Increase your typing speed

One thing that a lot of bloggers could do to decrease the amount of time they spend blogging is to increase their typing speed. If you are typing at say 40 words a minute you are getting half as much done as you could be at 80-100 words a minute. Considering the amount of time you could save yourself, spending a few dollars on a typing tutorial may be the best investment you could ever make.
Here's the best typing tutorial I have found. I was able to triple my typing speed using it, and I know of a lot of other people who would recommend it to anyone. It is also the cheapest I have found at just $10.
Encore 8014398 Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 18

What blogging is not

I'd say that about 99 percent of people who think about starting a blog have the wrong idea what blogging is. Some people think it's this weird complicated thing that only the best can figure out how to do. It's not. It's rather simple to get started, and you will learn more and more as you go along. Other's think blogging is something that requires you to be on the computer all the time. That's also false. Most bloggers spend just a few minutes to an hour a day writing for their blog. However the more time you spend getting traffic to your blog, the more money you will ultimately make.
The most common misconception about blogging is that it is a way to get rich easily without doing any work. Get that out of your head. Most bloggers will give up before they ever hit the $100 Adsense minimum payout, and will probably be just wasting a lot of time they could be spending on something else. So if you are expecting to quit your job, and live on just a blog or two you will be very disappointed. Having said that, if you are someone who likes to write, or are good at writing than you can make decent money in time.
If you aren't someone who particularly likes writing, or don't have much patience than you should probably find an a different way to make money.

Squidoo

Squidoo is a great way to send traffic to your blog. More and more bloggers and website owners are making lenses(their word for web page) for the purpose of driving traffic to their site. You can just simply make a quick web page about whatever your blog is about, and throw in a few links to your blog, your rss feed, and maybe a few post from your blog and you're in business. Also Google and other search engine love Squidoo lenses and rank them very high so you can receive a lot of traffic.
That's not the best part though. The best part is you can make money from it too. I'm talking a lot of money. There are bloggers (myself included) who have tried it just to send traffic to a blog, and had so much fun they made more lenses. As of this writing I am working on lens number 12. Some people make thousands of dollars with Squidoo. There are a ton of people who have quit their jobs, and focused just on building Squidoo lenses. They also have a referral program.
If you are wondering what a Squidoo lens looks like, here are a few of mine. Here's one to drive traffic to my blogs. And here are a couple that I made just to have fun, and make a little money. Who makes the best footballs and Best Basketball
Another great part of Squidoo is the great community. There are tons of people in the forum trying to help out each other and make it more fun. It really is the most fun I have ever had making money.
Squidoo.com

Private Advertising

So many bloggers rely on Adsense for their earnings that they get discouraged and give up. Like I say all the time, Adsense will not pay as much as you think it will. Until you are getting like 10,000 hits a week Adsense is probably not worth getting your hopes up about.
Private advertising is definitely the way to go. You can offer text links for just $0.50 or a dollar a month when you are just starting out. If you can get 10-20 advertisers you are looking at $20 a month above what you are bringing in from Adsense. Once you are getting a lot of traffic you can charge a lot more. Like you could offer advertising for $10 a month, or a hundred dollars a year. Or if you have a spot for banners, find some other sites that may want to put those on your blog. You will find that this is by far the easiest way to make money when you are just starting out.
Where do you advertise your advertising space? I do it mostly at blog forums like Bloggeries or Bloggst. I will give you a list of blog forums to bring in traffic, and to bring in advertisers in a later post.

Free traffic sites

A lot of people want to boost their traffic just for the sake of saying they have more traffic. Maybe they want to sell advertising spots, and just need to say they have higher numbers than they really do. Or some people just want to be able to say they are getting a lot of traffic. Either way here are some great options to getting easy non-organic(people who weren't necessarily looking for you) traffic.
Traffic G is a free traffic exchange site that gives you around 1.1 visitors for every site you view. You just have to click on a site, wait 20 seconds, and click the right word. I would recommend doing it while you are doing something else, because it can get very boring. But it will give you the traffic it promises.
Free link exchange lets you advertise your blog on other blogs or sites by putting links on your own site. How many hits you get depends on how many times your links get clicked on.
Link Grand is a little different in that it lets you make money by putting links on your blog, and in turn use that to buy links. You can also just buy hits for just $5 for a thousand hits. I have done this a few times with some of my blogs. You can also make money with referrals.

Social bookmarking sites

Another great way to get more traffic to your blog is with social bookmarking sites. They are a great way to get some free backlinks. Most of them can actually get you a lot of hits by themselves. They take a little bit of time to sign up and submit every post, but they are definitely worth it. You can also get friends on these sites and submit each other's blogposts.
Digg
Stumble Upon
Reddit
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Mixx

Domain Names

A domain is your URL, or .com in layman's terms. It is what people type in to find your blog. The domain can be very important. For instance, my original domain for this blog was www.moremoneyblogging.blogspot.com. I bought the domain www.thebloghelper.com. Which one would you click on first? Which one sounds more professional? Obviously the one without the blogspot in it. Also if you are starting a wordpress or blogger blog you probably won't be able to get the URL you want.
A new domain is very easy to get. They are really cheap($10 or so. You just go to a domain registering site, buy the domain, and link it to your blog. It's that easy. Godaddy.com is the biggest domain registering site out there, but you may want to shop around to find the name you want cheaper somewhere else.