Have you noticed how everyone’s starting a blog these days? The amount of content that’s being written and published is astronomical. It’s ridiculous.
You’re having to fight for every subscriber and every retweet. If you’re going to escape the masses, you need to start writing better content. Stuff that’s so vastly superior to the blogs around you that they can’t ignore it.
The fastest way to write better content…
…is to slow down.
You need to spend a minimum of two hours writing every article you publish. That sounds like a long time, and it is. It’s hard work. It’s exhausting.
But it’s the First Rule of Two Hour Blogger.
If you don’t, you’ll get lost amid the heaps and heaps of mediocre bloggers. It’s time you to decided once and for all that you’re not going to let this happen to you. Here are seven reasons you should spend at least two hours writing every blog post.
1. It forces you to have something to say.
If you have a mediocre, simple idea that you think is worth publishing, it won’t take you long to write it down. Far, far less than two hours. After fifteen minutes, you’ll be wrapping it up. It took you less than the allotted time, so you can’t publish it.
That’s a good thing. It’s not worth publishing. The topic is so simple, it’s not worth reading. Anybody could have written that, which means nobody’s going to pay attention.
Bloggers make this mistake all the time. They go for a walk and hear the birds singing and suddenly discover four blogging ideas. None of them are worth publishing.
If you can tweet the essence of a concept, it’s not worth wasting a blog post about it.
This mistake is very common and easy to make. You’ve been trained to think that finding dozens of blogging ideas is simple. It isn’t. It’s hard work.
Writing a solid post takes hours of intense focus. You need to give your readers content that’s worthwhile. This means maintaining a well-thought-out subject matter.
2. It creates more value for your audience.
In order for an artist to create beautiful, harmonious, well-balanced paintings, it takes him vast blocks of uninterrupted time – regardless of his decades of experience.
The same principle applies to writing. You need to spend a lot time and effort in order to create valuable content. Regardless of your experience, this takes hours of labor.
You can’t build Rome in a single day. You can’t whip up a worthwhile blog in half an hour.
3. It makes your audience slow down.
It’s hard to zip through a blog post that’s crammed with jewels, insights, and ideas. People want to slow down and enjoy it. It’s such a breath of fresh air from the bloated clutter that pervades the Internet.
Conversely, it’s really easy skimming a horrible blog post. Since it’s bloated and repetitious, you can glance at the title and learn what it says. You probably won’t feel like linking to it either, or even sharing it on Twitter.
Getting your audience to slow down and drink deeply is important. The longer someone hangs around your site, the better they get to know you. This is an important part of content marketing strategy. It’s also a great way to reduce your bounce rate as well.
4. It enables you to do your research, use proper grammar and punctuation, and polish your work.
If you spend at least two hours writing your content, you’ll never publish a blog post with a misspelled word. You’ll proofread it multiple times, and you’ll catch every mistake.
You won’t be guessing at your statistics and quotes either – you’ll have plenty of time to look things up. You’ll never have to update a post. Everything is laid out exactly like you deliberately intended it.
The most enjoyable part of writing comes with editing paragraphs; switching words around, changing adjectives, removing the passive voice. When you don’t do this, you’re leaving a potentially polished diamond in the rough. You want your audience’s experience to be as liquid and seamless as possible.
Don’t feel rushed, there isn’t any hurry. If your two hours is up and you’re not done yet, feel free to take up the next two. Go for it. You’re creating art. It’s timeless.
5. It improves your SEO.
The most important element in search engine optimization is getting humans to link back to you. The more time you spend perfecting an idea, the better it becomes, and the more likely someone will link to you.
6. It makes your posts longer.
Wait, don’t you want to keep things short and sweet? Not necessarily. When you’re writing truly remarkable content, your audience wants you to take things to the next level. If you have the solution to their problem, they don’t mind reading a thousand words. They’d rather see you elaborate things than leave your ideas sketchy or ambiguous.
Bloggers tend to get in a hurry. They write a few hundred words and suddenly start itching to hit the Publish button. They don’t take the time to explore the full potential of their ideas.
