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Issue 5 > Fifteen things I wish I had known when I started my first blog.

Fifteen things I wish I had known when I started my first blog.

Neil Patel explains what he's learned.

During the last three years I created two blogs, my first (Pronet Advertising) is on marketing and my second (Quick Sprout) is on business. Although both of my blogs do well, I made my share of mistakes.

I am not a big believer in regrets and I have learned a lot over the last 3 years, but if I started all over again, I would do things very differently.

Don't blog about news. Within your industry there are probably dozens of blogs that write about the news.

So why do the same? I know blogging about the news can get you more traffic, but it doesn't provide your readers with much value.

Pronet Advertising was accepted into Google news a few years ago, this meant that it could appear really high in the Google search results for almost any search term. Due to this, I would analyze Google trends and write on things that were hot. This was a great way to get tons of traffic, but my readers didn't care to read blog posts that were news related.

Pick a niche. My first blog was about marketing, the problem with that niche was that there were too many blogs that already discussed marketing.

Sooner or later I realized this and started blogging about social media marketing instead of general marketing. After I did this, my blog became so popular that it got into the Technorati 100.

Now I don't have a niche with Quick Sprout, but if I had, it would be more popular. Make sure you pick a niche with your blog.

Pick a big niche. As I mentioned above, my first blog was about social media marketing.

Quick Sprout also had a niche at one point and it was personal branding. Both of these niches were so small, that I got tired of blogging on them.

With my first blog, I just stopped blogging on it. With Quick Sprout, I ended up changing the blog from being on personal branding to business.

You want to pick a niche, but it can't be too small. If it is, you may run out of content ideas.

Be passionate. I wasn't too passionate about social media marketing, which is why I stopped blogging on Pronet Advertising.

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