Understanding newsletters and emails

Memberships & subscriptions
1

Hi,

I’m very new to Ghost and am grateful for this forum.

I want to make sure I do things correctly so it’d be great to get feedback from anyone who’s built a similar community.

My site is a jobs website for a specific niche in Canada. I’m starting from scratch and when the site goes live I’ll be growing the audience. At launch, anyone will be able to read the blog content.

  1. The main product is a newsletter-email containing links to jobs and particularly hard-to-find jobs, news, and other stuff. This will be sent out free at first once a week to anyone who signs up (free at the start). Would this be the correct approach > create a post and set the Post access to members only? And then mail it out as a newsletter or email once a week?

  2. If, while I’m growing the site, all my blog content is accessible, does it make sense to send that new blog content in an email-newsletter as well?

  3. I read the words Newsletters and Emails in various Ghost help articles and the forum. Are they different things, or are the words being used interchangably?

  4. At what point do experienced Ghost users recommend setting in place a paid newsletter subscription? 500 members? 1000?

Many thanks!

2

Welcome!

If you set content to members only, then unregistered visitors cannot read it. That may be what you want, or it may not. Note that Google can’t index content that’s only for members. If you do restrict access, it’s a good idea to use the public preview line (available under the plus menu in the post editor), to allow users and Google to read the first part. You may find this helpful: Newsletters, public previews, and more

I’ll let newsletter senders respond to some of the strategy parts. :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Good point! Thank you. Yes, it would be important to get some content indexed for a new site.

Maybe a lead magnet could encourge people to sign-up. Thanks for the link to the other post!

4

Hey Cathy!

Do you use a tag in your members-only newsletter?

Thanks!

5

You certainly could use a tag on your newsletter as a way to organize your online content better. For example, you can tag all your newsletters as member-news (arbitrary slug chosen), and then you’ll automatically have a grouping of them available at /tag/member-news. You can also upload a routing file to do more sophisticated collections of content at nicer-looking URLS. Tags can be part of the organizational strategy, for sure. :slight_smile:

6

Welcome :wave: We have some great resources on growing audience over on our Resources page:

(You can search for “growing an audience” to find everywhere we’ve mentioned the subject)

1 Like
7

Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the welcome and the resources!
Looking forward to reading over the weekend.

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