Are you spending hours blogging but the response is crickets? I’m going to help Rochester area bloggers with that dilemma in my class Blogging 201 at Writers and Books on Nov. 1.

I’ve been looking for best practices and tips to share with my students, which has meant digging through the Internet (or the “black hole” as I’ve been calling it).

So I thought I’d share links to five articles I’ve found that I consider must-reads for bloggers.

Here they are:

How to write headlines that drive traffic shares and search results by Nathan Ellering. Ellering wrote this for the CoSchedule Blog. He writes about CoSchedule’s amazing headline analyzer, in which you can paste in your blog headline to see how it scores. The analyzer looks at word balance, length of headline and headline type and Ellerby explains what each part means and gives tips on writing better headlines. I am definitely going to start using this tool for all my blog headlines.

Blogging gone bad: 7 mistakes you don’t want to make by Michael Hyatt. Hyatt is my guru on so many topics related to business, blogging and leadership. In this post, he offers ways to fix common mistakes of bloggers including creating posts that aren’t scannable and being inconsistent in your blogging schedule. I always recommend Hyatt as resource to my Blogging 101 students.

3 free tools to help you understand your online audience by Larry Kim. In this blog post for Social Media Today, Kim writes about how so many businesses don’t understand their target audience. That goes for bloggers, too. He gives brief summaries of Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Manager, and Twitter Audience Insights.

How to market with email newsletters posted on the SCORE website. A great way to gather a following to your blog is to collect email addresses, and then send out an email newsletter on a regular basis, which includes links to your blog postings. This posting walks you through how to get started, including explaining how to comply with the the CAN-SPAM Act. The post also includes a link to download a guide. I’m a volunteer mentor with Greater Rochester Chapter of SCORE and the national website of SCORE is a treasure trove of helpful information and webinars.

Facebook Page or Group: The Definitive Answer by Andrea Vahl. I stumbled upon Vahl in one of my “black hole” searches on the Internet, and I’m glad I did. She works with small businesses on their social media. Her posting confirms what I’ve grown to realize: A Facebook Group can be a great way to interact with people of similar interests. Sounds perfect for bloggers, while a Facebook Page is better for branding your business.

If you’re interested in taking Blogging 201, call Writers and Books at (585)-473-2590. Only a few spots were available as of today but I’ll teach the course again in 2017.