It can be a little tricky/tedious to judge which direction the dot is moving at first for people not familiar with games with that kind of a fixed direction minimap, a non-gamer friend had a lot of trouble with it. One thing you can do is ctrl-rightclick (or is it ctrl-click?) on the map north (up) from where the dot is and your character will start moving in that direction towards where you clicked, then you can just orient your camera in that direction and keep moving in that direction (while avoiding trees, etc, of course). This works in Latikai client, which I'd recommend by default, but may not work in other clients.
Also, if you're curious about where you are in the world you can make a new world survey (
http://salemwiki.info/index.php/New_World_Survey ). I usually like to just go straight in the opposite directon of whichever direction is towards town (it's in the middle of the coast to the east) when looking for a good place to build a new settlement.