This week I discovered Martyn Chamberlain — the Two Hour Blogger.

His premise is that any writing worth reading in the blogosphere must take two hours to create.

“You need to spend a minimum of two hours writing every article you publish,” he writes.

Later: “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.”

Martyn, I respectfully disagree.

What I have learned is that the more experience you have with blogging, the easier it becomes.

I may have spent nearly two hours crafting some of my first blog posts, but in the time since then, I have learned to write more quickly. Other bloggers whose work I deeply respect have encountered the same phenomenon. We’ve learned to write blog posts more quickly out of necessity.

Martyn, I do agree with you on several other points:

There is a lot of content on the web that seems thrown-together, haphazard.

There is value to be found, for both the reader and the blogger, when the process is slowed down.

AND.

A requirement of spending two hours per blog post is not realistic for most busy business owners.

As Phil Gerbyshak shared: “If I had two hours to write a blog post, I wouldn’t need to write a blog post.”

Have you noticed many abandoned or neglected blogs lately?

The very reason that many bloggers don’t write more often is TIME. They don’t have two hours, or one hour even, to write content for their blogs. Or, they have an expectation that writing and publishing a post will take a long time. So they don’t even start.

Perhaps, Martyn, our difference of opinion comes from a fundamental difference in our core audiences.

If so, I am curious: who are these people who have two hours to spend on every blog post? What are their goals for blogging?

Our audience here consists of

  • the time-starved
  • the over-committed
  •  people short on time and high on passion.

We write for people making a big difference in the real world who also want to make a difference through social media.

We want to help:

  • skilled jugglers
  • expert multi-taskers
  • professional time stretchers, and
  • those who squeeze every possible productive moment out of each day.

To them, we say:

What if you could write — or even start — a blog post in twelve minutes?

Could what you accomplish in those 12 minutes propel you forward?

Would you post more frequently, building a library of content to help search engines (and customers) find you?

Martyn, what if a published post is just a published post, not a work of art. Is it still valuable? Can it find an audience? Can it add value to your business?

Or is this post, written in (slightly more than twelve minutes), just noise that will get “lost amid the heaps and heaps of mediocre” posts?