Made a few searched on this topic, perhaps I don't know what the term would be for this. Proxy blog? I remember reading about how Google had signed up to become a domain registrar. It was speculated that they would use the whois information to make it so you couldn't create a bunch of sites you owned and then have them all linking back to your main site to build backlinks. I was wondering, what is the value of setting up blogs on popular free services and having them link back to your main website/blog in those posts? What kind of success/disappoint have you found in trying this?
I presume, that if you spend the same time on your site as you can spend on building those proxy sites, your results might be good. As if you want to have traffic on those free blogs, you need to spend some time advertising them as well. If that's a question just in backlinks, then you can do that easily, but I see no point in having links from low PR, low traffic, low search position blog.
Yes, it can be helpful to build inlinks from free blog services. Web2.0 sites like squidoo and hubpages can also serve that purpose.