After speaking with a few Indie Hackers, I decided to go with Notion and launch https://blog.productbyte.co/.
I used Super.so because they are more SEO friendly.
It's pretty easy to use and I am using a gallery database to showcase the blogs and a Mailchimp embed for signups.
Will keep you guys posted on how it goes!
Could you walk me through why you'd use something like this over Squarespace? Might be interested in this too.
Congrats my guy.
Definitely.
For me, I have been using Notion for years so I am very familiar with it. I draft all content there as well. It's more of a convenience thing than anything else.
Notion also offers great embed and can personalize the site very fast.
Cannot answer on the technical side as much but I am learning on the go :)
Ah, I see. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing buddy.
looks great. i like how smooth the loading is for pretty URL.
Thanks!
How did you fix the subscribe form on notion?
I embedded our form from Mailchimp which is our ESP.
Hope that helps!
My friend uses notion but I haven't used it for this yet. I am curious to see how you like it.
Im liking it so far. As I said, I have all my draft content on Notion so its much easier to upload it on the content.
I was in the same situation and built a Nextjs page which pulls the blog posts from Notion. Now it’s way easier to write blog posts and that’s also the reason why I’m building a SaaS around that idea.
Would be interested in long term usage from super.so, so I can improve BlogBlog.io 🙂
I don't know about all of the notion blog things. My current questions are why people want notion to publish a blog post. I know it's wysiwyg editor but is that makes the different to other writing software no it's definitely not. But what curious about is inbuilt custom domain thing will never come to notion and the hype will fade away eventually. Do you agree with my point ?
I see your point.
It's more of a convenience for me as I have all draft content on another notion page.
Instead of changing the format to another site, I have everything together.
Notion is also very simple to use and customizable.
Hope this answers your question. Been a notion user for years so I might be biased :)
Why you decided to use Notion?
Great 👏
If you wanna add polls or feedback from on your new blog you can try - https://pollsights.com
Let me know if I can help in anyway :)
Tried Pollsights before. It’s indeed a very nice design embeddable widget for Notion
If the goal of the blog is to drive more traffic for the product it should be on https://www.productbyte.co/ for better SEO.
Interesting, why so? Genuine question.
Google treats subdomains as separate domains.
Domains are ranked by a bunch of factors, one main one is legit backlinks. By splitting backlinks between the sub and marketing domain you lose a lot of SEO ranking.
Sure. But www is a subdomain, right? And blog is a subdomain. Primary domain is just https://blaablaa.co
What makes www different than blog as far as subdomains go?
Because you usually do a redirect from https://blaablaa.co to www.
Makes sense. Thanks!
Was mainly wondering if there’s some algo wizardry specific to www given its legacy importance.
I place websites on www because you might want to use the root host for something else, like ssh etc obviously it's different ports (22 vs 80) but semantically the root host is like your ops for the business, network, mail, etc, while www is just the website so it makes sense to separate them. and in future you get more flexibility to tweak those endpoints.
Why so?
yeah exactly you need the blog to be on the same domain as the product. otherwise the seo isn't as efficient...
I have seen https://blog.coinbase.com/
Use it. This was literally the only research I made on this.
How can I change to www?
Coinbase decided to put their web app on their marketing site.
That causes a ton of other issues.
The ideal is to have the marketing site and blog on one and the app on app.
yes I've seen many people do that but that can be because they focus on SEOing the blog and using it as a touchpoint to the website, which isn't wrong but if you plan to place some content on the website, too, you might want to merge it.
Again this article tells us that it's about infrastructure https://www.seo.com/blog/why-subdomains-are-a-bad-idea-for-your-website-and-blog/. And it's exactly the case of how can you use a subdirectory on a website if you choose to blog on a platform like notion. the answer is you probably can't. So there's no difference between www.X.com or blog.X.com. You can have a blog on subdirectory only if you have a pretty good control over your website, or can configure the server.
So productbyte.co is just a landing page for the newsletter. There isn't an app or any content that the website itself will host.
I wanted to create the blog.productbyte.co to create content surrounding certain keywords. like this one https://blog.productbyte.co/3-trending-products-to-sell-in-2021
Will try it out for a few weeks to see what happens :)
Thanks a lot for the resources, I will look into them.