Create a Website and Blog With Ghost.org

1. Introduction to Ghost: Welcome to the course. My name is David and I'm going to walk you through step one to step done out of create a professional website and blog it using ghost. Ghost is a free and open-source content management system with a strong focus on content marketing and subscription revenue goes to, comes in at two solutions. You have ghosts org, which is a hosted solution that takes care of all the little technical details of your website like software updates, the SSL certificate, etc, where you can download goes completely for free as a script and install on your own hosting account. Anyways, in this course, I'm going to cover everything that you need to know to get started with ghost at.org, I'm gonna show you how to create an account, how to set a custom domain name, how to design your website with various themes as well as all the essential integrations that you need to know about for e-commerce, email marketing, how to set your own referral program anymore. So if you've been looking to get started with ghost that org and goes in general as a content management system. This course is for you when you're ready to get started, click that next video and I'll see you on the inside. 2. Ghost overview - What we will be creating: Okay, So this is the website I'm going to show you how to make. We're going to begin by adding in this gorgeous hero image, how to adjust and edit theme with Ghost. How to add in some type of clear call to action at it, your blog posts, at your menu, at its social media links. Overall, how to design your website with goes, how to actually blogged with goes, how do you send your blog post to an email list? How to make some blog posts private for some specific paying members, et cetera. How to set up the subscription function over here so people can subscribe to your website completely for free. Or if you want to set up some type of recurring revenue model within your blog, you can totally do that with Ghost and just every little detail that you need to know to take full advantage of what ghost.org has offer. So let's get started. 3. Get started with Ghost: Welcome to my laptop. Let's begin SUE. This is it ghosted.org and this is the homepage for this content management system right here. And it to get started is very simple. You can click on this button that says Get started for free. And we can also come over here to navigate to the pressing Tab. So right here, if you click on the Sign Up button, you're going to be presented with the option to create an account and then you get a free 14 day trial. But how much does this all costs? So if we come down here, the pricing plans are varied. So the starter plan is $9 a month, crater 25 1550, and business is one and 99. Not too expensive in my opinion because I mean, these are pretty reasonable rates now, obviously, if you go with something like Digital Ocean and droplet, install ghost on your own self-hosted account. It's going to be way cheaper, but you have to take care of all the little technical details like the updates as associativity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what, that's the big advantage of using Go's Pro is it just, it's just done for you? It all works. So if you're looking to get started, I definitely would, again, as a new creator, go with these starter plan it right there, just $9 a month and you get 14 day free trial. So go ahead and enter your email address and set a password. Now once you submit everything, you're going to have to put in your name in a credit card. Now again, your count won't be charged is just to prevent span as they say. So go ahead and do that. All right, welcome to ghost IO. So once you submit payment, you're going to be presented with an onboarding process where you can just set your domain name, just go ahead and take care of all that additional information that goes is going to ask you, and then once you arrive at this spot, this is your dashboard. So your dashboard tells you how many members you have, how many paid memories you have, as well as your email open rates, then it presents to you a bunch of different pages and guides that you can jump into. Two are more about how to use ghost properly. Now the next menu item right here is to view the site. So we'll click on this one. So opens in a new tab. And here's our website. So right now it's just a sub-domain. So I have as vlog how that goes the IO, I'm going to change it to walkout.com. I'll show you how to do that in just a bit. And yes, so the themes out of the box look quite nice. They're very focused on blogging and content marketing in just very nice, simple and readable. I really, I just really like goes, I like how simplistic it is. I'm just very effective for what you're supposed to do, which is get people to subscribe and then send them content. Anyways was navigate back over here. So over here we have our post section. So that's self-explanatory, those of your blog posts, drafts, and then schedule means like you can schedule blogposts be published in a week or month, et cetera, then you're published piece of content. Now over here we have pages and pages are for things like your about page, your contact beach terms of US privacy policy, all that stuff. Now, tags are quite important with goes. So think of tags like categories, and it's how you organize all your posts. So when you have a specific website, like a topical website like this is flogging for example. So appropriate tags would be like cameras, tripods of blogging, tips and tags like that. Okay, you want to pick