I’ve been building up my site on Ghost and now I’m trying to figure out the best ways to actually get it in front of people. So far I’ve messed around with some SEO stuff, started a small email list, and shared a couple posts on social, but it still feels like I’m just scratching the surface.
I’m curious what’s worked best for you when it comes to promoting your Ghost site? Do you lean more on organic traffic, newsletters, social, or something else?
Would like to hear what’s been working (or not working) for you. Always nice to learn from people who are a few steps ahead.
Started in a very tight niche (DIY neuroscience, and specifically the community around OpenBCI)
Got my first few hundred subscribers as a result of posting tutorials people found helpful, and engaging with other people in the community on forums and Twitter
Discovered link aggregators like HackerNews and Lobste.rs when people started submitting my articles to them, and they hit the frontpage; started posting articles there if they seemed like a good fit. (This is where most of my subscribers have come from since then.)
Write tutorials about problems I have and can’t find good articles about, and then start getting inbound SEO traffic (mainly from these tutorials). Occasionally go through the Matomo dashboard and update the metadata for the articles that are getting like no traffic, in case that helps
Gradually pivot what I write about as my interests change, rather than staying in the niche I started in.
When I cold email someone I admire, avoid promoting myself directly, but include my blog in my email sigline (or send from an me@mysite address) so they can check it out if something I said piques their interest
Once my blog is high enough profile that advertisers start cold-emailing me, accept free trials from Refind, Meco, etc, so that if the subscribers they send convert to paid I can put that into growth (with the idea that any ad spend is 100% bootstrapped)
Promote other people’s writing that I like by sharing it with the communities I’m in and sending it to friends who would get something from it, and be a good internet citizen (what you put out comes back, often quite directly!)
Once subscribers are in the thousands and I have paid subscribers, spend more effort on each article, and try to write for my best readers, and let marketing mostly take care of itself
Thanks for laying this out. Honestly, this is incredibly useful for someone like me who’s starting from scratch. Seeing how you built things step by step, especially from such a niche space, makes the whole process feel way more approachable. Appreciate you sharing the real-world tactics instead of vague advice.
Hey! I’m in a similar spot with my ghost site, and what’s helped the most so far is focusing on consistent SEO-friendly content and building an email list that actually engages (not just collects). I’ve also found sharing posts on reddit, niche forums, and linkedIn works better than broad social media—more targeted and genuine traffic.
Another tip: repurpose your articles into short posts or carousels for socials. It keeps your content alive in different places without extra work. Still experimenting, but organic + community-driven promotion seems to go the farthest.
Is there any app or something that can auto post to socials? We create 4-10 posts each day and becomes difficult to then individually post them across all the socials and on Wordpress, using a plugin that automatically posts to Reddit, LinkedIn, X, BlueSky, Facebook.
Ghost doesn’t have plugins as such, but uses webhooks:
You can use these to connect Zapier (more or less native integration in Ghost − but it also just uses the webhooks) or other automation tools (Make, n8n, etc.) to connect Ghost to an app that can do the posting for you.
I use webhooks from Ghost → n8n and adjust some parameters there to then Webhook publish → IFTTT since it’s easier to handle Social Credentials there.
I also do more things in the background with n8n. You can do the social stuff in n8n but Facebook graph API verification was stupid. Hence why I have IFTTT as well.