The constraint of a sharp bag boundary in the bag model is relaxed in the present work. This has been achieved by replacing the square-well potential of the bag model by a smooth scalar potential and introducing a term similar to the bag pressure term. The constraint of the conservation of the energy-momentum tensor is used to obtain an expression for the added bag pressure term. The model is then used to determine the static properties of the nucleon. The calculation shows that the rms charge radius and the nucleon magnetic moment are larger than the corresponding bag model values. Also, the axial vector coupling constant and the \ensuremath{\pi}NN coupling constant are in better agreement with the experimental values.