Key Message: GO TO THE HOME PAGE OF THIS WEBSITE (but read below first).
What is good about blogs is also a source of problems. Blogs like this enable a business like ours to dissmeninate whatever it is we want to disseminate VERY effectively. Every post is automatically re-posted and or syndicated through countless other channels. These "channels" include, in our case, FaceBook (2 accounts), MySpace (2 accounts), a large number of "RSS" (actually stands for "Really Simple Syndication"...really!), Google, LinkedIn, Twitter (2 accounts). All of these get "re-blogged" by numerous other people and organizations, many of which we have never heard of.
All of that attention is good...right? Well, sure, over the years we have become an inescapable presence in search engine (e.g. Google) results. No complaints about that. So what is the down side? There are two big problems:
ONE: Visits through the "back door"
An ever smaller proportion of visits to a blog (e.g. like this one) are from loyal followers and friends who visit the home page to find out the latest news. This is called "coming in through the front door." At the same time, an ever increasing number of visits are "through the back door" when a visitor goes directly to individual pages (posts) that show up in search engine result lists. We know from careful analysis of our visit statistics, that most of these visitors DO NOT visit the home page as we would like them to do...as web etiquette (at least the standards we follow) demands...I would not think of NOT visiting the home page of a site for which a Google search plopped me somewhere deep in its content hierarchy.
What "back door" visitors see is completely out of context. A back door visitor could easily get the impression that we still sell banjos or that our primary business is still selling musical instruments at unrealistically low prices via our online store, the Adventurous Muse Store. NOTE: While the Adventurous Muse Store still sells select used and vintage instruments, bows, cases and the like, our flagship store/galleries for ALL of our own instruments and accessories is now Don Rickert Musical Instruments.
TWO: "Content Rot" and its cousin, "Link Rot"
Much of our content is relatively time-independent. These are the articles that take us a long time to research and write. On the other hand, much content here and on most other blogs in the "webiverse" are ephemeral in intent. For instance, a post about our 2008 Labor Day Sale on one of our online stores is usually devoid of currently useful content...it is spoiled or "rotten" content. Yet, we get hundreds of visitors via search engines to trivial posts like expired store sale announcements. We even have people email or call about getting an item for that special 2008 sale price.
The "link rot" problem is more interesting. Many old posts have links that simply do not work. These are called "broken links." Nobody likes a broken link and they go away angry. A bigger issue for us are links that still work, but they lead (through the "back door" of the Adventurous Muse Store) to obsolete product listings. We have done the best we can to re-direct these visitors to the new Don Rickert Musical Instrument galleries.
Bottom Line:
No matter how you get to this site, do yourself a favor, and do us the courtesy, of visiting the Adventurous Muse home page.
