You’ve just finished designing your new blog’s website and now are ready to grow but are not sure what to do next. It’s an achievement building your blog but now the real work begins. There are so many things you need to do for the next steps of growth for your blog. Here are 8 ways to do so:

• Create & post five blog posts

Before you publish or launch your blog, make sure you have at least 5 blog posts so that your blog doesn’t look empty to first-time visitors. You know what they say about first impressions.

• Connect site to Google Analytics

Blog traffic is one of the measures of success in blogging. Once you start your blog, you need to keep track of how many people are visiting or have visited your blog and from where they are coming from. In other words you need to keep track of your site metrics.

If your blog or a specific blog post on your blog is doing well, you need to know. Likewise if your blog is not doing well and not getting any traffic at all, you also need to know so that you can do something about it.

It’s also good to know where the traffic coming to your site is coming from so you can maximize those traffic sources if possible. All this information can be obtained from your Google analytics account. It is a helpful and essential tool to track your site metrics. Later on when brands want to work with you or when you want to monetize your blog using Google AdSense, the metrics from your Google analytics will be useful.

• Submit Google Sitemap

When you’ve launched your blog, you will want to make it visible on search engines so that people can find your blog on when searching for the topics you blog about. This is called organic traffic.

And to make sure search engines will index your blog you will need to submit a Google sitemap for your blog. You can do from the Google sitemap website directly or you can do it using the Yoast plugin or Google Sitemap plugin if you are using the WordPress platform.

• Create social media accounts for your blog

Your blog will need some social proof and another platform apart from your blog’s email list where you can keep people updated when you post new blog posts, as well as engage with them apart from the normal engagement you do on your blog.

This is why after setting up your blog you should create social media accounts for your blog. Some people use their personal accounts for their blogs. This is fine if what you post about is closely related to your blog’s niche. However, it is recommended to start a new account specifically for the blog to separate your personal and blog niche.

• Connect an email subscriber service

This is a step that is easily forgotten by new bloggers and often overlooked. Creating and growing an email list for your blog is important and contribute to the success of your blog.

With an active email list you have people who interested in your content and believe in you so much that they are willing to subscribe and be updated each time you have new posts up on your blog. This is guaranteed return traffic for your blog.

Your email list can be your greatest asset as a blogger after your blog website. It is to a blog what a customer/client list or database is to a business, which makes it too important to be ignored.

• Create an opt-in

Now that we’ve established how crucial it is to collect an email list, how best can we grow it? The most popular form now is an email opt-in. This is something both attractive and of value to your readers that you offer them for free in exchange for their email address.

This can be in the form of guides, a printable, discounts, eBooks and other digital products that will make your readers freely give you their email address in exchange for.

• Launch & Market

Once your blog has some blog posts for your new readers, has some social media accounts for them to follow, is connected to Google analytics for metrics and is now able to collect email subscriptions; it is now ready to be launched and marketed.

Please note that you need to market your new blog to people otherwise no one will be able to guess that you have published a blog unless you tell them to. So market your work with pride so that people can visit your new blog. Start with your family and friends and ask them to refer their family and friends and more people will start coming.

Market your blog posts on social media. Pick some platforms to specialize on and master how to establish your blog’s brand on that platform. Pinterest and Instagram are great platforms for bloggers to expose their blog. You can pick other platforms as well.

• Start monetizing

Unfortunately, many bloggers believe that blog monetization is reserved for the professional bloggers who have been in the industry for a long but this is not true. You may choose to wait for your traffic to grow first before you start monetizing your blog but you can also start monetizing it right from the beginning. There are many ways you can start monetizing your blog that doesn’t require you to have a truckload of traffic.

You can read these 20 ways of monetizing your blog or you can grab this eBook that goes into detail about affiliate marketing which is the number one way that professional bloggers make money from both their blogs and social media.