July 2009

Thinking about starting a business? Here is why you shouldn’t!

by Neil Patel

business failure

Do you want to start a business? You get to be your own boss, set your own hours, and potentially even work from home. Doesn’t that sound great?

Most of the perks that you hear about, aren’t accurate. I know it sounds like an awesome idea, but there is a lot that you don’t know about starting a company. Before you make your decision, here are a few things you should know:

You don’t have one boss, you have multiple bosses

When you work at a 9 to 5 job you have one boss that you have to report to. Whatever your boss tells you to do, you do. You may not always like what he or she is telling you, but at least you only have one person (worse case 2 people) bossing you around.

If you decide to start your own business, every one of your customers is a boss. If you think one boss is bad, think about having 100. Whatever they want, you have to do. If you don’t, your bosses (customers) won’t be happy, which means you won’t be in business much longer. [click to continue…]

202 comments

How To Write A Blog Post

by Neil Patel

writing blog posts

How hard could it be to write a blog post? If a teenager can do it, you can too… right? Well writing a blog post isn’t hard at all, but writing a great blog post is very difficult.

Over the past few years I have started 2 blogs. Although my first blog was a Technorati 100 blog, the content was crap. Readers didn’t care to read the content or engage in the conversation (comment on the blog).

Quick Sprout on the other hand isn’t a Technorati 100 blog, but you actually read the content and engage. I constantly am getting great feedback from you and requests to write more content.

Now I know I am not the best writer out there and I still have a lot to improve upon, but I feel that I have a good formula when it comes to writing blog posts.

Here is how you can write blog posts like me: [click to continue…]

229 comments

8 Things I Learned About You

by Neil Patel

If you are trying to grow your traffic, you have to first understand your visitors. When I first started blogging I thought that I could get a better understanding of who you are by just interacting with you through comments and emails.

Boy, was I wrong! Yes, I did learn some things about you through your comments and emails, but the majority of you don’t comment or email me.

After realizing this, I decided to survey you and dig through my analytics. Here is what I learned about you. [click to continue…]

202 comments

Stop Using Twitter… For Fun

by Neil Patel

twitter

As you already know, Twitter is one of the hottest websites out there. At first, I didn’t think it was useful , but I was wrong. Here is how you should be using Twitter to grow your personal brand and business:

Follow relevant people

Twitter isn’t too useful unless you are following other users. You could go the route of following everyone out there, or you could follow people that interest you.

I have tried both of those routes and I can tell you first hand that following thousands of users is a very difficult thing to do because you won’t be able to keep up with all of the tweets. Due to this I recommend that you go with the second route and only follow people that are sharing their knowledge. [click to continue…]

192 comments