A person surrounds themselves with their own world. All their thoughts reflect what they put around them.

Nowhere is this truer than in Internet Marketing.  It’s taken me a bit to see this (years), but now it’s starting to shine through a bit. For all the Website Marketing you do though social media, it’s only what you can affect, cause, influence, or control which makes any difference in what you receive, acquire, attain, or become.

Key datums here:

• You can’t interact more than about 200 people routinely, on the average.
• Social media will be only about two or three sites you visit and interact with all the time.
• More than a couple of blogs on different topics will keep you more than busy.
• The vast majority of people only ever do one thing at a time very well.

So you have to pick out your world and refine it to reflect back at you what you most enjoy, what helps you develop your passion so you can share your talents with the world.

If’ you’ve seen “The Secret”, there’s a teacher of Feng Shui there. And she makes a very valid point. The world you live in is chosen by you and simply reflects back at you – reinforces, actually – what you consider the world to be.  Kinda like a hall of mirrors. The art and furniture and general organization of your room will tell you much about how your mental room looks like inside your head – because it is a reflection of how you think. (Now we could go into the metaphysical here – but the story she told was of the guy who wanted dating and romance in his life and put a painting in each corner of his house to create that life for himself, replacing the paintings of women looking away that he had there originally.)

Online, it’s the same deal.

Discover the community you are part of and find the groups which reflect this. There are hundreds of thousands of social networks and groups out there. Just pick the ones which serve your interests best and start listening there, then contributing when you feel you can do so with real value. Sit at the feet of Masters for awhile and just listen before you add your two cents…

Now, social media publishing sites aren’t necessarily the same deal. Flickr, YouTube, and Archive.org all have communities, but they are more big clearing houses for content. As well, most of the micro-blog networks are good for very light, fast communicating – but your substance still has to be on your own site, your hub. Blogs you track and leave comments at, plus the forums – these are also communities.

The trick is to build your hub-site to reflect the real you. For most people, this is just having a single blog/site which they attend to and tweak and care for. This has all the opt-in’s on it and the analytics running constantly. This is where you put most of your eggs.

My point here is to simply pick those few areas where you can actually and factually do your best work, where you can contribute the best value, where you can help the most.

Don’t clutter your world with a ton of useless garbage. If you wouldn’t have it in your living room or your apartment, then don’t clutter your personal online world with stuff you can’t take care of. Some people are gardeners and some people are farmers. But most of us can’t really take care of more than one or two (smeall) pets and half a dozen potted plants in our lives.

So pick out your online world carefully and only those you can feed, water, and care for by your lonesome.

Some additional posts of interest:

• The death of search engines isn’t widely exaggerated at all…
• Inmates know how to unlock the sanitarium gates?
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• Why I’ve learned to love link-bait scraping
• Misuse “Conversation Domination” for SEO – its flaws and failures
• Basics of a small business start up – the Sunshine Marketing Plan
• Cheap way to get in-bound links from social media with images