My #1 piece of advice: you NEED a balanced college list.
What that means is that you have a healthy mix of colleges that qualify as likelies, targets, and reaches.
How To Create Your College List
Are you going in circles trying to decide which colleges to apply to?
With 4,000 colleges in the United States, it's probably a little overwhelming trying to narrow down your list.
If you don't approach this the right way, you could end up spending thousands of dollars and hours on application fees and personal essays...only to realize you're not really into those schools when the time comes to commit.
You might be narrowing down by the obvious metrics: size, public vs. private, region, rankings...but I want to encourage you to go deeper.