Is anyone here familiar with blogging and related services like blogspot, wordpress, etc. ?

I'm thinking about starting a blog, but I'm not very inclined to just jump in without learning more about it. There are so many related blog-hosting companies out there (or whatever they are called), it would be nice to hear about different people's experiences.

Like, for instance, here are a few questions that spring immediately to my mind:

Is it better to go with one of these services or to just use your own business domain to blog? On the up side of the former, it seems to me, might be that they will take care of a lot of the admin, and/or maybe other types of assistance?, and I'd guess the downside is that -- if your blog started to generate significant traffic -- they would then take the lion's share of the proceeds, if any.

Are there some of these services that would let you load your blog page at their site into a page on your own business site? Seems this would be ideal for both parties, but I haven't so far seen any indication of this methodology.

Is it best to blog on a single subject? And if so, and if one has 3 or 4 subjects they'd like to blog about, would it be better to have 3 or 4 separate blogs, or better to have a single blog for all 3 or 4 subjects? And how might one's choices in this regard affect one's traffic?

So, a few questions. I'm not sure yet what any other questions may be, but if anyone has experience with more than one of these blogging-hosting services, I'd certainly like to hear about the most significant differences, both positive and negative, between them.

If anyone can answer some of these questions, or provide a few URL's where I might be able to find answers to some of them, I'd appreciate. Thanks.

In the end, it's all up to you.  However, I do have a few pointers to add:

Don't buy a domain and hosting strictly for blogging until you get a significant following base, unless you're going to use your blog/website for other things.  It's just another bill, and, if you abandon it in 3 months, you haven't spent any money.  Kind of a try before you buy sort of thing.

If you're going to be a topical blogger, do your research.  Seriously.  Nothing gets you flamed/ignored faster than "breaking" a story only to be dead wrong.

If you want to get your writing out there, join communities.  It's not unheard of for one to have a blog on WordPress and post links to it via Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, linkedIn, etc.  That's how I get most of my traffic ;)

Good luck :) 

Jeni

Thanks, Jeni.