My top Examiner.com traffic-getting tips to try and make more money writing for the website online

Well, since there's a lull in stuff I really want to write on Examiner.com, I figured it would be a good time to update this blog with some of my top traffic-getting tips on Examiner -- and add some that I'm starting to try to see if they'll work.

#1 - Alexa.com is one of the best ways to find current news items. It was on Alexa.com last week that I saw a random Gather.com article about Brad Pitt shaving his beard -- so I wrote a simple article on Examiner.com titled "Brad Pitt shaves his beard (photos)" and posted it. Amazingly, that one article brought in so much traffic, thank God, it landed me at the #2 most viewed articles in Arts & Entertainment category on Examiner, and paid several hundred dollars. (Of course Google Trends is still there, but so many scammers and scraper sites pull from that list, and the list is so small, down to 20 items, it's not what it used to be.)

#2 - It's all about Bing.com -- at least it was for that piece. I was amazed by the amount of traffic I received on that piece -- not from Google, but from Bing.com. So Examiners, make sure to submit each of your pieces to Bing.com here, because you never know when that will bring you a boatload of traffic.

#3 Check PicApp.com. PicApp is a cool free service that lets writers use pics from different sources with a link back to their site. I've set up several bookmarks like this one searching for interesting PicApp pics from PacificCoastNews -- but mostly, I use PicApp when I can't find celeb pics from other sources, and they update pretty often, but I use it to build around a story already in my brain if it interests me enough.

#4 - Check Examiner.com photos of the day. That's a new thing Examiner.com has put up, with Getty Images and such. It might lead us to a big story.

#5 - Check your Examiner.com stats ad naseum. At least I know I do. Using Google Analytics and other real-time stats tells me something that I hope Examiner.com is incorporating soon -- at least I know with the redesign they said they plan to give us an easier way to incorporate stat-tracking code. But anyway, checking my stats info throughout the day helps me know what stories are hitting and why -- without stat-tracking code, I would've never known Bing.com could be the powerhouse traffic-getting source that it was that day. Plus, it's telling me to maybe I should try for shorter titles more often.

#6 - Write fast, and use the Basic Editor more often. That's a lesson I learned after being an advanced editor addict. Turns out I still use the advanced editor pretty often -- but I'm more of a basic editor freak these days. I can copy a pic I want to use, write up the text in Notepad, copy the text over to Microsoft Word to make sure I correct most spelling errors and that my word count is over 200 words -- and then plop the text into the basic editor -- and plop my stat code into the video code place (I only have to switch to advanced editor if I have more than one video code I want to embed along with my stats code) and publish. It's fast and free and good.

#7 - Use the Firefox browser -- I'm so in love with Mozilla Firefox, I get mad when I can't use it. I use it as my main browser. I've got a bunch of bookmarks all along the top of my browser -- Alexa, the Examiner Login page, PayPal, iGoogle, YouTube's rising videos, most popular videos, Seo Book, and the links to submit my articles to Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Beyond the top, I've also bookmarked stuff like which of my Examiner.com articles have made it into Google News and the like.

I love the fact that Firefox actually remembers my logins and passwords -- and that shaves tons of time off my day, leaving more time to create content.

#8 I stopped reading the majority of my comments -- Instead of wasting time reading what trolls may have to say (yes, I may miss a ton of great comments) I've chosen to focus more on putting out content, instead of getting riled up and responding to fake or spam stuff.