Find a freewebspace provider that providers free subdomain+cpanel hosting...then go to fantastico and create your free wordpress blog. I use wordpress, and I've found it to not to be limited in what you can do with such a blog software - where with blogger it is much more limited in what you can do...for example you can add SEO related MOD's to your wordpress site, or anything really if the MODification is made!
I've signed up for a few blog directories so far. At the end of the process, I get a link to paste on my blog of a little picture of the feeder. Is it necessary to paste this on my blog?
I found wordpress (the free one working on wordpress.com) more seo efficient, but the down side is gthat you can not put adsense or make it very commercial-looking. I use it to gather traffic for other website that has the adsense+affiliate stuff.