NY Times: How to Be a Blog Star

So You Want to Be a Blogging Star? (New York Times), by Paul Boutin:

Here’s what a number of successful bloggers with successful nonblogging careers say are the ways to think about getting into the business of blogging.

1. Don't expect to get rich. ...
2. Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice. ...
3. Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. “Deal with the rest of your life first,” advises Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who posts constantly throughout the day on his site, Instapundit.com. The volume and regularity has helped make his political opinion site one of the most popular on the Internet. “The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work.” Mr. Reynolds slips in posts between classes, as a break from writing law review articles and during slow time at home.
4. Just post it already! The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. ...
5. Keep a regular rhythm. Bloggers disagree on how often they should post. Mr. Reynolds and Ms. Jardin post several times a day. Mr. Cuban and Mr. Dziuba will go a week without a post. What matters, they agree, is that you establish a reliable rhythm for readers, so they know they can rely on you to have new material for them every so often.
6. Join the community, such as it is. There’s an unwritten rule — actually, it’s written about a lot on blogs — that you should always link back to bloggers whose ideas you repeat, or from whom you get a cool link to another site. Don’t use other bloggers’ photos or excerpt their writing without a prominent link back to the original. When in doubt, give credit. More to the point, linking to other bloggers is the best way to get them to link to you. ...
7. Plug yourself. ...

In the end, the biggest threat isn’t that you’ll fail to learn to blog. It’s that if you blog regularly for long enough, and begin to get comments and links from other bloggers, you’ll have trouble doing your day job.