We set the pace of our own blog by the number of drafts we could read to the last line each week and still sign without wincing. Search volume came second, and so did competitor calendars and the growth threads promising that daily posting changes everything. Because that count measures what a company can stand behind, we think it is the right pace for any company blog. Anything faster ends up publishing posts nobody at the company would defend, and that habit is how the internet filled up with machine-written content in a voice nobody has.
The writers we admire settled this long ago, in opposite directions. For years Seth Godin has posted to his blog every day, and he reads every post because he wrote every post. Paul Graham, by contrast, publishes an essay only when he has finished one, which sometimes leaves months between them. The two schedules have almost nothing in common. Even so, both were set by what the author could vouch for, and neither came from a calendar drawn up by somebody who would never read the result.
One post a week fits an hour a week
Propaganda asks about an hour a week of the person who owns the account. That hour goes on killing or approving pitches, reading drafts and settling the odd question about which fact is true. Nothing gets published without that approval. In that hour, we think one post is what fits.
Reading a draft properly takes longer than skimming it between meetings. It means checking that the price in the third paragraph is still the price, that every claim has an owner, and that the joke in the second section lands on the industry and spares the reader. A few minutes go on pitches. Most of the hour goes on the draft, and whatever is left goes on the private argument about the title. Two drafts squeezed into that hour would mean reading neither of them.
Size the pace for the worst month
Pick the number for the month with the launch in it, or the hire, or the board meeting that ate a week. Quiet months flatter any schedule. Three posts a week looks easy in a February with nothing on the calendar. In a launch month the same promise turns into three drafts nobody opened.
We'd bet the first missed week has killed more company blogs than bad writing ever has. One missed week became two, the archive started showing a gap, and the last post on the page ended up promising more soon. The web keeps a large graveyard of those posts, most of them dated sometime around a funding round. A pace held through a bad month will survive the good ones without any help.
Start with a batch, then settle
There is one exception to the weekly rhythm, and it comes at the start. A new blog with one post on it looks abandoned on its first day. Ours began on 14 October 2026 with fifteen posts written in twenty days and published over thirty, in three batches of pitches. We chose that sprint with our eyes open. It front-loaded the reading into the weeks when the launch had our full attention, and it gave the archive enough weight for a stranger to judge us by.
After the batch, the weekly pace takes over. The batch stocked the shelves once. If we had treated it as the new normal, we would have landed on a pace we could read for a month and then could not.
Write down success the day you set the pace
The plan that set our pace also wrote down what would count as winning, and for this quarter that means two searches on page one. By its reasoning, a domain with no history could win the two searches under difficulty 20 within eleven weeks, while the other eight would take longer. We kept one target the plan had doubts about anyway, "ai cms", despite its reading that the search mostly brings people shopping for a free blog. That disagreement went on paper too, with our names on it.
Without a target, month two would have become a debate between "it's going nowhere" and "give it time", with no number agreed in calmer days to settle it. A pace with no target always ends up in that debate, and the side that wins it is usually the one that was busiest that week. In Propaganda, the Strategist (in beta) proposes four goals a quarter and scores them every day. You can do the same with a notebook, provided the notebook gets written on day one.
Raise the pace by a fifth at most
When a quarter goes well, the temptation is to double. We built the opposite into the product. Our planner caps proposed volume at 20% above what went out the quarter before. A weekly blog that published thirteen posts in a quarter can propose about fifteen in the next one, which adds two drafts to read across three months. An hour a week absorbs that. Doubling is how a company with something to say turned into a content farm with a logo, and we have no wish to sell to the second one.
Six a quarter is the floor
Below about six posts a quarter, there is too little to read the numbers on. Two posts that went in opposite directions tell you more about luck than about the plan. We track time read on every post, and a handful of posts gave us a handful of anecdotes. Above what you can read, your name goes on posts you never checked. For a company with one founder and an hour to spare, the number between those two lines is one post a week, and we'd start there.