What Should A New WordPress Blogger Do?

This question is sparked within me for two reasons, two new bloggers entered the world. One, the company that I work for has a blog that is relatively new (blog.accade.com), and my g/f is working on launching a blog.

1. Find a really good domain name and keep it. If you don’t have a domain name that you like and one that you can remember, spell, and write easily, there is no point in it. We may live in the Google century but you will still need to communicate your blog to other people. Both in the form of providing links to all your social networks and for other people to link to and visit your site.
2. Find a great theme and then customize it to how you want it to look. If you want tag pages, make it have tag pages, if you want author pages, build out author pages, same thing goes for just simple things as making the title look exactly the way you want it to look. Plus side here if you want to learn about basic web technologies, customizing a WordPress theme is a pretty easy way to learn about basic web languages (HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS) without much harm.
3. Sign up for Feedburner and use it to burn your feeds. Trust me on this, yes Feedburner has had some issues lately, but the ability to have Google host your feeds without worrying about what happens if you change domains or you want to edit your RSS feeds and such makes it a great resource. Also Feedburner provides you essentially a Google Analytics service for your RSS feeds including: # of people subscribed, what RSS reader they use, how many clicked through on your RSS feed. Finally Feedburner provides one service that makes it impossible to beat, the ability to subscribe to updates in a variety of formats. Want a feed delivered to your email, done, a Google Reader, Yahoo, or Mail.app customized format, done.
4. Change your theme from using the standard WordPress RSS feeds to using the one that you created with Feedburner.
5. Create a Google Analytics account. Analytics will let you track your site’s vistors and give all kinds of information on them that you never would think you would want until you have it.
6. Add some plugins. I recommend the All in One SEO Pack, Disqus Commenting System, Login LockDown, Simple Google Sitemap, Simple Trackback Validation, WordPress Database Backup, WordPress Mobile, and WP Super Cache.
7. Write a ton of articles and keep writing.