Blogging U. courses deliver expert advice, pro tips, and inspiration right to your email inbox. Reach your own creative goals while improving your technical know-how. All courses are free — all you need is a WordPress.com account.

Four different tracks are available: Blogging, Website Creation (coming soon), Writing, and Photography (coming soon). Below, learn more about what’s available and how to participate.

Available courses

Visit the course pages for more detail on what they cover, and click the “Start” button on any page to begin your course immediately.

• Blogging: Learning the Fundamentals — a 14-day course to learn the fundamentals of publishing, customizing your site, and engaging with the blogging community.
• Blogging: Commenting Basics — a 5-day challenge to help get past the fear of commenting and start developing relationships with other bloggers.
• Blogging: Branding and Growth — a 10-day course to develop a coherent visual look for your blog and lay the groundwork for building an audience. Explore stats, social networks, SEO, and more.
• Writing: Intro to Poetry — a 10-day course encouraging you to write a poem a day, with a new theme and information on poetic devices and forms each day.
• Writing: Finding Everyday Inspiration — a 20-day course to warm up your writing muscles and help you find inspiration in the places closest to you — but where you might not think to look.

We’ll be adding more courses — intermediate blogging, writing workshops, photography fundamentals, website building, and more — so check back frequently.

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Starting and stopping courses

How do I start a course?

Visit the page for the course you’re interested in and click the “Start” button — that’s it! If you’re logged in to WordPress.com, you’ll receive an introductory email right away, and your first assignment a few minutes later. If you’re not logged in, we’ll prompt you to do so, and you’re off and running.

What if I want to stop?

No problem — every email you’ll receive includes an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Click it, and the course stops. You can also visit the course’s page using the above links, and click the “Stop” button.

This won’t affect any of your other WordPress.com emails, like notifications. And if you want to give the course another try, visit the course’s page and click “Restart.”

How many courses can I take? Can I take them more than once?

As many as you’d like, as many times as you’d like. We recommend taking one course at a time — blogging is fun, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be overwhelming! — but you’re free to take multiple courses simultaneously.

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Getting support during a course

Every assignment includes expert advice from our staff as well as links to more resources and to our customer support folks, called Happiness Engineers.

Reaching out to other bloggers also helps participants get the most out of Blogging U. courses. We encourage you to use the tag for your course when publishing posts (e.g., #bloggingfundamentals) and to browse that tag in the Reader to find and connect with other bloggers. If you don’t know what tag to use or browse, don’t worry — when you begin a course, we’ll tell you.

We also have a weekly Community Pool thread on The Daily Post, a site for blogging education and inspiration, where anyone can seek or give feedback on any aspect of blogging. A new thread opens every Monday.

Ready to register? Head to the Blogging U. home page to get started.