The First Blog Building & Promotion Steps

Hi,

I"m starting to build my blog & need some questions answered.

Does anyone know of a website that shows the steps one should take to go about building a blog in simple laymens terms.

Everyone is talking about Tag & Ping & how
to drive lots of traffic to your site fast

How should one go about doing the basic research
for tagging, I know about long tail & short tail keywords is it the same.

When The blog is ready what should I use first
pingomatic or pingoat or the pinging feature
built into wordpress.

For RSS whats the best program RSS2B

Gary