Stand up your publication and domain. The weekend that makes you real.

• A Beehiiv publication created on the free tier, named and configured
• Your custom domain connected so your site lives at your .com, not a shared subdomain
• Email sending on a dedicated subdomain with its own protected sending reputation
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC live, so inbox providers can verify your mail is really yours
• Replies routed to a monitored inbox, which Module 3 turns into your biggest open-rate lever
• Minimum viable branding: a square icon, a logo, one accent color, nothing more
• A published landing page where a stranger can subscribe right now

• Your name and .com domain from Module 1, bought and sitting in a registrar account
• Login access to that registrar (you'll be adding DNS records there)
• An email inbox you actually check, for reply routing (a plain Gmail works fine)
• A Beehiiv account (free to create; the free tier covers you to around 5,000 subscribers)
• About $0. This module costs nothing beyond the domain you already bought

Your domain is a storefront and a mailroom. Keep them separate.

Everything in this module is really about one asset: your sending reputation. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail keep a running score of every sender. That score decides whether your issues land in the inbox, the Promotions tab, or spam. A local newsletter with a 50%+ open rate isn't just well written, it's well delivered, and advertisers pay for the open rate.

Here's the structural move that protects that score forever:

        [yourdomain].com              ← the STOREFRONT
             │                          your website, your landing page,
             │                          what people see and visit
             │
             └── mail.[yourdomain].com   ← the MAILROOM
                                        the newsletter sends from here,
                                        with its OWN sending reputation,
                                        walled off from everything else

Inbox providers score reputation per sending domain. Put the newsletter's sending on its own subdomain and nothing else you ever do with your domain can poison the newsletter's reputation, and nothing the newsletter does can poison yours. One bad cold-outreach experiment from your root domain, one hacked account, one forwarding mistake: none of it touches the mailroom. The mailroom sends one thing, your newsletter, to people who asked for it, forever. That's how you build a pristine score.

One more frame before the clicks: this module is one-time work with permanent consequences. It's the plumbing of the house. Nobody compliments plumbing, but everything you build for the next year flows through it, so go slow, follow the order, and verify at the end.

1. Create a Beehiiv account and start a new publication.
2. Name it exactly what you decided in Module 1. The publication name is what appears in inboxes, so it's your brand, spelled and capitalized the way you'll say it out loud.
3. Write a one-sentence description in plain reader language: who it's for and what they get. Polish later; don't stall here.
4. Set the basics (timezone especially, since send scheduling keys off it).

1. In Beehiiv's domain settings, add your custom web domain: [yourdomain].com. This is where your newsletter's website and landing page will live.
2. In the same area, set up your custom email domain, and here's the move: enter it as a subdomain, mail.[yourdomain].com, not the root domain. Beehiiv generates a set of DNS records for both.
3. Open your registrar's DNS panel in another tab and add each record exactly as shown: same type, same host, same value.
4. As you add each record, use the registrar's notes or comments field to label it "beehiiv". Every record.
5. Back in Beehiiv, hit verify. Some records confirm in minutes, some take hours. Not verified immediately? Normal. Leave it and keep going; verification catches up.

1. Use Beehiiv's DMARC record generator in the email domain settings, rather than hand-writing the record. Hand-written DMARC syntax errors fail silently.
2. Set the policy to quarantine, applied to 100% of mail. Quarantine means "mail that fails authentication goes to spam": strict enough to satisfy providers and block impersonators, forgiving enough that a misconfiguration doesn't vaporize legitimate mail outright.
3. Add the generated record at your registrar as a TXT record at host _dmarc on your domain.
4. Label it "beehiiv" like everything else.

1. In your publication's settings, set the Reply-To address to a real, monitored inbox. A plain Gmail address is completely fine, and it's exactly what The OC Buzz runs: replies go straight to a dedicated Gmail I check, no fancy routing needed.
2. Send yourself a test: subscribe with a personal address, reply to any mail you receive, and confirm the reply shows up in the monitored inbox.
3. Only if your setup forces replies toward the sending address itself (some configurations do): add forwarding so nothing bounces. Cloudflare Email Routing does this free if your DNS is there; most registrars have an equivalent.

1. Make a square icon first: an initials-style mark or a simple symbol tied to your area, readable at 32 pixels. Canva's free logo tools, or Claude with an image tool, get this done in under an hour.
2. Make a simple wordmark logo: your newsletter's name in a clean typeface. It can literally be typeset text.
3. Pick one accent hex color and write it down. One. It goes on buttons and links against black-on-white everything else.
4. Upload the icon and logo into your Beehiiv publication settings.
5. Truly stuck? The escalation ladder: DIY with Canva or AI tools (free) → a Fiverr designer, ordering three cheap options at once and picking the best (cheap) → a 99designs contest (only when revenue justifies it). Start at the bottom rung.

1. In Beehiiv's site builder, pick the simplest clean template available. Resist the fancy ones.
2. Style it: black text on white, your one accent color on buttons and links, and a clean sans-serif font (Inter is the safe default).
3. Make the subscribe box the obvious center of gravity: a headline that says who it's for and what they get, the email field, the button. Your icon and logo where the template wants them.
4. Publish every page the builder created, not just the homepage. Beehiiv sites come with extra pages, and any left unpublished become dead links later.
5. Visit your actual domain in a browser, as a stranger would, and subscribe with a test email.

Verification checklist.

Infrastructure lies to you politely: it all looks fine until the first send tanks. Verify every line before calling this module done:

• Publication exists on Beehiiv, named correctly, free tier
• Web domain verified: your landing page loads at [yourdomain].com, with your icon as the favicon
• Email subdomain verified: Beehiiv shows mail.[yourdomain].com fully verified, every DNS record green
• Every DNS record labeled "beehiiv" at the registrar
• Authentication passes: send yourself a test email, open it in Gmail, use "Show original," and confirm SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all say PASS
• DMARC policy live: quarantine, 100%, TXT record at _dmarc
• Replies arrive: you replied to a test email and it landed in the monitored inbox
• A stranger can subscribe: you subscribed with a test address from the live landing page and the flow worked
• Every site page published, no drafts left behind

All nine true? You own working newsletter infrastructure with deliverability protection most operators never bother to build. This was the plumbing weekend. It's done, and it stays done.

The welcome email, and the deliverability flywheel.

The infrastructure you just built can deliver mail; next you'll make inbox providers want to deliver it. You'll write the one email every subscriber gets, learn why its first line is a reply ask (and why that ask is the single cheapest open-rate lever in existence), put a real human face on your publication, and set up the list hygiene that keeps a 50%+ open rate as the list grows. The machine has plumbing. Time to make it warm.

Every landmine, one place.