Hello! I’ve read all of the wordpress content on stuff like this, all of the ghost content, even a lot of substack and revue. I’ve used them all, and read their blogs/help center etc.
I bring that up because I am stuck in a way. I joined ghost because it is a better CMS, but I don’t quite feel that way about the email marketing aspect.
At least with wordpress or my email tool Automizy, I was able to create actual emails, and format them well. I Feel like in Ghost I can’t quite do that, and as of late just have been sending my emails out via my blog posts.
Not realizing how that makes the person feel. They don’t want to sit there and read an entire blog post, and I don’t want them to. I’d rather just send the first snippet or perhaps make an entire separate newsletter.
However I feel like Ghost in some people’s view is like revue or substack, where the entire blog is just a newsletter. Rather than having actual blog posts, I have one that is 8000 words in length even.
So am I going to have to just make a newsletter tag essentially, and create them separately and then send out the posts by putting them into that new post tag. Each post in that tag will just be formatted as an email?
I DON’T email every post. Way too many, for one thing. And some involve things that don’t work as well in the Ghost email system.
I do send out some articles, particularly ones that I think my readers would appreciate getting in their email.
The other thing I do is do a weekly newsletter, that is ONLY emailed and not available on the site (using a private tag) in which I use the link card to list all the stories of that week. That seems to work well for most of our subscribers and members.
Yeah I was only sending important blog posts at first. The issue is that I’m not used to emailing in ghost, I was sort of in wordpress or via an external system.
Why don’t you let them be available via site? I wonder if I could let them be available ONLY to paid members via site, and to ALL members via email?
The weekly summary newsletter is a perk for those who sign up for emails (free subscribers and paid members). So, not available any other way.
As for your second question: I’m pretty sure the post access affects only the web site. So, in the Publish and Send dropdown, you can choose to email it to everyone.
I publish blog posts and deliver roundup emails, and include links to the latest content. I like this because it means my newsletters can be quite informal, and subscribers can decide which articles to read.
I edited my theme so my newsletter issues (tagged: newsletter) don’t appear on the homepage, but they still have an archive and I set them to be available to members only so logged out members can’t read them anywhere.
Now Ghost has the “Send only” feature I am thinking about using that for email instead so the emails aren’t published.
Yeah so I was planning on making them available to members. However I was wondering how I should structure it.
If I made it a series then people who weren’t here at the beginning won’t see the start, but if I made them too informal then I wonder if people will stick around too.
I also make A TON of content, it is part of my plan. I have to get certain topics out before I can do some of my bigger stuff down the line. Which means I have a lot of posts each week, at least for this first half of the year.
"
I didn’t want my round ups to be huge, although they may have to be. It would be 5-7 posts though, so I guess nothing too insane.
If I made it a series then people who weren’t here at the beginning won’t see the start, but if I made them too informal then I wonder if people will stick around too.
From what I can see, making posts members-only (like @jbharris mentioned) would solve that dilemma? You could put a special tag or something and direct them to that at the end of every email, so newcomers have a chance to catch up.
@polyinnovator - Would be interested in hearing the solution you ended up with? I am also in a similar situation and am looking at potentially using a MailChimp or ConvertKit integration as I don’t want to send my subscriber’s full posts and would like to customize the newsletter content
When you make a post, Ghost lets you choose between “Publish and email”, “Publish only”, and “Email only”. So I guess you could do normal posts under “Publish only” and then use “Email Only” for the monthly roundup?
Ghost also lets you restrict posts only to Members (or certain specific Members), in case you want to control who views the post on the website itself. There’s also an option to have a “public preview” that everyone else sees, even in emails, but then they have to subscribe to read the full thing—perhaps not useful in your case, but still good to know! (@Paul2, if you’re still here, maybe this would help you?)
By the way, Ghost released a new feature that lets you create multiple newsletters, so subscribers can let you choose which one(s) they want to get (eg. only the weekly roundup and not the daily email when an article comes out, or something).