Don’t be like that. Push things to their limit. That’s how even better ideas get started.
7. It gives you a better reason to promote your content.
As you spend more time writing each post, you can start spending more time promoting each post. They go together. You’ll feel justified spending blocks of time sharing it with others.
As you establish a reputation for writing meaty content, you’ll be noticed and valued more, and your CTR will increase on social sharing sites.
It’s as simple as this: spend a minimum of two hours writing everything you ship from now on. These seven benefits are too good to miss out on.
We’ve still got a lot of aspects of Internet marketing to talk about. Subscribe today for free and join the ride. It’ll be worth your while. I spend at least two hours writing everything I publish. 
During my first blog post attempts I tried to crank out posts as fast as possible to get content on the site. But I realized that it doesn’t get me anywhere.
I truly agree with your two hours per blog post statement.
It sounds like a huge block of time, but the returns of investment are staggering.
And yes, just like you, I started out coughing up content waaay too quickly. Took me a year to figure out I needed to slow down.
Thanks for the comment, Johannes.
Thanks for this post, Martyn! Very helpful!
Everyone talks about content being the most important aspect of your blog. The two hour rule is certainly a good one to begin with as it forces you to rewrite and think and pull your ideas together. I like your reference to SEO also.
Thanks! Yep, that’s the most important (and most difficult) part of SEO.
Definitely some food for thought here. One question: Does this include the time spent fleshing out the idea in your head and researching the feasibility of the topic, or is the two hours in addition to that?
No, the two hours is from conception to published. Should you need more time though, nobody’s going to stop you. I know some bloggers who spend 4 hours on each blog post.
Ah, there is the reason for the website name. Nice. I spend several hours on each of my posts, as the theme of my blog is deep thinking. I agree with you on post length/time and hope that it pays off for me. I dig your clean, simple theme and writing style. Very polished.
You mentioned this is a premium WP theme somewhere as I was browsing articles. What exactly is the main draw for these? More options? I currently use Suffusion.
Hey Stephen. Two Hour Blogger uses the Freelance theme from Studiopress. I love it because it uses the Genesis Framework and the Freelance child theme. Let me explain how this works.
The Framework produces the code that Google sees. It’s great for SEO, and it’s rock solid. The child theme is responsible to the site’s good looks, and you can customize and edit it all day without affecting the rock solid framework.
When you buy a theme from Studiopress, you’re getting clean, optimized code, and professional design and graphics. To me, that’s a win-win and definitely worth the $80.
Thanks Martyn! That does sound nice. Do you have to know css, php, and html to customize it or it is done through a UI?
You have to know code dude. Or, hire someone like me who does.
You wouldn’t be the first client.
The themes that use a UI are great for beginners, but from a coding/design standpoint, it’s better to do it all manually. You’re in better control of it that way.
This is what separates Studiopress from Headway, DIYThemes, etc.
Hi Martin, Great blog, and I must say I am hatching some ideas myself, just from reading and enjoying your blog. One point I would make, regarding grammar, as you so correctly mention the importance of it:
“When it comes to the Internet, it means you need to understand the social web really really badly. This doesn’t mean you’re supposed to master Farmville and do a hundred #ff tweets every Friday. But it does mean that you need to understand ……………………..”
Can you see my point? You do not need to understand anything “really really badly” But surely it would be better to understand it “really really well” ? Just my observation (at least it proves your whole blog is being read, right?) Kind regards, Martin
Right, I guess I’m not exactly using the correct use of grammar there, Martin. I thought it played on people’s emotions to say “badly” instead of “well” but maybe I should change it. Thanks for the heads up.
And my name’s spelled “Martyn.”
So sorry, Martyn, after almost 60 years of spelling it my way, it’s a hard habit to break! lol
Right, well after 18 years of spelling it my way, it’s really awkward writing “Martin.”
Good article here. Very often I hear people who write 2 or 3 posts in two hours and at first I felt silly I couldn’t do it.
Now I take my time to polish every article and I post quality stuff once or twice a week instead of rushed articles every single day.
Good concept to build a blog around
Cristina
Quality is really very important in blogging and your rule can make this happen but sometimes it is also depending on the amount of knowledge or idea you have.
