The standard advice for company blogs in 2026 is: publish weekly. Ideally twice a week. Hire a content team. Maintain a backlog. Feed the algorithm.The content marketing playbook from 2018 hasn't really updated, even as the search landscape has.
We publish quarterly, plus ad-hoc when we have something genuinely to say.
The case against frequency
A weekly blog requires either dedicated staff or a relentless content treadmill that pushes the founder to publish things they don't quite mean. Most weekly blog posts are written because it's Wednesday, not because there's something worth saying on Wednesday. They read like that.
The cost of those filler posts isn't zero. They dilute the voice — making the strong posts harder to find amongst the merely-acceptable ones. They erode trust — readers learn that the company has things to say half the time and nothing to say the other half. They train the audience to skim rather than read, because most posts don't reward the reading.
Search engines used to reward frequency in a crude way (more posts = more landing pages = more chances to rank). Modern search algorithms have largely stopped rewarding that. What they reward now is content that demonstrably gets engagement— read time, return visits, links from other respected sites. Filler weekly posts don't get those.
The case for quarterly + ad-hoc
The shape that works for us:
- One quarterly anchor, the editor's note from the dispatch desk, dated to a specific quarter. Predictable cadence. Builds expectation. Reads as a record of what the company's actually doing.
- Five or six pieces per issue, each genuinely worth reading. Mix of opinion, craft, case study, process. Each piece earns its place by saying something we actually mean.
- Ad-hoc bonus pieces when something genuinely happens that's worth a piece. A specific customer story (with permission). A change of direction. An honest acknowledgement of something we got wrong.
The quarterly cadence forces us to think in batches rather than churn. A quarterly editor knows they're publishing six things in three months, not twelve things in one month, so they can choose what they actually want to say.
The ad-hoc layer prevents the cadence from feeling rigid. Issues 01, 02, 03... don't have to be the only times we publish. They're the times we anchor.
What we lose
Honest weakness. We lose:
- Search visibility on long-tail queries that frequency-publishing competitors capture. Some small business looking for "how to do SEO for a coffee shop" will land on a competitor's weekly content rather than ours, because we don't publish in that register.
- Newsletter momentum. A weekly newsletter is a regular touchpoint with subscribers; quarterly is too sparse for some readers' habits. We're aware of this trade.
- The appearance of being "active." Some prospects equate publishing frequency with company-is-thriving, even when it isn't. We get less of that signal by publishing less.
Each of those losses is real. We've decided to take them. The reason: each post we publish is a moment of trust between us and the reader. The reader gives us their attention; we give them, in return, something we actually mean. Filling the gap with weekly filler would dilute that exchange. Better quarterly than weekly-but-shallow.
The frequency we'd recommend to customers
When customers ask us how often they should be blogging on their own sites, our answer is the same: publish when you have something to say, not when the calendar tells you to.For most small businesses that's once a quarter, with the occasional bonus piece. For some, it's twice a year. For a few, it's monthly. Almost nobody actually has fifty-two new things worth saying in a year.
The instinct to publish-because-Wednesday is a content-marketing-industrial-complex artefact, not a customer-need. Most readers would rather have one good piece a quarter than four mediocre ones a month. The data supports this. The case studies that get cited are, almost without exception, the slow-publishing ones.
Voice over volume.