Better Blogging

Some people are obsessed with the popularity of their blog, trying to acquire ever higher rankings and vanity metrics. As a result a lot gets written on how to make a blog more popular. I don’t think popularity should be the reason you do anything, especially writing. However if you do want to improve your writing, specifically your blog postings I’ve given the matter some thought and am happy to pass on my advice on blogging better.

The two most important qualities to strive for are:

Timelessness and Timeliness

A posting has timelessness if once published it will remain relevant for an extremely long time, ideally forever. If you can achieve this with a blog post it will rank well in search engines for a variety of keywords and continue to be read for as long as it remains online. Yoast would call these timeless posts cornerstone content others might call them “evergreen”.

A posting has timeliness if once published it becomes the first or amongst the very earliest writings online to discuss a particular issue, event, or subject. This is the proverbial scoop from traditional journalism. If you can achieve this with a blog posting you will get a sudden increase in traffic and possibly gain incoming links and new readers. This is more commonly known as going viral.

A third quality to strive for and one which will take more than a single posting is being authoritative. To achieve this it really helps if your blog is focused on a single topic or a very small range of topics unlike this one. In an effort to maintain focus you can have multiple blogs, use subdomains, or rely on tags and your blog software to bring order to your writing. If you can become an established authority on a subject as determined by Google you will continue to attract readers and incoming links through dominance of the search engine rankings.

Improving Your Blogging

If you really want to improve your blogging, particularly how it performs in the various search engines you should also pay attention to the following:

• title – a well chosen title which includes relevant keywords but also entices potential readers to click on it is the most important words in every blog posting.
• quality control – proofread, spell check, verify links, make corrections, update the information through comments or follow up postings.
• link – no webpage is an island, link to other sites of authority and potential interest to your readers, it may attract reciprocal links and will likely improve your search engine rankings.
• participate – it is called the blogosphere and the world wide web for a reason, respond to comments and actively comment on other blogs.
• scan-ability – is the ability for a reader to quickly scan your posting looking for the exact information they want. This is extremely important online and is achieved by using bold text, italics, subtitles, bullet points and other aspects of typography.

If you are interested in further tips on improving your blog and your writing in general there is a lot of advice online though it can be a bit repetitive. I’ve provided links to articles before but the best way to get better at anything is practice. However, if you want to become a better writer, it helps if you become a better reader, this involves taking the time and effort to read more challenging authors and a wide range of subject matter and writing styles.

Blogging Longevity

Instafame is what many crave but if you want to become an authoritative trustworthy expert in your niche, if you want to create timeless forever fresh content that day after day, month after month, year after year gets read, stolen, and shared you need to give some thought to how you organize your empire online. You need to focus, choose your niche, choose your keywords, choose your technologies, and develop your voice and brand. You have to be able to sustain your effort for an extended period of time. I’ve been blogging with WordPress now for twenty years.

What Gets Measured, Gets Done

I recommend you have a plan, a goal, maybe even a philosophy on why you blog, what are you trying to accomplish? Is it just clicks, likes, and seeing your name in Google? What are your passions? You need to keep going, keep doing unglamorous behind the scenes tweaking and patching while you wait to be featured on Conan or Colbert. Be wary of just focussing on vanity metrics and chasing low quality clicks.

Do you now need a CMS?

What even is a CMS? In this case it is a content management system and if you’ve read down this far you may wonder what am I using to do my better blogging? The answer is WordPress. I’ve used WordPress since 2005 and I’ve been self publishing online since 1995. I still code HTML, CSS, even PHP, but the average blogger does not. If you are serious about blogging you should also get a domain, most people will be served fine by WordPress.com’s free hosting, but I have always paid for hosting since graduating university. In 2026 there are a lot of options out there, but I’ve stuck with WordPress for over twenty years.

Joost who has long been a staple of the WordPress developer community, proposed the average person does not need a CMS. What they instead need is an interface similar to the ones used by the AI Chatbots. That post along with my ongoing commitment to improving the Quality of this blog led to me updating this post yet again.

I’m still not sure the average person wants to deal with webhosting at all, but I can see how younger generations having grown up talking to their phone and telling it what to do, don’t want to type. They don’t want to tweak settings either and they certainly don’t want to program in PHP or JavaScript. The problem without outsourcing all your programming and writing to AI, is what you’re really doing is outsourcing all your thinking or potentially too much of your thinking. And as for short form video, that rots your brain.

Why WordPress?

There were competitors back in 2005, but apparently I backed the right horse as WordPress has grown to be the most popular publishing platform online. WordPress or whatever content management system you choose can take care of issues both big and small letting you focus on creating and sharing rather than coding and debugging, at least most of the time.

What matters most about your blogging platform?

I gave some additional thought to building a WordPress theme, these days I think the three most important factors for a WordPress theme and by extrapolation most any website are:

1. Discoverability
2. Share-ability
3. Speed (especially on mobile)

Discoverability

How do people find your website and thus your content? Most likely discover it in Google or some other search engine, especially if they are complete strangers. AI agents may just scrape your content and serve it with at best a tiny link no one clicks back to your domain. This is why SEO, which stands for search engine optimization mattered for years and became an obsession for some. There are dark arts. There are shady characters. There are Russian hackers. What worked in 1995 might not work in 2005 let alone in 2035. If you have a content management system such as WordPress some of your SEO problems are solved, but in the days of AI hoovering up all the content on the web, highly optimized for search engine content may be counterproductive. It might be better to stay way out in the long tail.

