I'm a bit late to the discussion (welcome April, glad to have you), but thought I'd throw my few pence in.
Linda already mentioned that I'm also heavy into blogging and she's right. My main focus is blogs/blogging and, I must say, I'm enjoying it.
To answer your question in the subject line, yes. One of my blogs actually surprised me in how it's perceived and embraced by the readers - so much so I'm considering launching a forum to accompany it.
Dealing with my various blogs also inspired me to slowly convert some of my web design business into a blog design and consulting business. It's a great joy helping someone achieve her goals through blogging and teaching her something new.
[wildtangent]Sometimes we become so used to what we do everyday that we forget about how exciting it really is. My consulting clients are so amazed and passionate that it helps to re-inspire me with my own personal projects. Often, I end up emotionally invested in their blogs as though they were my own. [/wildtangent]
Now, let's see if I can help out with your second question -- moving a blogger blog to a dedicated domain.
From my experiences, Blogger doesn't offer many options in redirecting a Blogger blog. The ideal redirect (301: Permanent) really isn't an option because Blogger doesn't support PHP or mod_rewrite. The best you could get away with would be a meta redirect and many bots consider this to be a 302 (Temporary) redirect. (Basically, it tells the bots that the move is only temporary and at some later date, the website may be put back up at the original location. Not ideal if you're moving your site to a completely new domain.)
Blogger does offer domain mapping where you can still publish and manage your blog from the Blogger admin panel, but the URL appears to be your own domain name. You'd also need your own hosting account with FTP in order for domain mapping to work because Blogger would rebuild the pages to this new site.
This is an option, however, if you republish every entry from your blogger blog to the new domain and delete the entries from the Blogger blog, there's no way for the search engines to know you've moved. The entries would all throw up 404 errors instead of a 301 redirect. Again, not ideal.
Best bet, if you've already built up a loyal following, would be to start the new domain name as a new blog and market it simultaneously as you get your readers converted over to the new blog for future updates. It's actually what Lynn Terry ended up doing when she
moved from Blogger to WordPress on her own domain name.
She continues to receive a lot of search engine traffic to her Blogger blog, so she added AdSense to monetize it, and
posts sporadically about what's going on at her new blog to get people interested enough to visit. This route seems to have worked well for her; the new domain has overtaken her Blogger blog when you search for her name in Google. (
Note: she didn't import any of her previous blogger posts. She basically started from scratch at the new blog and just left her Blogger blog up as is with links everywhere leading to the new blog.)
The real key is simply to get your readers up to speed and have them help you spread the word by updating their bookmarks, updating their readership (if they sent out any mailings about/interviews with you), and updating their feed readers. Then your next task is to get the new site listed in all the directories/websites your old Blogger blog was listed.
~ Teli