner.com? Are you seeking a way to link to
and recover your examiner.com articles? Well,
it’s possible courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
After seeing a surge in traffic here
over the last month or so, many new visitors to the site may have
been seeing my anything but subtle plugs to follow various links to
my work on examiner.com in order to, as the text plainly says, help
me pay my bills. Well, for anyone curious enough to follow the links,
they landed on a website that was clearly not the expected
destination. So, what gives?
For many people looking to break into
writing professionally 10-15 years ago, examiner.com and other similar websites
built on user-generated content offered a promising gateway. While not able to speak for the other
websites that I didn’t write for, I can say that Examiner was very
up front with prospective writers about what they were getting into.
Pay was per click, a penny per click, which wasn’t much. Examiner
was open about the fact that its writers probably wouldn’t even be
able to entertain the idea of quitting their regular jobs for
writing, but that writing for Examiner was more of a way to
supplement one’s income.
As for me, I was looking for a way to
cover my health insurance costs, or at least part of it. This was in
2009, long before Obamacare drove premiums through the roof. As for
the application process, it was quite simple: look for the largest
market city nearest to you, look for open titles, click on one you
were interested in writing about, write a sample article for that
title, and send it in along with some of the usual job application
stuff.
I heard back pretty quickly from the
editorial staff and, after I filled out a few forms and opened a
Paypal account, I became the Cleveland Photography Examiner.
After plugging away around a month or
so, I realized that this was, at least to me, pretty decent money,
enough to cover my health insurance and then some (back when a
healthy young adult could get a policy with a monthly premium under
$100!).
The real eureka moment came when I
logged on one morning to see my previous day’s click/earnings total
and was shocked to see that I had over 8,000 hits the previous day
and was going to be getting over $80 for that one article. The topic,
you ask? Remember
the viral photo of then-president Obama
looking at a girl’s butt? Yep. Since it was a hot topic at the
time and was related to photography, I did an article on it, posted it, and got picked up by Google
News. It was at this point that I read up on search engine
optimization (SEO) and how to achieve it. Since my pay was per click,
learning about SEO was something worthwhile to do and would quickly
come to be very profitable.
Over the next year or so, I would add
three more columns, Cleveland Astronomy, National Photography, and
National Space News to my plate, often cranking out at least one
article per column per day. Using my newly earned SEO knowledge, I
became pretty good at wording my headlines and opening paragraphs all
while looking for topics that either were already or looking to
become hot in my chosen areas. Astronomy and Space News? Major
celestial events like eclipses, meteor showers and new scientific
discoveries made good fodder. On the photography side, new cameras,
camera side by side (camera A vs. camera B) comparisons, hot photo
industry rumors, and how-to articles on photographing big celestial
events (think cross-marketing) often led to big hits, and money. A
couple of times, I made over $200 on just a single article that got
picked up by and placed at the top of search results in Google.
Did I ever make enough to live on?
Absolutely not, but who wouldn’t mind having, on average, an extra
$500 a month or so from writing about topics they were already
interested in? I sure didn’t!
Unfortunately, after a few years, the
examiner.com gravy train came to a screeching halt. Search engines
(most notably Google) decided that examiner.com was a ‘content
farm’ and that the articles offered on such websites were low
quality ‘click bait’ and that such websites’ search results
should get pushed to the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Come 2020,
people who are urging Big Tech and, even worse, government, to
regulate the spread of ‘fake news’ and ‘misinfornation’ need
to think about this: who are Big Tech and government to determine
what online content is of quality and what is not? Do you really want
other people deciding this for you? Do you think people are too
stupid to think for themselves? Well, it already happened when sites
like examiner.com were blacklisted by search engines. As a writer, I
will say that SEO was a big part of being successful on examiner.com
but, on the other hand, using attention-grabbing openings doesn’t
equate to junk articles and besides, what established media outlet
doesn’t use such tactics?
Long story short, the hits really
dried up. In fact, they all but evaporated. Many writers left. Me? I
kept plugging away at it for awhile, especially when a big
astronomical event was coming or when a hot new camera was first
announced. Eventually, on the Cleveland edition at least, I would
often occupy multiple slots on the most popular article list but have
only a few bucks to show for it when, in the past, I could have been
earning tenfold. Eventually, the effort wasn’t worth the reward and
I gave up on it, too. Come 2016, so did examiner.com itself. The site
went offline and all content, at least in published form, was lost.
Or was it? Enter the Wayback Machine.
Started in 2001, the Wayback Machine
is a web archive of cached web sites/pages that looks to serve as a
digital repository for as much of the Internet as is possible.
Getting curious upon learning of it, I started plugging in websites
that I knew were long gone and, as if by magic, there they were
again, often complete with working links. This is when I decided to
search myself and my long thought lost 4 columns on examiner.com.
Did you write for Examiner and want
to find your old stuff in its published context? Well, to do that,
simply
go to the Wayback Machine
and plug in your old Examiner URL into the search bar at the top.
Don’t remember your URL? No problem. The start of all the Examiner
URLs will be
http://www.examiner.com/.
After the slash, simply plug in your title in all lowercase letters
with hyphens between the words, then another slash followed by your
name with a hyphen between first and last. Example:
“photography-in-cleveland/dennis-bodzash” for my Cleveland
Photography column. That done, hit the “Browse History” button.
This is where things will get
different for everyone as the amount of saved links will vary. If
your column was popular, expect a lot of links. If you weren’t
popular or came in late by which point Examiner’s traffic was next
to nothing, don’t expect a lot.
Your site archived, start clicking on
things. If you were like me and listed recent articles at the bottom
of every article you wrote and/or linked to previous articles or ones
in your other columns if you wrote under multiple titles, there could
be a lot of clicking involved. Not all links will lead to an old
article but, hopefully, many will take you to an archived web page
where you can see your work in its original context rather than as a
Word file.
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