Free blog often lacks some features that exist in other paid blogs, Like the design of the site, the number of the pages and other things. but can the free blog exceed the paid one in Earnings
Have you tried wordpress?I think it's pretty good though it's free.And I'm sure you can benefit much from it if you have some good business idea.
Free blogs are great for driving traffic to your products, but in and of itself, im not sure if you'll make much.
You could always use something like wordpress.com but use your own domain name (OK, so not totally free but near enough). Wordpress is fully customisable and you can add some very professional designs.
Any free blog can beat a paid blog as long as you work hard and advertise it well. Have good content with rich keywords. Keep your readers coming back for more.
What!!? The design of any free blog (take blogger blogs fro example) is down to your own html editing skills and your graphic design skills. There are many templates which can be copied and pasted directly into your 'edit html' option in blogger.com. The graphics that appear can be done quite beautifully with adobe photoshop and/or other programs. Blogger is excellent and because Google own Blogger.com they seem to favour them when it comes to ranking them.
The thing about a free blog is that it could just dissappear at any point in time. What happens if you build it up to a thousand hits per day, and then the free hosting decided it was too costly to sustain your traffic? Things like squidoo, hubpages, ect are great marketing tools, but use them to send traffic back to your main site, and if you are selling anything then you should be more than able to pay for the webhosting. As has been mentioned buy your domain and set up a wordpress blog - it's just a couple of clicks in cpanel via fantastico. Most plug-ins are free, and you can also get thousands of niche themes for free, so don't let cash put you off starting a proper blog.
If you mean using Blogger or Wordpress.com domain, I would say they aren't very useful after a while. They are easy to make and everybody has one - whereas it's different with your own custom blog. You can create a great design, create amazing content and market to a much wider audience.
The best free blog is blogger,you can add google adsense,other affiliate program on it.And others,i think it is not well.
I think people have become conditioned by the availability of free blog services like wordpress.com, posterous and blogger. It is going to be difficult to convince people to cough up money for their blog. But this market has been successfully being tackled by the likes of squarespace. Of course you need to take care of 'everything in one shop' for the would-be bloggers, provide value for money, etc. that is not available in the free blog setups.
Free blogs usually have some restrictions. Wordpress slows down considerably after a certain number of posts. I heard that Blogger slows or even crash with huge influx of traffic. That's why Zen Habits move out of Blogger.