like four to seven tags. That makes sense for your website. Members are people who have joined your website, so they're paying members, total members, people who have subscribed. Then your integration. So any WordPress users watching this integrations is functionally the same as plugins. So when you want to add in an additional feature to your ghost website, you just navigate over here and then search for what you want. So for example, like if you want to use convert kit, for example, they have some type of integration with convert kit, same with various e-commerce plugins, et cetera. Now staff, that just means like who has access to the website, like the person who owns website and maybe any authors you have for the website, etc. And then we're done. There it goes, bro, that's your current account and then you can upgrade your account right there. Then over here we have a little dial, something, you can switch it black or white. And then we have the gear icon. And this is actually quite funny because it's just like hidden, hidden away, but it's actually quite important. The gear icon you're gonna be spending a lot of time over here setting up your website. And so this is where you can navigate to all your settings, general branding theme, navigation, membership, e-mail, newsletter, code injection. So code injection is like say you want to run Google AdSense or something like that. You go to Google or you go to code injection. Now, Labs is grounds for testing new features. So labs actually quite helpful because you can import content quickly and easily rehear you can export your content again. Ghost is a free and open source systems. So if you write a bunch of blog posts, you can just easily export your pieces of content right there. You can delete all your content. Over here you have your redirect so you can set this up. Again. Everything's a little bit more technical with go. So for example, if the download this YAML JSON, you know, nope, open it with Notepad and add in the redirects manually. Not too complicated, but if you're a complete beginner, it may be a little bit complicated, but that's really it. And so that's overall a nice broad overview. But what to expect with ghost. 4. Get your custom domain name: Now let's set a custom domain name for our website. So currently we're using a sub-domain of a ghost dot I O this, okay, to get started. But again, overtime, you would definitely want to get your own domain name like your.com. 5. Install Theme a theme and design your website: Now it's been about 20 minutes in the domain name is working as appropriate. So let's click on a view our websites. And yeah, this looks great. So now we have blackout outcome. Now the next thing that we want to do is design our website. So with goes, you design using themes. So let's navigate back to our Dashboard and let's go ahead and click on the little gear icon right down there. Then you want to click on where it says theme. Now, right over here you have a few different options. So you have the theme directory where you can choose a bunch of free themes from. Or you can navigate down here and click on upload a theme. Now you're like upload a theme. How does that work? Well, if you're using a, an installation of goes on your own shared hosting account or whatever, you have to upload themes. But because we are using ghost pro version, everything's kind of built in, so that makes it really easy. But you can also buy themes from something called Dean 4s for example. And so right here they have Ghost blogs in Goose themes from theme forest. So if we open up this, here, we have a bunch of premium themes that you can jump into and explore. And if you want to buy one, it seems very easy. You just purchase it, download it and save it to your laptop. And then you just go back into your settings and then click here and upload a theme. Anyways, let's go ahead and click on a view more. And we're going to be looking at the ghost marketplace, professional goose themes. Discover a beautiful custom design, perfect for your publication. Alright, it's gone down. All right, anyways we have the price, so we have official free and paid soap totally up to you. So there's plenty of great looking free themes you can choose from. There are quite a few paid themes in some paid themes are quite expensive, okay, now Kunal not going to sugar coat it. So we come down here for example, like this one is a $149. Just for a theme. Bit expensive. Anyways, I'm gonna go ahead and click on Free. And I'm going to show you one of my favorite free themes that goes actually also it's come down here. Boom, this one I love. It's called massively. Let's go ahead and open it up. There we go. And let's click on visit the demo. So this is massively dot goes to I0. So I just liked the way this looks, very subtle details. So the image and the background has a slow fade in. Nice big tax rate, their contents front-and-center. Overall, it looks really nice. Again, totally up to you, whatever you want to do. So but I'm going to install this theme. So enter these sites address, right, so let's go ahead and do that because we just set our custom domain, domain name. There we go. All right, Let's click on install. Okay, now it says you're about to install massively from theme directory. Yes, we are. Let's go ahead and click on Install. And let's click on activate. All right, and that's it, literally that simple. So now we have massively and we have downloaded it and installed it as our primary theme. 