It’s easy to follow friends on Facebook and Twitter.

And it’s easy to sign up for lists and get emails in your inbox.

It’s less easy to ignore them once you’ve clicked the appropriate button.

You worry about whether your new friend (who you’ve probably never met) will be offended if you stop following them or unfriend them or unsubscribe from their mailing list.

Chances are, they’ll just chalk your unfollow up to “it happens”.

But if you don’t part company, you need to be careful.

It’s so easy to allow negative influences into your life and – with my self help, law of attraction, hat on – those gradually shape your thoughts and drag you down into their way of thinking.

The law of attraction gets a lot of hype but, deep down, it works.

Napoleon Hill used it in Think and Grow Rich, so it’s not a new concept, just an older concept that’s been grabbed by the new agers.

For instance, there’s a marketer on Facebook whose posts regularly show up in my feed.

I’ve exchanged messages with him and promoted some of his products.

The products are good. But a lot of the messages in his feed are negative. Maybe because he’s attracted some people to his list who are after a quick buck and use methods that won’t last. He then starts posts about those methods and before long there’s a thread that seems to be a mile long with everyone talking about whichever method or thing he’s started talking about.

It’s the internet equivalent of daytime TV with some of the seedier aspects of that medium.

And I’ve hit “hide post” in an attempt to reduce its impact on me – if that doesn’t work, I’ll hit the unfollow option so I stay on the friends list but don’t see his posts at all. That’s how Facebook have dealt with the approval “what if I offend them” side of things.

If someone on your feed is being negative too often or is simply posting too much that everyone else gets excluded, go down that same route yourself and hide them.

The same goes for marketing emails that drop into your inbox.

Deleting them is easy but doesn’t stop the next one from arriving.

Marking them as spam kind-of cures the problem but the computers that look after that logic don’t always continue filtering them to spam so there’s a chance they’ll pop back in to your main inbox.

Unsubscribing works and keeps things a lot cleaner. The downside is that it takes a bit longer but that’s only a one-off process.

The marketer may or may not get notified that you’ve unsubscribed. They may or may not check the message. And they may or may not recognise your name and get upset.

Chances are they’ll just think “OK, that happens” if there’s a thought at all.

If you do this on a fairly regular basis, you’ll keep your mind going in the right direction more often.

And you’ll declutter your Facebook feed as well as your inbox so there’ll be less processing time needed to get rid of all the stuff you didn’t really want there in the first place.

Think of it as spring cleaning your internet life.

And then enjoy the feeling of freedom it gives you because you can spend those previously unproductive seconds doing something more productive in your internet marketing.

That’s win-win!