First up, this is not an exhaustive section on RSS and Blogs. It is a simple guide on how to get the best use out of them for free. It is exactly what I have done.
I assume the reason you want to use Blogs and Feeds is to gain an advantage in search engine rankings for a particular theme of search phrases.
First, create your own blog. I used Blogger, because:
There are downsides to Blogger though - it is a little limited in function, it only produces Atom Feeds, not RSS Feeds, and it is only 1 page, with no statistics. Although there are add-ons you can use.
There are other free hosted blogs, but often seem targetted at say teens, or had ads. The other alternative is to host your blog yourself, using freely available blog software.
So. At Blogger, choose your title and description wisely, to reflect your chosen targetted searchphrase. Eg I created Work From Home Business Tips. Gee, guess what phrase I was targetting.
Make your first post. Go to Posting, enter your post title and content, and hit the orange Publish Post button at the bottom.
Go to the Settings Area. In the Site Feed section, set Publish Site Feed to Yes, Description to either Short or Full, and write down your Site Feed URL. Mine was http://work-from-home-business-tips.blogspot.com/atom.xml. You will notice this is kind of unformatted.
First, we will add your feed to My Yahoo. If you don't already have a Yahoo account, you can open one for free. Look for the My Yahoo option and go there. With My Yahoo you get to choose what information you want on your default page. I placed RSS Headlines in the center of My Yahoo page.
Then click the little Edit box. On the next page, type the URL address of your feed (see above) into the search box and click search. Then when it has found your feed, click Add, and then Finish. That's all. When you visit your My Yahoo page, you will now see the headings from your own blog appearing.
To get your Feed onto a website, you need a third party to convert it into HTML format. There are several that will convert it to Javascript, but some search engines find reading Javascript difficult, and this will remove any advantage.
BigBold offers free conversion. Go to their site, type in your Feed URL (ending in atom.xml), and click Create. The next screen will ask you what your target website is, and your preferred format. Click Create again. Choose the IFRAME format, and copy and paste that code onto your website. I chose to paste mine onto Work From Home. (If you view it in IE, the colours aren't quite right, as IE doesn't correctly interpret CSS formatting inside an IFRAME. But it is nice in Mozilla FireFox)
Then, make sure you promote your blog in all the blog directories. Ping it after each new post. Search Google to find directories to submit to. Exchange links with other sites.
Track visitors to your account. Extreme Tracking offers great free tracking if your display their little icon on your blog.
And that's it. Easy, huh?