This article was orginally written to teach my members how to get ISP clients, but you can use it for almost any business that you are in.

--------------------------------------------------------- Earn With the Secret of a Well Defined Target ---------------------------------------------------------

This is the second secret to building your business. Without this you will wander without direction dispelling your energy ineffectively.

Consider the power of water. If you attempt to strip a wall of an old layer of paint by spraying water in a wide pattern, that paint will never come off. However, if you put pressure behind that water and then narrow the stream so it all comes to one tiny point, or one well defined target, then the paint starts to come off.

The water represents your energy in finding your prospects and motivating them to join your company.

So what we need to do is to take the very same amount of energy you are now using, (with perhaps a little more pressure), and point it to a well defined target so that you can increase your power to build your business by 100 fold or more.

To do this you need to make some decisions. These have to be well thought out and must be backed by a strong burning desire. So make some decisions that seem reasonable, yet challenging enough to be exciting for you.

1. What is the real reason you want an ISP business? Is it to help others, do you like working with people, do you need some money to send your children to college, do you want recognition of accomplishment, do you feel it is a important service you can provide to help others? You must find the reason that you are really doing this.

Without this reason the fire you need for building a business will never start.

2. After you understand the real reason for building your business, now you must decide what amount of money is needed to accomplish your reason.

Start with a reasonable amount, you can always make this amount larger later. The amount needs to be enough to accomplish your reason and enough to be exciting and challenging. But it must not be so much that it seems impossible to do which will put out your fire and your business before you even start.

3. After you have your reason and the amount of money you need to earn you must now decide upon the method which you will use to accomplish your goal.

It is possible you really do not know this method yet so pick what you think is the best and start witht that. As you perform your method you can adjust and change until you get the method that works just right for you.

Once you have found the method that works for you then you must repeat it over and over on a consistent basis.

Some possible methods you may use to build your business are:

A. Calling local businesses on the telephone. B. Visiting local businesses door to door in person. C. Calling business owners you already know and asking for referrals to other business owners and then repeating the process with these new prospects once you are known to the new referrals. D. Contacting friends in person or over the telephone. E. Asking for referrals from your friends and then repeating this process. F. Putting flyers on doors with your phone number. Put an offer for a free trial website or 30 day money back guarantee. G. Getting an interview in the local newspaper or on the radio or television. You will need a special twist to be newsworthy, such as a mother that left corporate america to start her own home based internet business. Be creative. H. Having business cards made up with a compelling advertisement with a call to action on the back of the business card. Give these to everyone especially anyone that may owe you a favor. I. Running a small classified advertisement in the local weekly newspaper. As a general rule the ads in the weekly newspapers give you a lot more pull then the dialy newspapers, and the price is about 1/10th as much. J. Have an announcement on your answering machine that you are running a special for hosting websites. K. Post your business card on bulletin boards where you are known, such as work, your child's pre-school your church, etc. L. Run an advertisement in your local church announcements if they do that. M. Find a busy corner and give away free lemonade with your business card. N. Put a sign in the window of your car, or even get magnetic signs for the outside of your card. O. Have t-shirts made with your advertisement and where them wherever and whenever appropiate. (Your kids little league game maybe). P. Put a compelling offer with call to action on advertising specialties such as mugs, mouse pads, etc. and give them out to quality looking people. Q. Make a professional tent shaped two sided sign and place it in the back of a pickup truck and drive around busy areas in the business district. Be sure to have a phone number, (perhaps a cell phone that you have with you), and a compelling offer with call to action. You could even say, "stop me by calling my cell phone at: " R. Put a compelling offer with call to action on small signs on sticks at busy intersections where people can read them while stopped at a traffic light.

When you become creative there are many more ways than this to become an effective marketer with very little up front expense.

4. Write down a schedule to achieve your levels of income. For example, if you have decided you want to earn $2,000.00 per month profit, you will need to first determine how many clients you will need. It is possible you could do this with only a few clients if you plan to provide HTML, daily maintenance, graphics, etc. Or if you only want to provide the hosting you may need 100 or more clients.

For example let us say you want to provide hosting only with some hand holding for $35.00 per month. Your cost is about $2.00 per month for wholesale, probably $2.00 or so for billing, which will leave you with about a $30.00 monthly profit. To get to your $2,000.00 per month profit you will need about 67 customers.

Now you need to set a time limit to get those 67 customers. Be reasonable about it. If you have decided to contact local businesses via telephone, you will probably need to make 10 presentations to decision makers to find 1 customer.

So to get 67 customers count on 670 presentations. You will need to make numerous calls to get through to decision makers so if you set a goal to make 3 presentations per day that could be reasonable if you were planning on about 2 hours of work per day.

If you are going to work 5 days per week, and do 3 presentations per day, it will take you 44 weeks, or about 10 months to find your 67 customers.

I would then put up a chart tracking your progress. Make hash marks each day for the presentations, and a special mark for each customer.

At the end of each month see how close you are to getting 1/10th of your goal or about 7 new customers every month.

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ALL INGREDIENTS ARE IN PLACE FOR A Well Defined Target

Let us review:

1. What is the real reason you want to build an ISP business? 2. What amount of money is needed to realize your goal? 3. What methods or plan are you going to use to realize your goal? 4. Track your progress on paper with well defined limits each month to meet your goal.

IT IS IMPORTANT ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR SYSTEM IN PLACE YOU REPEAT IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER. ________________________________________________

A personal story:

I refer a lot to Sheridan, Wyoming, as I received a lot of real life lessons about business there.

When I started my cleaning company in November of 1981, my only goal was to make a good living without having to work for someone else.

I did not have any real method of marketing in mind, as I was one of the first people in my family to go into business.

The only thing I knew to do was to paint a sign and hang it up outside a temporary office space shared by a friend of mine.

I learned some lessons about marketing the first year, but I never made any real progress until November of 1982. By accident, see: http:/ imshometownstories.com/THTSchapter11.html

I discovered the powerful method of telemarketing. I then set a specific goal for myself to have a telemarketer make enough calls to get 5 prospects per day. The telemarketers were simply calling and asking if someone could come out and give them a free estimate on carpet cleaning.

Here is what I discovered:

A. 70% of the appointments would actually be there. B. 80% of the appointments would schedule a job to be done after I gave the free estimate. C. The average job was $80.00.

This meant if I could get 25 prospects every week, 17 would be at home and 13 would schedule a job. Now that I had a system all I had to do was do it over and over and over.

This took me from barely eaking out a living to hiring a staff of 4 telemarketers and another full time carpet cleaner to help me handle the work load.

Think about your plans and goals to get your ISP business moving today!

Copyright 2002. Any person using this article must publish it without modification and include authors bio and links.