If you are considering blogging full time, you should be mindful of the fact that there are millions of blogs out there, so you will likely face some fierce competition, unless your niche is a very narrow and specialized topic. For most bloggers, the more people find their blogs, the better, so they write on things they know really well, and they often incorporate in their text keywords and key phrases through which people can find their blogs easier.

Before you create a blog, you need to nail down what exactly you want to write about most frequently, that is to say, find your niche in the “blogosphere” (the community of blogs), and sit down and think about how a person interested in your topic might search for your material on the Internet. Come up with a list of keywords (or phrases) that you, as such a person, might want to type into a search engine with the hope of finding your blog. Choosing good keywords to tweak search engine results is part of what is called search engine optimization, or SEO.

While keywords are not everything, they are pretty important. Try to make them as relevant to your material as possible. To help you find keywords with high traffic on search engines, there are a number of free tools you can use, including the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This particular tool provides statistics in terms of current monthly and overall average searches on your keywords. It is generally a good idea to find relatively often-searched, but not too generic keywords. Hundreds of thousands–or millions–of searches would mean too much competition to stand a reasonable chance in searches, while too few searches mean that you wouldn’t really get too big of an audience.