You can start with a free blog at wordpress.com. When you post they ping their ping-o-matic service, which in turn pings yahoo, technoratti, etc. They also list you on their pages of tags, popular posts and so on. My point is you get free incoming links. So don't be surprised if you get like 400 visits on your very first porn/sex post. Buuut, this won't last long. Someone will report your blog as mature and they will stop the free advertising (while still providing you the free service). Then you can start pinging ping-o-matic yourself, not hard at all, visiting a bookmark is all it takes.
To me, it's a good idea to use their free blog hosting, tools, stats, even for training sysadmin-hassle-free purposes, I mean you don't have to install or maintain anything. Then, once you're comfortable with the blogging and all the lingo around it (ping, trackback, tag, comment spam
), you can keep this blog, if only for incoming links purposes, and start a new one, on your own domain and hosting.
