To Succeed in Blogging, Know Your Blog Competitors

Steve Hodson has a good suggestion for new bloggers - Research your area of interest:

Find out how many other blogs that there are that are writing about the same thing you want to. For this you can use either Technorati or Google’s blog search and spend some time; and I don’t just mean an hour or so, going through the results. Visit the blogs, read them past their front page, analyze how the posts are written, look through the comments and see how the blogger interacts with their readers. The idea here is two fold - first is to see what you are up against and second to see how the popular bloggers got to be just that - popular. Link.