As I write this, it’s the last day of 2013.

If you’re on my list, I’ve sent you a link to this page and wished you a happy and prosperous New Year for 2014.

If you’ve come across this page in a different way then chances are that it’s not the start of the year and may no longer be 2014 but the message applies anyway – it’s only our use of a calendar that marks a relatively arbitrary day as the start of something we call a year, based on the length of time our planet circles our sun.

Anyway, that’s digressing, sorry!

Whether it’s the start of a new year or not, you need to know where you’re going in your life and your business.

Because drifting and hoping for the best generally isn’t good enough unless you’re content with getting less out of life than you could.

If you’ve not got a plan and you haven’t checked out my internet marketing blueprint, now would be as good a time as any.

If you have got a plan and you’ve not looked at it recently then it would be worth digging it out and checking whether you’re still on track and even whether it’s still in line with what you want to do and where you want to go.

At this time of year, it’s traditional to come up with a list of New Year resolutions.

They’re often much like a bucket list but in recent years I’ve found it much better to home in on a handful of things and concentrate on them rather than try (and usually fail) to concentrate on a myriad of things.

If you’ve not done so for a while, take stock of all your current projects.

Jot them down and give them a priority.

If you’re like me, you’ll have quite a few on that list that are “pending” and have been so for longer than you’d care to admit.

I’ve just done that with a project I’m working on with a friend – the domain came up for renewal, we’ve not done anything with it for some time, we have got some time and money invested in it (for instance, a licence for iDevAffiliate). So we took a view that we’d spend the $10 or so on renewing the domain name for a year.

But we also agreed that if we had the same conversation in a year’s time and there had been no progress, we’d agree that it had fallen off our priority list and not renew again.

My guess is that there’s at best a 50/50 chance that we’ll have done something. It seemed a good idea at the time.

It’s worth doing this kind of exercise on a fairly regular basis – I’d suggest maybe quarterly – to keep yourself on track and make sure that you’re not running around in a hundred different directions at once, getting nowhere because you’ve got no time to focus on anything.

Which brings me round to the original thought behind this post.

The New Year will bring lots of different offers your way.

A lot of those will have very good sales copy and/or will pique your interest.

Some will be good. some will be less good (or at least not something you really want to work on, even if they work brilliantly for others), some you’ll buy and never use, some will be worth tens or even hundreds of times the investment you’ve made.

You only need one (maybe two) that fit into that last category to transform your life!

I’ve had several people contact me, asking me to promote their New Year offer.

I do promote other people’s products – it’s part of my business plan – but they are either products I’ve bought and used myself or they’re products where I’ve been sent a review copy and decided that’s a worthwhile product.

This isn’t unique to internet marketing – the travel section in newspapers is full of reviews of places where people have been given the vacation, celebrities Tweet about products they’ve been given, etc.

In certain industries it goes even further.

Supermarkets regularly get paid to put a new product on their shelves (one I heard about recently was given the first boxes free for each store) and charge extra to put items on promotion. They also get bonuses for meeting sales targets.

Again, in internet marketing, there are often bonuses for affiliates: most sales overall, fastest to reach 25 or 100 or whatever sales, best bonus (yes, I’ve seen that), etc.

Which does explain why some of those offers in your inbox seem to be promoted by everyone. They’re all vying to get to the top of the sales leaderboard.

As a rule, it’s not something I participate in unless I believe in the product.

So I’ve hit a “fastest sales” bonus once or twice. But only because I genuinely believed in the product – otherwise it would have been put in the pile of products I could have promoted if I was only interested in my short term profits.

Which doesn’t mean those products don’t work – they probably do – just that I wasn’t comfortable promoting them.

You need to do the same kind of thing – work out your comfort zones.

And also figure out where you should expand them, otherwise you won’t grow as a person or a business.

For me, that means I’ve got a list of product areas that don’t fit my style so I’ll close the sales page as soon as I find that out.

That alone has helped me focus a lot more and it’s something I think you should do.

You almost certainly already know the kind of offers you’ll never use.

For me: CPA, Facebook ads, Pinterest, Twitter (that one may change) and quite a few others.

Your list will be different.

Then there are areas where I know as much if not more than the rest of the market.

I’ll take a view on new ones for these as they may have one thing I’ve missed or forgotten that would make the purchase worthwhile.

Or they could be rehashed rubbish. I don’t often ask for refunds but there are a few vendors that are on my “never buy from again. Ever” list.

And, no, I’m not going to name them because your list will be different – it really is one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

But it’s worth keeping your own list of vendors who don’t live up to expectations.

Incidentally, I do the same with music. I’m old fashioned enough to still buy CDs but if the next couple of releases aren’t up to scratch, the band will go into my “I used to follow them” list.

This may all sound like a lot of work.

But it’s time well spent.

Because it saves time (and maybe money) later.

Anyway, after what seems like a rant, I wish you all the best for the New Year. Whether that’s 2014 if you’re reading this soon after I’ve written this post or some time in the future if that’s the case.

Focus.

Find one or two people you “click” with (back to music – when I was younger I did that with a reviewer in a music paper and bought every album they rated with 5 stars. Which is why my music tastes are varied!) and follow them.

Keep the distractions low.

Focus on a manageable amount of things – just one thing is often boring, so a few is OK. But no so many that you don’t spend any real time on anything.

And set aside some quality time to do stuff on those things.

As little as an hour a day most days will make the world of difference.

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