Is Weekly Blog Content Needed or Is It No Longer Helpful?

At the top level of blogging, you have to make a lot of overarching decisions. Foremost among them is how often you're going to post to your blog.

There are a lot of different schools of thought here.

Some big-name brands and marketers, for example, adopt a kind of "whenever it feels right" schedule. You see sites run by these big names getting a new pillar-style post every month or two, and sporadic smaller posts in between. Sometimes there will be 2-3 in a given day, sometimes one for a week. Whenever there's a topic worth covering, they cover it, and that's all they need to do.

Other brands take a firm schedule and fill it out with whatever topics are available. This is where I've been for years.

• A couple of my sites, and most of my clients, publish once per week.
• My main blog often publishes twice per week.
• Occasionally, a client will have different requirements, and I'll post daily or on another schedule.

Usually, there's a kind of push-and-pull here.

The more often you post, the shorter and thinner the posts tend to be. It's difficult to sustain a rapid pace when you're doing weeks of research and multiple rounds of revision, right? Conversely, the less often you post, the more likely each post is to be a whopper.

This is also stark in other fields, like YouTube. You have channels that post daily with 5–10-minute videos, and you have channels that post one 4-hour video essay every six months, and both can be very successful.

The caveat here is that you can get around this balance with money. You can publish high-quality posts multiple times per week if you're willing to pay people to produce them. A lot of large brands these days have multiple writers or even multiple content teams working for them, each one on a longer cycle, but layered so that the pace of publishing is fairly rapid.

AI is also clouding the issue. With LLMs, you can output something resembling content in a much faster turnaround time than human writers can. You have to do other things to it (edit it, fact-check it, humanize it), but it can still be faster. Better, not necessarily, but faster.

Past Advice on Blog Post Frequency

The concept of blog post frequency is something I've talked about a lot before.

My general conclusion, as echoed in posts like my guide to building a blog content strategy, is this: frequency doesn't matter as much as consistency.

A study from a few years back found that 11 posts per month, or about three per week, was the sweet spot.

That's for established sites, though. Personally, I like to do a big content push when I'm launching a new site just to build up a backlog of content and get the name out into the SERPs. Then, once the site is more established after a few months, I dial it back to 1-3 per week.

I've also often found that once per week is better than 2-3 times per week, but there are a lot of confounding factors when doing this for clients (external marketing efforts, other content teams, advertising) that make it harder to draw firm conclusions.

Truly, though, the goal is to be consistently visible in various feeds. A lot of algorithms out there, from Facebook to TikTok to the Google feeds, are all very time-sensitive. If a post is more than a week or two old, it's a lot less likely to show up for time-sensitive feeds.

If you feel like this runs in opposition to the goal of creating evergreen content, it kind of does, but they're different feeds.

There are people who get almost all of their information from whatever comes across a recommended news feed. These are heavily biased towards new content, and always will be. No one wants to read "news" and find the post they're reading is from four years ago.

Anyone who searches for information more deliberately, such as just using Google search for a question rather than browsing a feed, has access to the top-quality evergreen content on the subject. Similarly, LLM summarizing and search replacements also bias quality content over recent content, largely since they pull from Google or Bing, which surface quality over recency.

So, both are good for different reasons.

The Ideal Frequency for 2025 and Beyond

That's the past advice, so what is the current advice? Have things like AI and the shift away from Twitter and the slow death of Facebook had an impact?

Yes and no, but largely no.

I hold by my old opinions. Your goal is consistency, which means sustainability. If you can't keep up with 2-3 posts per week, the inevitable crash-out is going to hurt more than if you had just established a more reasonable schedule at the outset.

If anything, these days, a higher frequency is almost a sign of spam. Unless you're a major company with dozens of writers, are you really able to post daily, or multiple times per day? If so, it's probably because you're using AI to do it, and there are plenty of people who look down on that today.

How to Find the Right Content Schedule for Your Site

There's no one single answer for everyone here. If there were, Google would publish it in its help center. The reality is, you do what works for you and your site.

This can vary depending on the size and scale of your business, your marketing budget, and your goals. It can also change throughout your career with that site.

So, instead, let's talk about different factors that can influence how often you should post.

Your Skills and Capacity

First of all is how much you can actually handle. I'm assuming here that you're writing the posts for your own site, which is frequently but not always the case. Ignore this one if you're just planning to hire a content marketing agency like mine, or pay some freelancers to write for you.

When you're first starting out with blogging, it can feel easy. All you need to do is pick a topic, write about it, and publish it, right? What could that possibly take, Michael, ten minutes?

