Evans Liberal Politics, August 31, 2010, by Paul Evans:

I want to do a creditable job with this blog post because it might be the last you see from me for a while. Certainly you won’t see anything else from me today, and I want to let you know that I will no longer be blogging “the news” on a regular basis. I can’t. I am going to have a life now. Blogging liberal news and politics ruined my life. And it could very easily happen to you. It’s a sucker’s game, and you’re not going to win, and you’re not going to make a fortune. I just wanted to recount here what happened to me by way of an explanation, just in case there might be one or two people who read this who might care, either because they are my friends or because you might have picked this up on Google, and you might actually want to know, so you can avoid what happened to me.

It started with a genuine and worthwhile interest in the political process. I have some liberal friends. One of them volunteers for the Democratic Party and another is the Wayne County Democratic Party official secretary and also belongs to the Wayne County Progressive Network. Another friend, a church pastor, is active in charity and liberal political causes. So it was natural that in about 2005, I started to get involved a little as an activist. If I hadn’t had problems most of my life with mental illness, I probably would have got involved a lot earlier in my life than that.

In late 2005, I became friends with the owner of a computer repair shop. A guy working out of his office in downtown Wooster and I became friends a few years later, and that guy was a website designer. Well, you can put two and two together. The bug bit and I started taking courses in website design from him, and learned how to program in HTML, XHTML and CSS. Meanwhile, Obama burst onto the national political scene. It was July, 2008, and I started campaigning for Obama, mainly over in Canton, Ohio. I had campaigned some in the fall of 2005, also. Then Obama got the nomination and I started putting liberal news and politics posts up on my brand new website design business website, Evans Web Design.

But I got to thinking, I was alienating half of my potential business clientele, since any conservatives — and Wayne County is 62 percent Republican — sure wouldn’t very likely want to do business with a website designer who had all this liberal news and politics all over his business website. So, I guess it must have been in about March of 2009, I bought the domain http://www.evans-politics.com/ and moved all of my music, my music videos, my nature images, and every last drop of the liberal news and politics material over onto the new Evans Liberal Politics. And so it began.

At that time I was seriously dating a lady from Cleveland, and some time was occupied editing and in fact rewriting her book on spiritualist Christianity, If You Plant Roses You Don’t Get Carnations: An Introduction to Spiritualism (Amazon book description and purchase page). My mother Eleanor had also recently died (February 8, 2007) and I was completely responsible for the care of my elderly father, Jack.

Well Evans Liberal Politics went from being a hobby to become what I have realized has been a nightmare in my life. It started with a sincere belief, arising out of my participation in the Obama campaign, that ordinary people might have a hand in changing the world, and was also very much my own means of self expression and I enjoyed it. But then I started to get ambitious for my website.

Let me add parenthetically that it sure feels odd writing this particular article, since it’s just more of the same. It’s doing what I’ve “always done,” putting up more content on my website. But it’s the last time for a while. Not only has Evans Liberal Politics brought you a minimum of two, and usually three to six or more blog posts every single day since November of 2008, but the process itself has exhausted me, ennervated me, and ruined me financially and as an individual human being. During that period, I wrote a more personal news column (like this one) about once a week or more. I don’t know, but I think writing a column when you are trying hard to use good English, connect with readers, give out some good news or political content, and somehow express yourself as though you are an experienced professional writer, is not so easy. I tried so hard that the effort actually had me on the edge of a physical breakdown for exhaustion for maybe a year, now. And really, it brought me nothing but heartache, no wide readership, no web popularity, just false hopes that extended on far too long. They only could have extended on this long if, as has been the case, I was basically obsessed with “becoming somebody” on the web. No reasonable person would have kept at it this long, making essentially zero money, and with no audience. But here’s what happened.

I was spending hours every day putting up the news for my website. My best friend and his wife started commenting that I was spending all my time with Evans Liberal Politics, and that it didn’t seem very healthy to them. And I started staying up late at night, getting the news ready for the next day’s audience. (Every night about 11 p.m. or midnight began the daily struggle to get some new material up so that there would be at least a little traffic, a few people who would want to come to my website. If you don’t put out new material for Google’s and Yahoo’s search engines, you don’t get found in searches and you don’t get visitors.) My website designer friend gave me advice on how to make the site better and how to popularize it, but it never got very popular, despite my efforts. I just tried harder.

