Building Up a Blog - Course/Mentor Recommendations?

I'm no professional blogger, but here's a few really basic tips about blogging that I know:

You need to make sure that your blog is offering something people want. People read blogs about weight loss because they want to lose weight, people read blogs about making money online because they want to make money online.

Make sure you have authority in whatever it is you're offering, don't be "I'm 300lbs but here's how you guys can get ripped!" If it is a situation like that I'd recommend blogging about how you're losing weight, what exercises you're trying etc. Establish some sort of connection with your audience.

Posting three times a week is ok, so long as its quality. I advise you spend all of your free time possible writing future blog posts, and make sure each and every one is high quality.

Write to other bloggers in your niche and ask if you can guest post and have the guest post link back to your blog. Just try to get someone with authority in your niche to endorse you.

If possible, create your own product within that niche like an ebook (make sure its QUALITY) and have someone or even a few people with authority do a review of it. That'll drive you traffic like crazy AND get you good sales.

Have a newsletter, build up a list, but don't spam them. Only send them emails if you have a new blog post, a new product launch, or a special offer for them.

Respond to any email you get from your viewers unless its just pure flame. There's no need to respond to emails that are nothing but insults.

Put keywords in your post titles, re use them a few times throughout the post, don't worry to much about it. From what I've heard the best advice about SEO is not to worry about SEO.

The colors on your blog should fit the mood of it. If its a blog about kicking ass it should have lots of red and orange for example. Just google basic color psychology and I'm sure you'll be able to find this out for yourself.

This is my own personal opinion, but I think you might want to know this now while you're starting out and can fix it rather than later. Make sure your blog has its own URL. Dont use Blogger or Wordpress hosting it just doesn't look nice. Also make sure the URL can be said outloud easily and that it matches the name of your Blog. It may be hard to come up with something but it's important.

Good luck.