6. Hero Image CTA: Let's design our websites. So this is the massively theme and it looks okay. We definitely want to add in a custom image in the background, but every other ways it looks good, everything's in place. So let's begin customizing our website. So first off, navigate back to your dashboard and you want to go ahead and click on the gear icon. And we're going to be working in the general tab and the branding tab. So let's go ahead and click on it general first. Now right over here with title and description, this is where you can change literally the title and description. So if you don't want, if you want this to say something else, you just jump over here and edit as appropriate. Now the time zone, self-explanatory, you can just change the time zone for where your blogposts are published. Now the publication, the language you can adjust right there, then the most important one right here is the site meta settings. And so right there you can set an SEO title and a meta description. So I personally recommend doing is setting something like these site title page separator and then a key word description of your website, and then a meta-description that incorporates various related keyword phrase is just something that describes your website. Literally that simple. Now if we come down here, we have Twitter Card and we also have Facebook card, really, what is that? It's very simple. If someone shares your website on Twitter or Facebook, how do you want the link to look? You've wit with ghost, you can adjust in customize the look and feel of your presence on the social media websites so you can add a Twitter image, Twitter title, description, etc. Now if we come down here, we have social accounts. And so you can link your social accounts if you have a Facebook page or a Twitter account that's associated, associated with your website. You can just add it in here to get full structured data in rich card support. And then at last you can just make your website private if you want to go ahead and do that. All right, so let's come back up top there. Let's navigate back to our settings. I'm going to leave now. We're going to navigate next to the branding tab. And over here is where you can adjust the branding. So for example, if you're not a big fan of this hot pink color, while you can adjust that rate there. A publication icon was that publication icon is this little thing right up top there. So if you want some more custom other than this like weird thing, I definitely recommend uploading a publication icon. I'll get to that next. And then we have publication logo. So depends on your theme. So for the massively theme, I definitely don't recommend a logo because it's just going to plop the logo right here front and center. And I think it looks really bad, but I'll show you how it's done. Because again, if you're using a different theme that you may want to upload a logo. Then the last red down here we have the publication cover. So there we can just upload a cover image of our choosing. So for example, I have this image I took with my Canon 90 D. And I'm going to set that as the background in. Yeah, that looks good. Okay, so let's go ahead and click on Save and Close. Fantastic. So now we have a nice big, gorgeous image in the background. And we have our texts front and center, and our website looks good. It's coming together quite nicely. 7. Logo and Favicon: Creating a logo and a favicon for our website. So the service I'm going to recommend you check out is called Canva.com, completely free to sign up and create an accounts. Now let me come over here in with good to YouTube thumbnail. Now it really doesn't matter. I just like the YouTube thumbnail formats. And this is where we're going to be designing our logo width. All right, so let's delete, so it opens up. In. There we go. Okay, so first off, we went navigate to where it says texts. Let's go ahead and click on that. Let me go ahead and click on heading. And I'm going to type in a heading. So my CE is called the vlog house. Let's go ahead and add that in. Vlog. How There we go? Alright, so with Canva, a couple of different things that you can do for stuffing. Come over here and change the font that you want to use. For example, if I want to use Anton for example, I can just click on that and change everything to Anton so we can make this big like this. And I think that looks good. All right, so we can go ahead and click on spacing. Maybe I want this to be the letters to be a little bit closer together. So click on negative 22. There we go. All right, so I think that looks okay. And let me take this again. And let's go to effects. For example, in, let's go ahead to drop shadow. And I think that looks okay. So we can just leave that as our logo. Now. Maybe I want to add some type of icon to go along with it. So we can go here to say elements, sorry, elements. And then we can say pin, something like camera, see what comes up. All right, so we have a bunch of different little images for cameras. So we just pick the one that you like, again, takes time to find something, but we'll just minimize that. And we'll take this one right there. Alright, so make this a little bit bigger. Okay? And that looks good. Okay, so let's go ahead and actually I'm going to go ahead and remove this job shadow. Actually get rid of that habit, be normal. There we go. Okay. We'll just leave it like that. So again, very simple logo. So again, with the by default, simple is good, okay, You don't need to have an overly complicated logo. Anyways, I'm gonna go ahead and download and we're going to have it saved as a PNG. Let's go ahead and download this. All right, drag and drop it to our