Tip #4: Shoot more, cull more

The best thing about digital photography is that you can take as many pictures as you want (within the limits of your memorycard(s) obviously) without increasing the cost of it. That is very good news indeed as you will be able to experiment more with your photography.

Try and shoot the same scene multiple times with different settings. Change things like white-balance, color-tone, aperture, shutterspeed, preprogrammed scene-modes (if you are so inclined) etc.

Give exposure bracketing (or any other kind of bracketing your camera might have) a go. This takes several shots (usually 3) of the scene with different exposures, which can work miracles on hard to shoot scenes like snow-scapes or beaches.

Another tip is to always keep your camera in continuous drive mode. Usually this works by holding down the shutter for as long as you want to keep shooting. This way it shouldn't interfere at all when you just want to take a single shot, but is a boon when you suddenly find yourself in a situation that requires a quick response to get that perfect picture. Even when taking a posed shot this can help: A single shot of a group of people will always have people in weird poses, with their eyes closed etc. If your camera can take several shots per second you'll have shot them several times before they even realise you've started. Of course if you are using flash this will be a problem...

Now that you have a ton of photos however you need to think about something that is way more difficult, namely picking the ones you want to keep. Plenty of people keep every single shot they make, as if somehow they will lose the moment if they throw something away. Such a collection however becomes both hard to manage as well as boring to look at. Looking at oodles of photos of the same subject is quite yawn-inducing to look at and might have people skip over the real gems in there.

I for one tend to go by "one photo per situation" rule. If I have several shots of the same thing I allow myself to keep only one. The best one. Of course deciding on that is hard. Especially if the shots look really similar. In that case, just delete any one of them and be done with it. Otherwise, check for sharpness, noise, focus, bokeh etc.
Ask yourself the question: what is the subject of these photographs and what brings it out in the best way?

This all may seem really obvious, but it is important none-the-less. Newspapers, for instance, employ people just for this task alone. So if you want to end up with a collection that is both manageable and interesting to other people, you have no choice but to choose.