So Happy New Year Guys.

The festivities are drawing to a close in our house, luckily no family member has yet killed another (although it was close last night when the last lime was used up in some fancy cake when I needed it for my gin and tonic).

And it’s a new year.

I always feel an amazing sense of anticipation at this time of year, and business and personal ideas buzz round my head.

Reading the emails and blog posts that have been sent and written by various internet marketing experts is always interesting at this time of year, and the advice ranges from excellent to downright obvious ‘BUY MY PRODUCT’!

I on the other hand being generous, giving and extremely hung over feel like offering words of wisdom instead.

Joking aside this is something that hit me when I first came across it (it’s old advice) and I keep a reminder pinned above my desk because I’m guilty as Hell of this particular internet marketing crime.

It’s simply this – not all activity is productive.

Getting up, logging onto your PC and just doing ‘stuff’ won’t bring you any money. You need to be doing the right stuff.

I love designing web page graphics. Adore fiddling about with Photoshop. The thing is, if there was a prize for being crap at it, my shelf would be full because I’m hopeless.

Now that’s an obvious example of doing ‘stuff’ that doesn’t increase my income. It’s much more profitable for me to pay a web designer (hello Darren) to do it for me because in the 8 hours it would have taken me to design a horrible looking header I can earn ten times the cost of the graphic work.

But sometimes it’s not so easy to spot.

What about going through my Aweber account and deleting the people who have unsubscribed but are still on the list?

What about a blog post that doesn’t link to any product or serve any sort or promotional service (like this one) but I just fancied writing anyway?

And what about things that you THINK make you money like writing and submitting articles?

Sure they can create income, but at some point you’ll hit a level where you should be outsourcing this type of thing and getting stuck in to something that you’re really good at – in my case it’s writing ebooks or coming up with new product ideas.

Go back through your Paypal or Clickbank account and look at where most of your online income came from for the past couple of months. THIS will show you where you should be concentrating your efforts.

I was quite amazed to find that a noticeable chunk of last month’s income came from affiliate selling, yet I rarely concentrate on this sort of work unless it’s from pre-existing income streams.

So this month I’ll be making a bit more of an effort to make some affiliate sales in various niches and maybe concentrating less on pay per click, which I enjoy dabbling with but takes up my time and last month only brought in a couple of hundred dollars.

Likewsie if your business isn’t yet bringing in a lot of money the temptation is to try  different things. So for example if you try affiliate marketing and find it only brings in $100 one month, should you try pay per click or article writing?

Well yes, AT SOME POINT, but for now why not stick with something that you can see works?

If you can make $100 through affliate sales then tweak, test and double your efforts rather than spending time on just doing ‘stuff’ that other internet marketers say they do.

Trust your own bottom line – your balance sheet. It’s concrete and real proof of YOUR workable system. Do what has brought you cash. Do it again. Once you know how to do it, outsource it to someone else while you try something else maybe.

And as for 2009….

 Well a leading UK mental health organization has just announced that making new year resolutions is bad for you because it can cause you to become depressed if you don’t acheive your goals.

Well as a marketer it could also leave you poor if you don’t hit some targets and set some goals.

I’m not a huge fan of goal settings but I often promise myself when starting a new product that I won’t judge the results in ANY way for at least 3 months. This gives me breathing space to get on with the project without having one of those crappy deadlines like ‘By 1st March I will have made $10,000 from this project’ approaching.

The next person who tells me to write a goal on a postcard and keep it in my wallet could find they’re storing said postcard in a much darker and tighter place.

Don’t give yourself a hard time just because it’s a new year – instead make things easy on yourself my not trying to judge or quantify what you’re doing for at least 60 days. Tell yourself you won’t set any goals or think about any results so you can focus on the actual task of DOING rather than watching with dread as your goal deadline approaches.

This year is going to be a tough one for a lot of people so don’t go hard on yourself – you need all the emotional support you can get and there’s nobody better than you to provide it.

Instead congratulate yourself for having the balls (ladies too) for actually DOING rather than just thinking about it or as most of the population do, whining but not trying to improve things.

That’s it from me I think. I was considering having some lunch now but after watching (at 2am as the drink flowed) someone’s granny trying to break the Yorkshire record for how far they can carry a pork pie using just their arse cheeks I think I’ll give it a miss.

Happy New Year.

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