Soon I was putting up four or five — or seven or eight – articles a day. For several days, a few months ago, I was putting up ten articles per day, but the traffic never increased above 100 to 200 — on a good day — page views per day. My parents had benefited from my poor deceased sister’s IRA, and also had inherited some money from Dad’s mother Mae, my grandmother, so there was some extra money and I started to advertise with Google and then also Facebook and Microsoft AdCenter. This was pay-per-click advertising, where the website ad gets featured with the results of relevant searches, and you end up paying about 75 cents to even a dollar or more each time somebody clicks an ad and comes to your website. It added up, too. Fast.

One Blog Owner’s Story

I kept trying, but still, the traffic didn’t increase much. If I had fifty thousand dollars to put into advertising, then maybe I would have gotten somewhere, but I just ended up spending about three or four thousand dollars and got nowhere. I was still trying, though, and I still had a lot of ambition for my liberal news and politics website. In about September of 2009, I got really ambitious. I started looking around for a high powered marketer with a national reputation. Well I didn’t know how to find just the right marketer, and I’m sure I went way too much overboard, but I found Website Consultants out of Miami and New York state, and they advised me that if I hired them, they would change the website over from one using Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, and later Dreamweaver CS4, which is a website creation program, to a WordPress installation. WordPress had a lot of great plugins and has become all the rage in blogging circles. It’s free, too. (For those with some technical knowledge, WordPress is a PHP based, MySQL datbase that needs a Linux server to work. PHP is the programming language WordPress operates with, although it is easy to find a free plugin that allows you to make posts in the much simpler programming language HTML or XHTML, which has to some extent superceded the older HTML.)

By the way, I wanted to take this opportunity to say that as a website designer, I have learned a lot in these few years. I can now easily design a WordPress site myself, and optimize it so that IF you can yourself come up with content that will draw in traffic, I’d be happy to design your site. With the internet the way it is, that’s a big IF. It’s darned hard to get popular on the web. I believe I now have some proof of that fact. But please feel encouraged to either email me or phone 330-202-7661, and we can talk. But I really think that my own limitations are not much in the area of website design any longer: I’ve gotten quite good through my experience with Evans Liberal Politics, and would be happy to design your website or blog. Please contact me if you are interested.

It’s easy to see what happened here. I became obsessed with Evans Liberal Politics. National high powered marketers are NOT cheap, and it cost me $700 for a three month trial and then I went all out and spent $5,200 to hire them on a long term contract. Evans Liberal Politics became a WordPress site and the domain (website address) changed from http://www.evans-politics.com/ to the simpler http://evans-politics.com/. Websites Consultants fixed it so that typing in the www address redirected a web browser to the new address without any www’s and I thought I was going to become somebody.

The funny thing was, even though I spent thousands on a national level consultant and several thousand on advertising, my traffic never picked up that much. I kept trying, and refused to consider getting discouraged. I was on the first page of ten results from a Google search for the search term, “liberal politics”! To me, that meant I JUST HAD to start getting a lot of traffic soon. I started putting advertising on both my website design site and Evans Liberal Politics. Now, if you BUY advertising, you’re going to run up a fortune in costs in no time. But the funny thing is with all the advertising companies I tried, it doesn’t matter how many times somebody loads a page with your ads, you don’t get paid a cent, then. AND you don’t even get paid anything if people click on your ads and are taken to a web page where they might buy something. NO the way all this advertising works is, to get paid, the ads have to appear one heck of a lot of times, and a lot of people have to click on them, and then they have to actually buy something. Then, and only then, do you get paid anything.

I have even wondered if Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest of them have the search engines totally rigged so that only the “big boys” get the traffic. But I guess mainly the limitations are my own, and mainly there the fact that, while I am pretty good at programming web pages, writing, editing and finding authors for the site, I just have never had that certain “magic” that it takes to find a topic, a video, or somehow make your site into something that becomes very popular. And I no longer mind that, at all.

So You Want to Write A Blog?

