Welcome

Hi,

I have tried several freely available blogging tools available over  internet. Most famous and free blogging tools are blog, blogger and wordpress. My first weblog on internet was blog. It has very easy to use interface any body without any blogging knowledge can publish his article in just 1 minute over it. But, How can you earn from this blog as it already has advertisements for free users ? So, I tried blogger where I can also publish my own advertisements and affiliates for generating some revenue over my website. Alexa rankings showed me that it has high acceptability around the globe. It has lot of free features available with it like from customising template to running javascript. You can invite more authors to join you on your blog as a team member. You can publish your blog just by sending an email. You can also host your blogger over other domains free of cost.  Isn't it great!

Wordpress  has nice features  with more stability and easy environment to work upon .It supports more flexibility then blogger. Many developers around the globe are extending capabilities to wordpress and are giving more innovativeness to it. I also have created a new wordpress account and currently I am testing it. For all of these above mentioned sites if you can have a blog writor or editor like windows live writer then publishing of your blogs will become very easier.  You can then directly upload pictures and videos without much hastle.
If you are just new to blog and do not know how to handle blog writer then you can use inbuilt editors available with some websites like yola and weebly etc.  They are really great to work upon it. Above mentioned blog tools are free to use.
For a nice and easy to use blog you can try one of these two options-

Make a yourname.co.cc account and host your blogger account over it.





Make a yourname.co.cc account and host your yola account over it.






For new comers both yola and blogger accounts are easy configure  and use. Both  has inbuilt sitemap but you need to wait till your site is indexed. First you need to sumit your website to google webmaster tools and then verify it. You can follow this beautiful to make your task easier :

http://www.yola.com/tutorials/google-webmaster-tutorial

You can submit inbuilt sitemap naming "atom.xml" for blogger and "sitemap.xml" for yola.  
If you want to know more about how to host your blogger or yola account at yourname.co.cc than you can follow this link:

http://www.directsaurabh.co.cc/2009/10/link-your-customdomaincocc-account-with.html

  or

http://www.directsaurabh.co.cc/2009/10/host-yola-with-cocc.html

I hope it could work for you. Using free services have some disadvantages like you will not get custom domain name,emails services etc. Anyways you can upgrade your account any time you want. If you can pay at starting then you can also try typepad and godaddy. They really provide very good hosting services.

Thanks and God bless.