Confused about Newsletters vs Posts

Using Ghost
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Hi. Complete Noob here, I looked and looked and can’t see this answered anywhere. I feel like I’m missing something basic.
I want to pre-populate my site with a bunch of posts. So that my site has enough interesting content on it to tempt people to sign up and maybe stay a while and read. But then I’d like to send out some of those posts as email newsletters. So sometimes my newsletter would be the Post. And sometimes a Post could be sent as an Newsletter. But there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to do that on Ghost. They seem ‘baked in’ as one or the other especially if they’ve already been ‘sent’.
I guess I’m trying to get my head around the difference between Posts and Newsletters – even though Ghost calls both of them Posts. And trying to figure out how to make a workflow that makes sense to me.

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You have 3 options for a post (which you select as part of the publishing flow):

  1. Publish it over the web
  2. Publish it over the email
  3. Publish it over the web and email

Pedantically, a newsletter in Ghost refers to a “category” of emails that a subscriber can receive if they want to - you can manage them in the admin panel (/ghost/#/settings/newsletters)

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Thanks for that Vikas.
I sent out a test post as an email. It shows as ‘sent’. But there seems to be no way to also retrospectively publish that to the site.
I guess I have to shift my mindset when thinking about what Ghost is. It seems to be a blogging platform (?) that is also an email marketing tool + simple website CMS. Would you agree with that assesment?

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If you publish web-only, you do have the option to unpublish and then publish & send as a newsletter. But yes, once you send it as a newsletter, you can’t send it again, nor can you convert it to web + newsletter. (The latter seems wrong to me. The former is presumably to protect you from accidentally spamming your members.) The workaround is to make a duplicate of the content (most easily done by right clicking on it in the list of posts) and then publish or email that.

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5

Thanks Cathy. I think I ‘get it’ now. :slightly_smiling_face:

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