Robin Hamman, author or the highly to recommend blog cybersoc.com summerized 11 points people new to blogging should know when starting:

1. Sort out your domain name
2. Sign up to a third party RSS service, such as feedburner
3. Join technorati and claim your blog
4. Host your images using another service, for example flickr
5. Consider signing up to sites like blogburst which syndicate your content to news and media websites
6. Make sure you add your URL to Google
7. Add some sites with similar content to yours to your typepad list
8. Sign up for, and start using, del.icio.us and publish the links you collect there
9. Post comments on other blogs and leave your URL there
10. When you first set up your blog, really put some thought into the categories you’re going to use
11. use Pingomatic

Read Robins full article or get his podcast.