Free Blog Sites I recommend:
http://blogger.com/start
This is the largest blogger on the internet by Google.
http://bloggertoolkit.com
This site is really nice because it teaches you to blog in an easy to menuver web site and it teaches you how to make some money (using google ad words) with your blog.
After you have finished your first blog, you need to ping it. Log into
http://pingomatic.com
and enter your blog name and address and hit the ping button to send it to many web sites. remember to ping only after new contant is added. Don't forget to ping, because it sends out to blog site with the new content you just wrote to many sites on the web. It will build your traffic and if you add links to your own web page, it will be sure to build your traffic there as well. It seems google and other search engines are ranking sites with blogs higher.
Tom
[links removed due to link dropping / self promotion]