Rule One: Study what I do here, and then do the opposite (just kidding -- sort of).

More seriously, Reuters' Felix Salmon offers a raft of tips, but I'll excerpt his 'what-not-to-do' section: (seen first on Twitter)

What shouldn’t you do?

The first is something I see a lot when journalists first start blogging: they write beautiful self-contained journalistic pieces, with ledes and nut grafs and few if any links. Go have a look at your favorite blogs, and see if you can find any pieces like that. You can’t. Blogs are much less formal, much less polished, much more conversational. So ignore what they taught you at J-school, and be yourself.

Don’t worry about hitting the “publish” button. Not everything you write will be good; some of it will be downright bad. And you’ll get called out for that, and it won’t feel very nice. But publish anyway. If you were having a conversation in the pub, you’d say silly things sometimes. Just move on. More interestingly, you’ll find that a lot of what you thought was bad turned out, in retrospect, to be very good. And vice-versa.

After you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll grow a nice thick skin, but at first you’ll probably get riled up by some of your commenters, both on your blog and on other blogs linking to you. Try to be zen. Alternatively, you might get riled up by the *absence* of commenters, or people linking to you, and ask yourself if you’re just shouting into a void. Again, be zen. And do try to avoid obsessing over pageviews. They’re not a very good metric of how widely your stuff is disseminated, and you’re not doing this for CPMs. So, again, be zen. Because otherwise you just start publishing listicles and other linkbait, and your blog becomes crap.

Don’t expect to be an overnight success. It takes a while to get momentum — more than a year, in most cases — and if you’re enjoying yourself that shouldn’t matter.

Don’t censor yourself. You’re doing this because you want people to read your work. So make that as easy for them as possible. If they want you to email it to them, email it to them. If they want to read it on Seeking Alpha or Huffington Post, then post it there. If they want to read it in their RSS reader, then make sure you publish a full RSS feed. And if someone else flatters you by copying your stuff, be happy, not angry. You’re not doing this for the pageviews, you’re doing this to be read.

Most importantly, just have fun. If you don’t enjoy writing the blog, no one’s going to enjoy reading it. So jump in and make merry!

As always, read the whole thing.