I am a creator, generative AI is not.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks-those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Share-ability

Once a new reader finds your website and content, if it sparks joy they may want to share it with others. After twenty plus years of publishing online, I’ve seen a backlash first against social media websites and now AI generated content. Even if you choose not to embrace Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest you need to make sure your content shares well on those and other social networks. Unfortunately, you also need to make sure AI and search engine bots can hoover your content up easily. WordPress especially certain plugins can help get your structured metadata, sitemaps, and analytics in order.

Speed Kills Your Traffic

If your blog loads slowly, especially on mobile, most users will not wait for your dancing baby logo. Google and other search engines are supposedly rewarding websites that load quickly. This is one of the reasons I removed unnecessary plugins and JavaScript including all the little social sharing buttons that had become so common. Social media is now integrated into browsers and operating systems so I think it is more important to ensure your blog loads quickly. If people like your content they will find a way to share it.

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

This post is about blogging better and blogging is writing. However, I also mentioned how you need to ensure your post has high scan-ability. The speed you content loads is also vital as is how well your website looks on a mobile phone. As I’ve refined my writing style to improve Quality over the years, I’ve also realized I’ve changed how I use images, so I thought in 2026, I’d include a section on using images when trying to blog better.

Bandwidth used to be expensive

I’ve paid for this website for over twenty years. I’ve never paid a lot, but I’ve always paid real cash out of pocket. I’ve hit my bandwidth limit in the past, usually this was a result of hot linkers not my own popularity, this is why images online used to be smaller in file size and lower resolution, not because people didn’t like looking at pictures twenty years ago.

People like looking at pictures

The success of Instagram and Pinterest revealed how much people like looking at pictures online. Indeed the rise of Pinterest forced a lot of bloggers to look at how they were using images as did the rise of social sharing buttons in general. Blog posts need a featured image, this image is usually the first one appearing in a post and is leveraged when sharing a post on social media. A blog can definitely benefit from having more carefully chosen pictures surrounding even more carefully chosen words.

How I used to use images in WordPress

As I mentioned above, bandwidth used to be expensive, so I used small images and I often floated them around the text. I was reminded of this when editing old content recently. At some point, someone convinced me I should always float images to the right of the text. I even changed my blog theme to float the featured image to the right as shown above and below. How I use images in WordPress has changed over the years however. As time has gone on I’ve tended to use more images but also to include more text in each individual blog post, though technically only the featured image is necessary and many WordPress themes will put in a default featured image.

How I blog better in 2026

As browsers and monitors have gotten larger and there is greater and greater variety in the resolution of the screens people use to view websites, I discovered that always floating images to the right was causing me more and more rendering issues. For a time, I always centred my images. I’d put them between paragraphs or at the end of a post. However on a really large screen a bunch of small images centred looks weird, so of late I’ve added no alignment at all.

There are two reasons I stopped centring images one is mobile phone users who browse in portrait rather than landscape orientation. Not centring images also has to do with how I serve mobile readers this blog which is through the WPTouch plugin. I’ve been using this plugin for almost a decade. I think WPTouch overrides much of my default styling and text layout to make it more mobile friendly, so why spend all my time carefully resizing images and floating them to right if the plugin is going to resize them again and not float them to the right?

Finally there is Flickr. I became a Flickr Pro a few years back which means I pay for the service. People always want me to upload more images but I only have so much time for blogging or social media. Flickr allows me to put high resolution images online and use their custom HTML embed in my blog posts. This has worked well on this website, less well on WordPress.com. Photos are important in travel blogging and miniature painting two of the main focuses of my better blogging exploits.

Popups are bad m’kay

In 2026, I’m amazed so many websites still have popups. Many of them want me to subscribe to their mailing list. If your website gives me a popup, I give your website the FU. I hit the back button and I certainly do not link to your website and subject both my readers to your popup.

Popups are especially bad as more and more people browse the web on mobile devices. The popup is often so large it covers the entire screen making the website unusable, resist adding a popup to your website, be a better blogger than that.

I am aware that in some countries a website must make you acknowledge what cookies or tracking scripts are being used or ask you to confirm your age prior to letting you use a website, this is acceptable, covering the entire screen in a marketing call-to-action is not.

How much money will I make blogging?

I’ve got some bad news, for every blogger who gets a book deal, there are thousands and thousands who abandon their blogs without much ROI. I have not abandoned my blog, but I have not gotten near enough return on my investment, none-the-less I persist. I’m not sure if blogging has been good for my personal brand, it definitely has not lead to a better career.

Mark Schaefer a more successful blogger than I, offers these reasons to blog, even if nobody reads what you write.

In Conclusion

I recommend you take care. It is not publish or perish. What is done, can not always be undone. Remember you are always writing for your future boss. You are your Google results. In 2026, people continue to learn the dangers of social media. You should try to monitor your online reputation, celebrate your successes and learn from your mistakes. No blog is an island, blogging better generally requires a call to action, so share a link to this post or at least leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on August 3rd, 2006, it was last edited on April 25th, 2026 and is filed under: Advice and tagged: Blogging, Timelessness, Timeliness.