As you can see, unless you’re really, really popular with many thousands of page views, you’re not going to essentially make anything. On my best day, I had about 1,100 page views and made almost six dollars off of the ads. But that was a huge exception, and other than that, the most page views I get is a little over 200 views. And perhaps about 100 or 120 unique visitors. So I might make 50 or 60 cents off of the ads if I’m lucky, that is, IF one person goes so far as to buy something. The main reason I was encouraged to keep trying was that in terms of my Google rankings, thanks to a few WordPress plugins and great search engine optimization by Website Consultants, I kept getting high rankings for broad, widely searched phrases on Google Search, which about 60 or 70 percent of what people use for searches for content they are interested in. I never could understand how, with a billion personal computer users worldwide, I could be featured often as the top result for the search term “liberal politics,” or at least be on the first page of results, and for example be number two for the search term “liberal Christian news,” and number five for “rock and pop playlist,” and still not get the traffic I needed to either make a little money or at least have the satisfaction of knowing I was reaching a wide audience.

I suppose I could also have been luckier, and someone who really knew what they were doing about making a website popular might have decided to partner with me, or help me. Maybe then things might have worked out. I didn’t have the money to continue to employ Website Consultants and no one ever volunteered to help me at all with Evans Liberal Politics. I only have a certain level of knowledge as a website designer. I know one thing that would have helped is if I knew the programming language Flash, or was good with PHP, I could have made the blog posts expandable, so that only the first paragraph or two was showing, and then the pages wouldn’t have been so terribly long. I think a lot of people may have objected to having to scroll down real long pages, and that may have hurt the popularity or the site. Daily Kos has expandable posts and I always wished I could have programmed that into my home page.

Another money drain was because my intense love of music caused me to start buying royalty rights to stream music for the site. I thought that having some really good music on my Paul’s Playlist of Rock and Pop Hits would get me the traffic I wanted. At the time, most songs from artists you have mainly never heard of cost about $30 each to buy the royalty rights to stream one song. That cost me a lot, too. But I was still trying. (Later I learned how to find really good music to stream for you over on Paul’s Playlist of Rock and Pop Hits for nothing, and I know we have a really good product for you there. 183 rock, pop and electronic rock hits, most by well-known, commercial artists. But it just never took off.) Sigh.

Well it got so that I didn’t do anything else in my life but work on Evans Liberal Politics. I’m sure my friendships suffered because of this, and I know my dating life suffered, and I became basically obsessed to get Evans Liberal Politics popular and find a widespread audience. I am very sad to admit to you that, due to my stupidity and obsession, I am in fact guilty of having neglected the proper care of my elderly father when he was at home with me. Not a lot, but a little. Jack is a very wonderful man, and has been a wonderful father to me, and to think I could have been spending many hours with him doing stuff together and was just glued to the old computer instead… And I will never live that down. I will always know that I put my ambition for this website ahead of being my father’s proper caregiver and companion in the last years of his life. That’s really sad. I even neglected my own personal hygiene. And also my addiction to cigarettes got worse as I just sat hour after hour, blogging away.

It’s a sucker’s game folks. Don’t get sucked in. I know for certain that I provided a quality product, that I have always been high in the Google search rankings, and that I never stopped for a single day when I had it within the realm of human possibility, to always put up fairly interesting, and relevant content. Moreover I kept up with the news, and I rarely let a good topic that was in that day’s news slip buy without putting up an article about it. I managed to get really well thought of authors for Evans Liberal Politics, like Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. Back before he died, the wonderful progressive writer Howard Zinn used to let me post his stuff, too. I got several featured writers from Daily Kos and also Campaign from America’s Future, too. And I found out that the AlterNet and Truthout original articles, and those from Common Dreams.org, have no copyright and can be easily republished at no risk. I was always careful to put a link with description to the original with any article I ever republished. And I spent hours and hours slaving away myself, trying to write an original article every other day or so, if for no other reason than to lend my website some additional credibility, so I thought.

The single most popular liberal blog, Daily Kos, is reputed to get between 2 and 4 million unique viewers per day. If I had even got to the point where I was regularly getting ten thousand, I would not be writing this particular article, and I would have kept trying. But I think that for ordinary people, trying to get popular on the web today is a sucker’s game.

