Blog cadence: a practical guide

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. This guide covers what blog cadence actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why this earns attention

Consistency matters more than frequency. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

Where to start

One useful post a month beats four thin weekly ones. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Publish when you have something worth saying. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Consistency matters more than frequency
• One useful post a month beats four thin weekly ones
• Publish when you have something worth saying
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Common failure modes

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

What to do next

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.