1. Blogger

The Blogger WordPress theme has long been a favorite for people with a story to tell. It’s simple, but highly functional design enable you to get started quickly and publish stories frequently. This theme is designed with bloggers in mind, first and foremost, so it doesn’t take a WordPress whiz to make it look and work great.

Try the Blogger Demo

2. Freyja

The Freyja WordPress Blog theme offers an elegant personal blogging design with simple customizations that go a long way. You can choose between 2 personal blog demos and an e-commerce store demo and import the designs with one click. However, if you want to go completely custom, Freyja is easy to use and provides all the options a blogger would want.

Try the Freyja Demo

3. Wunderful

Wunderful is one of the cleanest minimalist blog themes you can find for WordPress. With simple layouts and features, it’s very easy to make this blog theme your own. Choose between grid and list layouts for your blog posts, and add widgets and contact forms to tie it all together.

Try the Wunderful Demo

4. Tuulikki

For 2017 blogging themes, you can’t miss Tuulikki, a theme that looks as elegant as it sounds. This theme features a crisp minimal blog design. The look and feel lends itself to fashion, food, family, or home bloggers, and has the flexibility to fit any type of blog.

Our favorite feature of this theme is the posts slider.

Unlike many of the clunky or aggressive sliders out there, this one shows off posts with clean scrolling right at the top of your posts page. This makes for a nice user experience, as your latest content is prominent right next to your main navigation bar. You can choose from the three different slider layouts built in.

Tuulikki also does a great job displaying categories in the right sidebar.

Tuulikki isn’t a one-trick pony, though. With plenty of variety in blog layouts, a promo box, and WooCommerce integration for online stores, this theme packs in tons of style and function.

Try the Tuulikki Demo

5. Carbis

Another contender for bloggers is Carbis, which features a very professional design geared toward travel blogging and rich photography.

We love the featured post slider, and the title box that only appears on the middle post, as well as the awesome category tiles.

In addition, the blog post feed comes in a unique format which slightly overlaps the post body with the featured image, blurring the boundary between photo and text.

Carbis helps you create a great reading experience with room for photos to breathe. It’s a great option for travelers, photographers, or anyone who wants to create compelling content paired with beautiful photos or instructions, such as recipes.

Customize the fonts, colors, and layouts easily with the theme options, and this blog will tell your story with swagger. Or, with a rich photo display and social media links up close and personal, Carbis makes a great hub for the social media whiz.

Try the Carbis Demo

6. ZenBlog

ZenBlog has been a longtime favorite at MOJO Marketplace for it’s straightforward blog format and highly usable features. ZenBlog has plenty of room for photos that tell a story as well as an optimal layout for reading and perusing your thoughts.

The typography design stands out among other blog themes.

The different font weights, for example, guide your eye and create a very finished professional look.

The layout and placement of widgets for ZenBlog are highly customizable, and you can try all the options in the theme demo. Also, the theme developer has created tutorial videos that make it easy to set up your WordPress site just like the demo and customize.

Try the ZenBlog Demo

7. Blogera

Need some inspiration for a uniquely designed blog? Blogera features 25 demo designs, each with a different perspective on what a blog should be. The cool part is you can take any of these designs, import the settings and content with one click, and customize the content.

This theme lets you create any type of blog very quickly because of the demo designs. Seriously, it has everything from a basic travel blog to a unique full-width style, as shown here:

We can’t underscore enough the value of variety here. Want to get started blogging fast? The developer has created a video that shows you how to build your blog in 5 minutes, and our customers have raved about their support:

Try the Blogera Demo

8. Heron

Sometimes, a blog WordPress theme just needs to be simple and focus on the content experience. Heron is one of these themes. You can get started quickly with a pixel perfect design that is tried and true, and puts your content up front.

Our favorite feature is the extended excerpts for posts, which allow you to read a couple of paragraphs before having to click “read more.”

You have many options to make each post unique, such as galleries and sliders, but the layout can remain uncluttered and centered on your stories.

Try the Heron Demo

9. Bloghi

Bloghi is an outstanding design for nature, fashion, and lifestyle bloggers who want to bring style to their writing and photography.

Some of Bloghi’s coolest features are the widgets, such as: about me, advertisement, flickr, video, carousel, and social media sharing buttons. You can add dimension to your blog feed by placing these nice easter eggs in the sidebar.

Above all, Bloghi does a great job of presenting your blog posts in an attractive feed, with all the features you need tocreate interesting categories and expand your audience.

Also, having great support for your theme is not to be overlooked. See what people are saying about Bloghi and their support:

Try the Bloghi Demo

10. Juliet

The Juliet blogging WordPress theme brings sophistication to your writing. Of all the blog themes we’ve combed through this year, this one has one of the coolest category designs, which also give you space to describe the different types of content you create.

Juliet’s elegant layout enables you to pack in a lot of information, photos, and features without getting crowded. For example, this blog feed and sidebar layout features a ton of info, yet it feels adequately spaced.

This theme has many features and styles, but also offers something different—a look book template. With the look book template, you can create as many look books as you like and change the layout as well. The look book is a great way to group evergreen content that fits together, or to provide product guides and comparisons.

Try the Juliet Demo

1. Start with Quarterly Themes

The four quarters of the year provide the perfect framework for building a more detailed content strategy, while also refreshing every three months. Choosing four main themes for the year will also focus your content efforts, providing the consistency in post topics that will build an audience.

The themes that you choose should reflect both your business goals and the needs of your potential customers that you’ve found through customer research. They should be broad enough that individual topics within them address the interests of customers at the awareness, consideration and decision stages of the purchase process.

2. Break it Down into a Monthly Calendar

From your quarterly themes, you can begin to plan out a more detailed content plan for each month. Start by deciding how frequently you will post new content, based on the capabilities of your team and the number of content topics. This could be one new post each day, one every other weekday or even a much more in-depth piece per week.

There are many tools you can use to build out your content calendar, starting with a basic calendar in Google Sheets. CoSchedule and HubSpot also offer free calendar templates for planning out your content campaigns. You can also use task management systems like Trello to organize the content process.

The key is to plan out a consistent schedule of content that covers all customer needs and uses a variety of content types, including long-form posts, infographics and even video. You’ll also want to incorporate holidays and other special events in your calendar when they align with your audience’s interest.

3. Plan to Promote Your Content

Another key aspect of a successful content strategy is effective promotion of that content—which again needs to be consistent in order to draw the audience of customers that you want. If you are just starting out or making new efforts to expand your audience, social media is the key to drawing new attention to your content.

Each social platform has different best practices in order to get the most out of your shares—Social Media Examiner breaks this down in more detail. In order to keep track of your promotion schedule for new content, these social media posts should be included in your content calendar. You’ll also want to consider setting a budget for social media in order to increase your reach.

4. Build Your Content Team

For smaller marketing teams—or even solo ones—the amount of planning and actual content writing needed to be consistent can be overwhelming. This is where freelance content writers can help, though you’ll want to ensure that the freelancers you hire have a thorough understanding of your industry and your audience. Services like Scripted make it easy to find qualified writers and to set up a consistent schedule of content creation.

Once you’ve established a consistent schedule of content, the next step is refining your strategy and your processes to be better and more efficient. Google Analytics is a wonderful, free tool that enables you to measure interaction with your content and promotion channels.

Get going on your new content plan today and start providing extra value for your audience.