Recently, I was listening to a series of cassette tapes published by direct response marketing legend Dan Kennedy. While there were a great many valuable lessons that I learned while listening to the tapes, one particular story caught my attention as being something that applies to a great number of real estate agents in our industry.

Dan talked about a chiropractor who found a niche by moving from town to town, setting up new chiropractic practices, then selling each practice once it's generating more than $1,000,000 a year in income. This chiropractor's goal along the way is to generate 72 new patients a month for each of his new chiropractic businesses.

When giving a talk to other chiropractors about how to successfully build their practices, an audience member asked this man, "What's the one thing I can do that will generate 72 new patients a month for my business?" And the man responded by saying, "I can't tell you the one thing to do that will generate 72 new patients a month for your practice. But I can tell you 72 things to do that will generate one new patient. And I can also tell you that I do all 72 of them."

This reminded me of what I sometimes experience when talking with real estate agents who are looking for one simple, magic activity they can do that will have them become incredibly successful in our industry. And when I come across agents like these, what they're looking to find speaks volumes about what their underlying attitude is...one of "I don't want to do what's normally necessary to become successful. I really just want to do what's easier." And I can tell you from experience that the agents who normally think this way are often the ones who struggle at being successful in our industry.

The chiropractor in the example above developed his system of doing many different approaches simultaneously in order to find new clients. And in every city he moves to, the results are basically the same. He develops one more chiropractic practice that he sells, to another doctor, for a handsome profit.

So in reading this story, what are all the activities you could be doing right now to develop more business for you in your real estate career? And in helping you to better know what these are, and assist you in staying on track in getting them done, I also have an exercise that I'd like you to do.

Get a stack of 100 or more 3" X 5" index cards and a pen, and go somewhere quiet where you won't be disturbed. This means you'll definitely want to turn your cell phone off too. You may want to go to a library, a park, the beach, or just somewhere where it's quiet for you. And in doing this, I highly recommend that you do it someplace other than in your home or in your office.

What you want to do is brainstorm and write down every idea you can think of for developing new real estate business. Write one idea down on each index card, then move onto the next index card with a new idea. If you need to write down a phrase or a few sentences to clarify your ideas on one or more of your index cards please feel free to do so.

The truth is, you've probably had many ideas about activities you can do to develop new business for yourself, but many of these ideas may just remain fleeting thoughts that come into your mind from time to time and then disappear. This process will enable you to write down each and every business development idea you can think of, and then have all them in one place to look at, review, and continually take action on, in your real estate business.

There's probably no shortage of new ideas to utilize in developing your real estate business at a higher level. The shortage, if it exists, is probably in the follow-through of actually remembering these ideas and then implementing them.

This exercise, like the chiropractor story above, also came from Dan Kennedy. When I first heard him describe the exercise I thought to myself, "Why do I need to do all of this on index cards? I can just make a list of these activities on my computer instead." But there is a real difference in taking the time to write these ideas down on individual index cards, hold them in your hands, flip through them one by one, and be able to physically have a wealth of ideas on these cards available to you at all times. It's a very different feeling and a much more powerful process to do it this way. In addition, you may want to have a special box that you keep all these ideas in, as they truly represent your greatest marketing opportunities in the weeks, months, and years ahead, and they should be treated appropriately.

So if you're thinking you'd like to come up with, and implement, more strategies to take your real estate business to the next level, I highly recommend that you do this exercise. When you do so you'll probably feel refreshed and excited about all the new opportunities you've written down for yourself, and you'll probably also feel that achieving the next level of success in your real estate business is now much closer to you.