OK, I'm going to try to detail my personal blogging experiment to date. This is different from my other thread on Blogging, a paid experiment, mostly because the paid one is still waiting for liftoff and my personal one started about 2 months ago - keep that time-frame in mind.
First off - I LOVE blogging.
I mean, it was a real PITA at first, trying to come up with unique, relevant content every day or two. You had to write the content, find the images, host the images, edit the copy, post it, edit it again, moderate the comments, etc.
A couple of months on, it's more of a process now and just part of my day, so I kind of like it. I've been approved as an official media outlet for the two major auto manufacturers I blog about, so I can directly access and use their own press kits, releases and images - sweet! PLUS, it seems, so far, postings of press releases - same ones everyone else uses, has not resulted in anything resembling duplicate content concerns - I was told this wouldn't be a problem given the nature of press releases and their intended multple uses, but...I just had to see for myself.
I also make use of Google's alert features - news comes to me.
I'd say about 1 in 12 items I post is a scoop for me - I just happen to get it from a North American source and post it prior to the rest of NA waking up (I'm on the East coast). I've also learned that today's news can actually be news from 3 days ago - LOL, seems to be the norm with news sites around the globe. 
I have trackback spam and comment spam - I'm using a free (open-source) program by bblog - so I installed it, I tweaked it, I edit it, I troubleshoot it (thankfully it's pretty reliable) and the bblog community is active and helpful. I'm somewhat draconian in that I don't allow comments very often on my postings, but so goes the battle to control spam.
I looked at paid solutions, but wanted to follow the low-to-no-budget approach and still retain control - unlike Blogger, for example.
Now, want to hear about results?
Well, in two months the readership has gone from 0 to about 130 visits per day - I have not marketed the blog other than submitting it to various blog directories and services like Technorati and FeedBurner. I do have a link from my website to the blog, but that seems to have taken a bit more than a month to be "recognized" by the website users...LOL
Now, I'm not saying this is HUGE or anything, but recall, it's been live a bit over 2 months now, with no real marketing efforts.
Adsense - well, the ads are in place across the top and down one side - not ideal placement for ads, but it's what I've got given the template and NO DESIRE to rebuild my own design to fit the ad requirements. I'm going to start experimenting with ads in the actual posts - either with a story or in their own posts - we'll see how that goes.
Revenue from the ads in the blog space sucks (pennies to a dollar or so a day - the main site averages about $8/day) - plain and simple - given the tiny amount of traffic the blog sees, and the mix of ads shown given the variable content mixture, the actual payment per click is laughable - for now. I've seen this project as incremental and designed to achieve ranking for various search phrases, rather than a direct revenue generator from the gate. A positive note is the CTR generated by the blog traffic is high - so it *appears* that given a good amount of traffic, the blog ads WILL perform better.
Rankings - well, since the "keywords" being targeted are variable and depend on the content being posted, SEO is limited to the most basic keyword research (if any) for a topic, the title is written with this in mind, and the phrase peppered in a couple times. If it's a press release, well, I usually ad-lib a bit of my own thinking either before or after it to include the phrase that few times.
I am planning a couple of self-written, very targeted articles in the future for those busy keywords I want to target - now that the blog is well indexed and seeing some love, so to speak.
For the main phrase the blog targets overall, admittedly a low-volume, yet nicely targeted phrase, the blog now ranks 3rd/4th in Google. As I found out earlier this week, those news items I got posted before others, or even on-par time-wise with others, are starting to rank inside the top twenty for their phrases. Admittedly, in some cases, those phrases were less thought-out than I'd have otherwise liked, but SEO copy-writing and news reporting, I've learned, don't always naturally fit together easily.
Regardless, I'm happy.
The overall point was to see if a blog could obtain decent rankings and develop some search traffic for the domain - the answer is yes. Not news for sure, but I have proven it to myself.
Now, well, I'm addicted to posting to the blog - every morning is a race to see if I can scoop other new sources for the latest items. It's been educational too - ever wonder how a manufacturers media site responds to negative commentary or news - they stay silent. They prefer to post news about only positive items - go figure...LOL
This is a great way to build a community of users - less work than maintaining a posting forum and easier to control as you want to.
I can say the following:
~ bblog blogs can rank well in the results
~ SEO work for blogs can be, IMO, somewhat less involved than for actual webpages
~ it's vital to get listed with a couple of good services/directories
~ press releases used on blogs seem to avoid dupe content penalties (or I haven't been hit yet)
~ You will learn a lot
~ It's LOTS of work - don't think you'll post once a week and be successful - my pace averages about 2 posts every day or two
~ The "Bloglines" spider is an addict...LOL - about 80% more visits from that guy than any other spider - and G is here every day...
~ Now that I've "established" the blog, it's time to tackle the grass-roots marketing that'll bring the links
~ I have not done any link building to date save for the blog directory submissions and services (about 8 - 10 of them)
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Hopefully this post will serve to answer some questions for the folks new to blogging and search marketing. It's not going to cover everything, nor was I trying to. I simply wanted to share my experiences to date and express my opinion that this does work, it works relatively quickly and, odd as it sounds, can be addictively fun to maintain.
Now, for some housekeeping notes:
1 - I am not a database technician
2 - I am not a sysadmin
3 - I am not THE MAN to turn to for help - I'm just a guy trying some things and noting the results
4 - If you want more info on bblog. please Google for them
5 - ...if you're inclined to PM me for urgent help with your blog, I charge $100 USD per hour - prepaid.
6 - I cannot offer anyone help on getting their blogs set up - sorry. It's one thing to muck up my own database, but I won't do it to others.
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