Agree. I often spend more than that. And I also make it a rule never to publish a post at once. I sleep on it and if I still like it in the morning, I publish it.
This is my first time to your site, and I’m thinking about the last blog post I wrote. It was a post inspired by some emails I’d received from readers that left me frustrated and emotional. I had to go to the office, shut the door, and start writing it on paper. I wrote most of it before typing it into my offline editor, then uploaded it to WordPress. The only reason why I got online was to figure out how to write some CSS and edit the piece.
I stepped away from it for an hour to have lunch, then came back, edited it, re-wrote some of it, re-read it again. Hitting the Publish button was the hardest part, because it came from a deep place. This whole process probably took 3-4 hours.
It’s been a day, and this post has been shared and viewed more times than any other in one day, and I’ve received some nice responses from readers. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a spike after the email update is sent out this weekend.
The point of my comment is to affirm that what you’re writing about works.
I’m still learning how to write better headlines, but I guess that comes with practice.
Thanks.
Thanks for sharing that story Darlene! That’s really neat.
For a post that’s almost 6 months old, this is worth reading and rereading. I have to agree there’s really no rush to get a post out. I think we put the pressure on ourself. I used to blog Mon to Fri and then went to three days a week. I’ve been thinking about cutting back even more but need time to think this over.
Thx for putting this together.
I’ve read other posts from your site, but I thought it’d be good to read this one as well.
I’ve just published an article. I’m thinking now if I worked on it for two hours but I think all together it took about that time
.
I can’t disagree with what you wrote above, but for me it feels like there’s hardly if any difference in traffic, comments or shares no matter how short or long my posts are (I have 500+ word articles, <200 words news flashes, quotes, and intro-with-some-opinions posts – so there's enough to choose).
. At this point I doubt that putting 2 hours in every post would change something about that (and you just don't need 2 hours for a quote 
.
Actually I decided to start writing shorter content to be able to publish more content. And that did help to get a bit more traffic simply because I have more to promote now.
It's also very unrewarding to spend hours on an article, to really think it's a decent piece, and then to see how everyone is just ignoring it
Well, thanks for your advice anyway, I'll definitely remember it – your blog's name will surely remind me
Maybe it’s not for everyone Raymond, but my best articles are usually the ones that take me longest to write. For example, look at my latest article that spans more than 1.4K words. It’s one of my most popular to date.
Thanks for your reply.
No, I completely understand the idea, more value attracts more readers, so a nice fat article should do better than a simple quote, but my statistics show the quotes do best, although there was 1 article that did equally well. So that’s what I find confusing. Maybe the low traffic volume on my site is just making it hard to make any conclusions about it.
Pfff. I’m starting to think to hire someone to tell me what the hell I’m doing wrong
.
The first thing I thought when I saw that your blog title was your first “rule” was, “Only two hours? How could I possibly cut back that much??”. I had to laugh when I actually read the rule–these days, I guess, two hours is an inordinately long time for most people!
Cough. Pretty soon I’ll have to change my name to “five hour blogger.”
Oh, okay. Good. I was just about to say…
I’m a slow writer, true, but I like to spend a week writing a good, quality article. Even as my speed improves, I’ll still want to leave a week’s worth of space to edit the article to perfection.
But, I’m not a blogger, I only have an email newsletter, so who cares?
Hey Martyn,
Very cool post. The internet has definitely changed with so much more content….. Volume probably got you noticed a lot more early on, but I like the points you make about really creating something helpful and polished. Seemed to be what I have observed from people I enjoy listening to lately since they stand out above the clutter.
Martyn,
Thanks for the book. Outstanding information!! I am probably the slowest blogger
you will ever meet. I have been talking about starting a blog since the beginning of time.
I can’t even get past a great title. I know what I want to write about or should I say paint
a picture with words that readers will linger on and actually pass on to their family and friends.
Thanks for your inspiration.
it took me 7 post on my first to learn that content is king,traffic is queen but til now i haven’t perfected to post great content ,and your tips could be the missing piece to get it done..