Once you've been at it for a while, you quickly realize you aren't getting anywhere. You need a lot more intentionality behind your blogging. You need topic research and qualification, you need SEO, and you need link building. You can spend days just laying the groundwork before you even start putting together an outline.

In this early stage, publishing once or twice a week is fairly normal. Most people at this stage have day jobs and aren't able to dedicate a ton of time to the blog. It's a side hustle.

Often, the next stage is ramping it up. Once people get a taste of the potential rewards, like seeing traffic numbers go up or getting their first hit of revenue, they crank it up to 11. That might be the "11 per month" tier, or it might be daily posting, or more. This frenzy can last a few months or a year, but sooner or later (often sooner), you end up in burnout.

At this point, you have a decision to make. Do you dial it back to something more sustainable? Do you abandon the site because you're burnt out and just don't like it anymore? Do you start paying someone to do your writing for you? Often, this results in right back where you were: 1-3 posts per week, at a sustainable clip.

Meeting Quality Goals

I mentioned above that some of the big-name sites seem to only publish once every couple of weeks, or even less often. When they do, though, the content they publish is an absolute banger. These pillar posts become massively shared linkbait throughout their industry. They often present unique information, case studies, or deep research that isn't found anywhere else.

Spending the time it takes to publish very high-quality content can be very rewarding. The downside is that you have to be established first. A no-name site with five blog posts on it isn't going to get much traction, no matter how good those five posts are. You need a strong foundation before you can dial back to the extreme end of quality over quantity.

Adjusting to Fit the Needs of the Niche

Another truth people don't often talk about is that different niches and different styles of coverage have different needs and benefit from different frequencies.

Some niches are pretty small, and there's not a lot to cover. These often benefit from a slower, deeper amount of coverage, where you can take the time to really dig deep into your topics.

Others are broader and more active. When there's always something new on the horizon, there's always something to cover and a new perspective to take, and even daily posts might not be able to keep up.

This is also sort of the difference between a more resource-heavy service site (like Content Powered) versus a news site (like Search Engine Journal). I don't need to have a post covering every little bit of news or new development in content marketing. Instead, I focus on deeper and more robust discussions, and evergreen guides and resources.

This can even depend on your monetization strategy. If you're a site reliant on pageviews for display ads, a higher volume of content will be more beneficial to your bottom line. If you're more reliant on winning over individual clients with the quality of your service, less frequent but more detailed and more trustworthy content wins the day.

Other Kinds of Content

Something else that's worth mentioning is that blogging frequency isn't necessarily just about publishing new content. In fact, I would argue that once your site reaches a particular point, it becomes just as much (if not more) about maintenance of existing content.

Updating old content can be extremely valuable. Anything that holds value as a topic and as a link hub on your site can be updated and maintained. But, instead of doing that silently in the background, you can also "republish" the content to push it to the front of your feed.

You do need to make your updates significant, of course. If the post still contains dated references or outdated perspectives, and all you did was update a few keywords and push it as new, you aren't going to get much out of it.

Just changing a date won't trick Google, after all.

I also figure that, if you're in a position where you have a sustainable blog with a consistent schedule and you're considering increasing it, you can instead look to other channels.

In my experience, going from two blog posts per week to three blog posts per week can be beneficial, but you're likely to get more out of that effort if you instead take that time and dedicate it towards making videos out of older content, or recording podcast versions of content, or even writing those posts as guest posts for other sites.

There are a lot of different ways to benefit from extra time and effort that aren't just increasing the number of times you blog post per week.

Is Weekly Content Still Worthwhile?

I set one post per week as a baseline, but is weekly content even necessary anymore?

I say yes.

The fact is, if you're posting less than once per week, you're really not giving yourself the fuel to grow. One post per week is 52 posts per year. That's not a ton of content when you consider blogs out there with thousands of posts in their backlog.

Blogging is and will always be a numbers game. Without at least a certain amount of volume, you have no stability and no room to grow. You need a broad foundation to build the tower on top, right?

I will always recommend weekly content until such time as the entire marketing paradigm changes to move beyond our current search-based models. I don't foresee that coming any time soon.

You can post less often, but only if you have other things that can fill that gap. Maybe you're investing in video, maybe you're investing in outreach, maybe you're updating old content; whatever it is, the effort is the fuel that helps you grow.

You can post more often, but consider sustainability. I've been through burnout a few times myself, and it's very much not fun, and it takes a long time to properly recover. You can avoid it with money, but then you have to balance the budget as well, and that can be just as difficult.

In the end, it all just comes down to finding what works for you. For the vast majority of bloggers, that's going to be weekly content.