Ask a room of marketers how often to publish and you'll hear everything from "once a week, minimum" to "daily if you can." Ask who's going to read and approve all of it, and the room goes quiet.
That second question should set your content calendar frequency. A draft isn't ready until someone who knows the business has checked it: the founder, a product manager, the office manager, a licensed professional. Their time is the scarce part. Plan around it.
Where calendars actually stall
Anyone who's run a company blog will recognize this:
- A calendar gets approved with an ambitious number.
- Drafts arrive on time.
- Review takes longer than anyone planned. Drafts pile up in a shared folder.
- Posts go out in bursts, then stop. The calendar is quietly abandoned.
A stalled queue costs more than a slower calendar would have. Drafts written against March's brief are stale by May. The writer has moved on and lost the thread. Feedback arrives as a batch of fifteen documents, so it gets shallower with each one. And you've paid for work that isn't live.
Four posts a month that go out beat twelve that sit in a folder.
Count the review hours first
The math fits on a napkin.
Review hours you have per month = the hours per week your reviewer can realistically give × 4.33
"Realistically" means the hours they'll protect in a bad week, not the hours they'd like to have.
Review hours you need per month depends on the mix of work. Our cadence planner starts from these assumptions:
| Piece | Slots | Review time the planner assumes |
|---|---|---|
| New article, up to 1,800 words | 1 | 1 hour |
| Pillar guide, 1,800–3,500 words | 2 | 2 hours |
| Expert-interview article | 1½ | 1½ hours |
| Refresh of an existing page | ½ | 15 minutes |
| Consolidation (2–3 posts merged into one) | 1 | 30 minutes |
They're defaults, not facts about your team. In a regulated business (law, finance, healthcare), where every claim needs checking, double them. A reviewer on their twentieth draft will be quicker than one on their first.
Why are refreshes so much lighter? The reviewer already approved that page once. They're checking what changed, which is laid out in a change log, not reading a new piece cold.
Three hypothetical teams
Made-up teams and made-up numbers, to show how the math changes the answer.
| Team A: local clinic | Team B: B2B software | Team C: online store | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who reviews | Office manager | Product marketer | Founder |
| Review time | 1 h/week (about 4.3 h/month) | 2 h/week (about 8.7 h/month) | 30 min/week (about 2.2 h/month) |
| What they asked for | 4 new posts | 12 new posts | 4 new posts |
| Review hours needed | 4 | 12 | 4 |
| Does it fit? | Just | No | No |
| What we'd suggest | 4 new posts, Cadence 4 | 4 new + 4 refreshes + 2 merges = 8 slots, about 6 h, Cadence 8 | 8 refreshes = 4 slots, about 2 h, Cadence 4 |
Team B is the common case. Twelve new posts need about 12 review hours a month, roughly 2¾ a week, and the product marketer has 2. Something gives, and it's usually the calendar. The suggested mix still fills eight slots, but it needs about 6 review hours instead of 12. And a software company with a two-year-old blog almost certainly has a few overlapping posts that should be merged anyway.
Team C is the less obvious one. Half an hour a week won't cover even four new articles. It will cover eight refreshes of existing buying guides, because the founder is checking edits, not reading from scratch.
When refreshes beat new posts
Shift the mix toward refreshes when:
- You have posts older than 12 months that still get impressions. They're already in front of people.
- The new topics on your list overlap pages you already have. Write them and the two pages will compete.
- Your reviewer's hours are the limit, as above.
Lean toward new pieces when the site is young, when there are obvious gaps between what you sell and what you've written about, or when nothing old is worth saving.
Not sure which camp you're in? Run your domain through the free sitemap decay scanner first. It shows how much of your site hasn't been touched in a year or two.
Isn't more just better?
No. Google's spam policies describe generating many pages "without adding value for users" as scaled content abuse, whatever tool produced them. That's a description of abuse, not a publishing quota, but the direction is clear enough: volume isn't the goal. Google revises these pages, so read the current wording on Search Central.
What matters more than a big number is a steady one. A reader who finds a burst of twenty posts followed by six months of silence doesn't see a publication. They see a project that ended.
Picking your number
- Write down your reviewer's real weekly hours.
- Multiply by 4.33.
- Fill that budget with a mix, using the review times above, before you look at price.
- Match it to a plan: Cadence 4 is $2,100/mo for 4 slots, Cadence 8 is $3,900/mo for 8, Cadence 14 is $6,400/mo for 14.
- If the total comes out under two slots a month, you don't need a plan. Buy one article for $575 or a refresh pack for $1,350 and see how review goes.
The cadence planner runs all five steps and lays the result out as a 12-week calendar you can export as a Markdown table or a calendar file. It works in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us unless you choose to book a call.
Choosing a cadence is the first half of a content strategy. The other half is deciding which topics go in the slots. Our topic map and 90-day calendar is a fixed $1,250 if you'd like that settled before committing to any plan.
A cadence your team can keep won't guarantee rankings or traffic. Nothing will. What it does is get drafts published instead of leaving them to age in a folder.
