KARON: Good point! What else can you tell us about your “magic formula?”

MARNIE: Well, both sites have *LOTS* of pages people can visit. As you know, more pages = more doors for visitors to enter = more listings in search engines = more traffic!

KARON: Keep going… I’m all ears.

MARNIE: The masthead I told you about earlier helps drive traffic from my heavy-hitter sites to my newer sites. Among other things, it features articles and tips from site contributors. Then, in my newsletters, I encourage people to go to site to read further. In other words, everything's not there in email, they have to go to site to get some of content. KARON: Well, you just have all kinds of tricks up your sleeve, don’t you? Anything else?

MARNIE: Yes, actually : ) IdeaMarketers is also a "newsworthy" site that is used as a resource for many people. It tends to get a lot of mentions in articles simply because of its nature. And because of quality of site, IdeaMarketers has been recommended in a lot of high-traffic ezines.

KARON: So combination of all these elements creates a Web site that people WANT to visit time and again, right? Marketing sites such as these is left more to visitors than to your efforts, huh?

MARNIE: In a way. The visitors most certainly are reason for my success. As I said before, search engines are not to be ignored, and I’m a firm believer in ezine advertising, but when you build a site designed around visitor interaction, traffic usually comes without a struggle.

KARON: Thanks so much, Marnie. This gives us some serious issues to think about.

MARNIE: My pleasure!

The two sites of Marnie’s we mentioned in this interview are her article promotion site http://www.ideamarketers.com, and her women’s spiritual growth site http://www.shelovesgod.com. Visit them today to see Marnie’s traffic pulling designs in action.

We tried to get her to find out what needed to be done, but she got defensive and was difficult to deal with. After about six months of problems, it became too much; we had to find another farrier. When we told her we were switching, she got snotty.

"Don't you want to know why?" we asked her.

"No", she said bluntly, and hung up.

We know that many of Marlon's other customers also switched. Trish has ruined her father's business of over 30 years, which is a tragedy. But another tragedy is that Trish bought business from him and is making payments. They are both going to lose.

There are two lessons here having to do with learning. The first one is this: if you are delivering a flawed or otherwise inferior product, you must learn how to fix it! What do you think will happen if you do a poor job and don't even try to make it right? If she had shown a willingness to "do whatever it takes" to fix problems she was causing, we would have been more patient.

The other lesson is this: if you lose a customer it is imperative that you find out why and learn from situation. If it's because of something that you did, you may be able to fix it and save customer, but even if you can't save this one, you may be able to prevent losing anyone else.