Somebody needs to care about what you think or you might as well be talking to the wall. The Internet allows you to blog about anything you want. It doesn't automatically create readers though. If you're blogging about something nobody cares about it will never be found and read, let alone responded to. One way to increase your blog topic response is to make sure there is a market for your topic. How could you do that?

Search On Your Topic

Go to the major search engines and type in the words you typically use when writing your blog posts. What web sites come up? As you visit each web site look for several things: how they talk about the topic, the types of products and services they offer, their Google Page Rank, articles, information pages, ezines, testimonials and, particularly, blogs.

The goal is to get a sense of how your topic is covered by other web site authors. This help you determine who cares about your topic and whether you've got a market place to connect with. When you explore other related blogs look for posts with comments to gage the level of interest in your topic.

Searching the Internet using your own words helps determine the size of the audience who sees things from your point of view. Is it a brick wall or an open door to a huge market of interested fans?

Evaluate Their Keywords

Make a list of the keywords and phrases you believe people you're interested in connecting with would use to find web sites on the topic you blog about. This is different than searching on the words you use to cover your topic. Although, it may be a good idea to merge the two lists to effectively reach your target market.

With list in hand, go to http://www.overture.com and click on "Visit the Resource Center" and then click on "Keyword Selector Tool". Use the Keyword Selector Tool to see how many people are searching on your blog topic. How many people using your topic's related keywords are likely to care about what you think?

Another way to check out who might care about what you think is to use the Google Suggest tool. Go to http://www.google.com and click on the "More" link. Next, click on the "Labs" link and scroll down to the "Google Suggest" link on the bottom of the left column. Again, how many people care about your blog topic?

Which ever way you use to size up your blog topic's market place of interest, you'll have a better handle on who cares what you think. If your blog is only an exercise in expression the numbers won't matter. But, if your blog is part of a small business marketing effort, you'll want to constantly search on your topic and evaluate their keywords.

So, if you blog on a particular subject and want your blog to be read make sure what you think is something that somebody cares enough about to search on using the keywords you're writing about. Or else, you might as well be talking to the wall.