What are the main To Do's when starting a blog?
 

So I'm starting my first blog about, and it totally feels alien to me. I've avoided blogs like the plague for some reason, kind of like seo at the beginning and boy am I regretting it now. I figured better late than never.

I'm going mainstream with this one, and I'm doing it on a subject that I have personal interest and knowledge in, luckily it is a popular subject and I have a great domain for it:

My domain would be - thekeywordblog.com , the keyword then blog .com .. so this should help greatly.

I chose to go with Blogger instead of Wordpress , I've heard this was a mistake but I figured google owns blogger so for indexing purposes it has to have some kind of advantage on google.

Anyways, so I've installed the template and have everything ready to go.. but I'm sure there are many things I'm missing, stuff like:

- unique ip
- site map
- backlinks, etc.

What are some of the other things like this that I should do for building a proper foundation? I want to make sure I have it good and right before I douse it with a good bit of traffic and send it on it's merry way.

Any good input or help would be greatly appreciated, I feel like an idiot with blogs already but it seems a lot easier once you get into it. I'm a freesite man myself, I've always depended on traffic from ad networks rather than proper seo returns.

Thanks again folks!