Here's our advice for anyone thinking of blogging: read a bunch of blogs before you start. For that, we recommend you get an RSS News Aggregator. There's a bunch out there for both Windows and Macintoshes.
I use NewsGator because I live in Outlook a lot. Other good ones are RSS Bandit, SharpReader, FeedDemon, OnFolio 2.0. Also, many browsers are including news aggregators. On the Mac side, Net News Wire gets a lot of recommendations.
So, how do you find blogs? Well, if you're in the tech industry you can read my link blog. I read through more than 1200 feeds and put the best things up there. Out of 3,000 to 5,000 items per day that come through all of those feeds, I'll post the best 100 or so.
But, if you aren't in tech, you'll want to use a search engine. There's several:
http://www.feedster.com (best for beginners who haven't started with RSS yet).
http://www.pubsub.com (gives best results, but via RSS).
http://www.technorati.com (shows linking between blogs).
Let's say you're looking for blogs on "quilting." Well, you can just go over and do a search on quilting on any of those search engines. But, if you use an RSS News Aggregator, you can subscribe to the search now. That's really cool because anyone who uses the word "quilting" on a blog, from that point on, will automatically show up in your news aggregator (if you subscribed to the search feed).
We do searches on our names. Our company names. Our competitors. And some common terms that people in our industry would use.
That way you can listen to what people are saying about you, your company, or your industry.
Here's the crux of the tip. If you read 50 blogs for two weeks and you don't have something to write on your blog to start it off you probably aren't gonna be a good blogger.
So, get reading and blog about what you find!
