Blogging can be a great way to increase content for your website. Maybe you don’t have a blog yet and are thinking of starting one up. Or maybe you do already have a blog, but you’re just not getting the traffic yet to justify spending your time (and your money) on it. So how do you make a better blog than what’s already out there? Or how do you, as a blogger, blog better? By following these tips.

Have a Purpose
Even when you’re writing a personal blog about your daily life and activities, you should never go into a blog post not knowing what you want to write about. The blog in general should always have a very specific purpose, and each blog post should support that purpose. To do this, write yourself a mission statement that may or may not be posted onto the actual blog itself. Then when it comes time to write any blog post, check back with that mission statement and ensure that the post will support your mission statement and that the two make sense together.

Consistency is Key
We would all love it if we could just blog whenever we felt like it. But truth be told, unless running your blog is all you do, you won’t feel like it very often (and maybe not even then.) Because of that, you need to make sure you’re blogging every day or at least every other day – whether you want to or not. To help you do this, set aside a large portion of time to write several blog posts, publish one of them when you’re done, and then save the others as drafts. Depending on the software you’re using, you can either post-date them to publish automatically on specific days, or you can simply go into your blog and hit “Publish” when it’s time to get a new blog post up.

Make it Interesting to Look At
Sure, content may be king, but your readers will only get to that content if they like the first impression they get from your blog; and they get that from the design. Make sure, firstly, that the design of your blog conveys the type of business you’re trying to promote on your blog, and that visitors will get the concept as soon as they land on it. Then make sure the design is not stuffed with anything and everything you could find. This means cleaning up photos by putting them into a photo gallery, and that you don’t have large banners or tons of ads that will distract your visitors, and detract from the overall appearance.

Have great Content
With your design exactly the way you want it, you can then start to focus on your content. This means more than just getting it up on a regular basis, and making sure it keeps in theme with the idea of your blog. It also means being creative with your topics, and also being timely with your topics. After all, if you’re running a sports website you don’t want to recap a game an entire week after it happened. To help you with this, set up Google Alerts that will come right to your email and keep you in the loop about what’s happening; or visit blogs on similar topics and check the comments section. There you can see what people most want to know about, and then write content that will help them out with it.

Blogging better can seem like a difficult thing to do when you’re just starting out, or when it seems as though you’ve tried everything and just can’t seem to get visitors to your site. Use these tips and find just how much they can help you achieve your blogging goals!