I am brand new to all of this. I want to start a blog and have advertising and affiliate links included, but I also want it to show up on the search Engines. Is it better to go independant or use something like blogger? Will I have to sacrifice advertising? Thanks.
For any e-commerce to work it must be a self-hosted blog as most of the free blog systems restrict you in fully monetizing a blog. Also, it is very difficult to get rankings for a blogger site.
Register a domain name, obtain hosting from say Hostgator where the WordPress blog script is included in the hosting packages in the CPanel via Fantastico.