Introduction (Hi!) & advice for launching a new blog

Hi everyone! I'm excited to be a part of the Indie Hackers community. For some background - in a previous life, I founded & sold Tindie.com. After that I joined Netflix as a Sr. PM. Now I'm launching a new blog with a friend, fatfire.com - a blog for the fatFIRE (financial independence, retire early) community. This our first blog based community, so we are learning as we go.

A few things we've learned so far:

Buying a parked domain name

• We bought our domain (fatfire.com) through DAN.com. That was my first time purchasing a domain name from a private owner. The negotiating took a few days. However after I accepted the final price, it was very smooth from there. Highly recommend buying a domain through DAN.com

Blogging platform

• If you are looking for something super simple, Ghost really is nice.
• After changing your Wordpress theme, checkout your Menus & Widgets. They may have changed.
• Wordpress Business support is super responsive. Shockingly great.

Google

• Make sure to sign up for Google Search Console. You can submit your Sitemap there.
• Google Analytics 4 is very different from GA UA I was used to 5 years ago.
• Filtering your IP addresses from your traffic involves going to Admin > Data Streams > (select your URL) > More Tagging Settings > Define Internal Traffic. (That took a while to track down so hopefully that is helpful to someone else!)

Other Free Tools we've found helpful:

• Mailchimp for emails
• Cloudflare for CDN
• Yoast for SEO
• SEORush for keyword ideas

Since we are at the starting line, I want to build the community in public for others to learn from. We are currently working out -

• how often we will post
• where to share the content (reddit, twitter, other places?)
• The UI/UX for the blog. Making sure it isn't confusing for first time visitors (since everyone is a first time visitor)

Are there any big issues to the blog so far that you all see? Any improvements we should make? Happen to have any advice for a first time blogger/ blog community?

Thank you and looking forward to sharing what we learn along the way!

Emile
Fatfire.com