Well, I want my life back. I stopped enjoying using my own computer a year or so ago. All my time was spent blogging or arranging details like marketing, advertising and authors for Evans Liberal Politics. And do you think a page or blog post just APPEARS on the web??? You have to get the author’s permission, and then you have to code, or program, the blog post. You end up typing and cutting and pasting hour after hour. And to do this since November of 2008 and average perhaps 170 page views per day, just isn’t worth it. I neglected my father, I became obsessed, and I made my own life a kind of living hell, not to mention squandering a few tens of thousands of dollars I would dearly love to have back.

Tomorrow (which is today, since it is almost 3 o’clock in the morning), I am not going to be adding more to the site than is here with this article, and in fact, the regular, exhausting process of putting out the daily news is over for me. I want to live again. I don’t want to be a typing automaton. What does it matter at all to me if I get ten viewers a day or 150? What difference could that possibly make to a sane person? I want to take the time to watch some movies on my computer, and surf the web. Moreover, I want a life away from the computer. I want to shower and shave every day, visit my Dad at the nursing home every day, and begin anew the learning process of being a human being.

So that’s it from Evans Liberal Politics. I Quit. Not one person ever emailed me from this site and then befriended me. People just aren’t that friendly, I guess. Have a wonderful day, everyone! It’s been real. I might put up something I’m especially interested in once in a while. But I won’t be doing it to try to attract an audience. I’ve learned my lesson there. I am going to take my dog for a walk today. Watch a movie and play in the sunshine. Not only that, but I’ve been interviewing for a real job, and yesterday I just may have been hired at not one, but two, part time jobs. Real work. That pays money. I do believe that I am going to “get a life.” I want to thank Bert Bishop, Kay Bowen, Linda King, and especially Shannon Hedrick and Wesley Wright for helping me get to the point to where I could see that I had to “stop the madness” and begin living my life again. May God Bless you all, each and every one of you. ~ Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans

UPDATE: September 3, 2010, from Paul: I was just hired to do telemarketing from home here in Wooster by a Cleveland based marketing firm. You make calls using your computer and one of three programs they supply you with. Yesterday I spent six or seven hours studying their materials and filling out all the paperwork required for the job and mailed it out Priority Mail. The job is 15 to 30 hours a week and has a flexible schedule, which will in fact leave me with quite a bit of free time, especially since I don’t require a whole lot of sleep.

The fact is, blogging is at this point pretty much “in my blood,” and I actually enjoy typing and am a really good typist. So expect continued blog posts from me, even though the audience is quite small, just as a means of self expression. I know that some few people really do enjoy Evans Liberal Politics, and I enjoy putting out the blog posts. Maybe that makes me unusual or even weird, but I don’t agree with the weird part. Just a different sort of animal. A blogger. Evans Liberal Politics will therefore live on! However I am really going to try to take better care of myself. Also, having made many of the mistakes a new blogger can make, I find myself more experienced and wiser, I hope, about the whole blogging scene. I am going to really try to get enough sleep, too. Thanks to anyone who read this far and might be concerned. Love and Peace, Paul

"Old bloggers never die, they just become part of the internet legacy."

Evans Liberal Politics Theme Music

"Another One Bites The Dust:" Sigh. This is Queen, of course. Blogs Come and Blogs Go. Only the Internet Goes On Forever. — 3:25

"It’s A Long Way to The Top If You Wanna Rock & Roll," by the AC/DC Swiss tribute band Live/Wire (sorry, no bagpipes!) This is my unofficial theme song for Evans Liberal Politics. — 5:34

“Come Save Me”, a meticulously produced, downtempo, smooth R&B / Pop track, by Dan Gatreau. I keep wondering where the woman who will save me from all this is, and why she hasn’t come into my life yet. — 3:07

“Blue Shiva,” a really cool and hip sort of long electronic piece by Massimo Migliosi, obtained from download.com (when they were still offering free music). — 11.09

*****

To make a Word or .pdf document of an article, or share or email it, simply load the individual article by clicking the dark blue title at the very top, or use the icons beneath the article.

We’re Counting on You!
Tell Your Friends About Evans Liberal Politics!

Listen to 183 Rock and Pop Hits!

Our Playlist is #1 Rated by Google