desktop in it There's our logo. So one quick little thing I wanna do is I want to remove the background. So we're gonna go to remove B, G, okay, it's called Remove BG. And I love this website so you can just upload any image and it removes the background. So go ahead and do that. Now we have the original in, it's going to remove the background for us. In. There you go. We now have a transparent logo. So let's go ahead and click on Download. And there we go. That's it. All right. Yep, Perfect. All right. So let's go ahead and we just have to crop it. So I'm just going to use a tool to crop it, use any image editor to crop switch is take the top down a little bit right there. And we'll take this right there in a little bit off there, and a little bit off there. Click on, Okay. Click X. Again, save. There we go. Alright, so now let's navigate back to our website, goods you branding. And now we want to upload a publication logo. So we can go here to upload a logo and then boom, there we go. Let's upload our logo. See how that looks. All right, and it looks terrible. Now it doesn't look terrible, it just looks bad on this specific theme. Okay. So again, that's why I said earlier, depends on the theme you're using. I don't like the way that this looks at all. For the massively theme texts. Simple, Looks good as the user scrolls down con, transforms into this look, I think it's perfect. It doesn't need any. All right, so let's go ahead and add in a favicon for a website or publication icon as it's called right here. Now, you have to pay attention to the instructions. A square social icon, 60 by 60 pixels. So it doesn't mean it has to be 60 by 60, but it was a 100 pixel. It has to be 100 by 100. Otherwise it won't let you upload the icon. So we have to navigate back to Canvas. Let me go ahead and delete this. And we're just going to just going to take this image of the camera right there. I think that's totally fine. All right, let's go ahead and click on it. Download again, go through the same process as before. We'll download this as a PNG will drag and drop that right there. We'll go to Remove Background, click on Upload Image, click on the camera. Vector graphic. I can't remember what it's called Vector Graphic. There we go. Let's click on it, download. And there we go, drag and drop dead there. All right, so let's go ahead and open this up and make sure it's a even square. Alright, so let's go ahead and crop. Alright, so we have 375, or it's just a justice, as good as best we can. 370. I bought a little bit more as 375. There we go. Okay, there we go. Click. Okay, there we go. So our fab icons, ready? Click on that. We'll click on Save. All right, so now let's navigate back to our website. In there we go X out of this, Let's go ahead and upload or icon. And then we have our icon right there. Go ahead and upload that. And there you go. Okay, so now click on save and close. And let's go back and reload our website. All right, so we have our image there and we just click that one more time. There we go. Okay, so now our favicon has been updated to something a little bit more custom. And that's it. 8. Menu and Pages: Menus n at pages. So if we scroll down right here, you're going to notice that this is your main menu bar right there. And this is populated with specific pages that are already created for your website. So if we want to edit this, very simple, so first off, again, like always, navigate back to your dashboard. Now your pages are controlled by the Pages tab and then your navigation, The open up this in a new tab. So your navigation is controlled by the navigation setting right over here in your setting. So we just click on this over here. And then right here is where all your specific pages are linked to. And then you can adjust everything as required. So for example, maybe I don't want this home link right there. I can just go ahead and delete that or maybe I don't want to have this collection link. Where is collection link is about how to get started with the goats content management system. So for example, let's go ahead and delete this one, and then I'll click on Save. There we go. So now the collection item in the menu has disappeared. Literally that simple. So again, these are all pages on the site and you can relate to whatever you want. So for example, if we notice this one right here, we're linking to an author bio page. You can link to your tag page whatever you want to do. So anyways, to add a new page is very simple. You just click on the Pages tab right up top there you have a new page button which you can just go ahead and open this up. Okay, So we have a few pages with our website already is we have a contribute Privacy Contact about this sites. And so if you click on add a new page, then it just opens up in your standard designer, similar to the blog post section where you can just add in a new page so you can add in a feature image right there, page title, and then you can begin writing content for any type of page. So what pages do you really need? Honestly, you're going to want a few things. You're probably going to want maybe like an about page, a contact page, legalese pages like your privacy policy terms of use. I already have right here, so you have a privacy page. So again, totally up to you. I would probably go ahead and create like an about page, edit this contact page, keep the privacy page. Maybe like a resources page, something like that. And it's literally that simple. And so just come in here and start editing and designing your page with content. And then when you're ready and you want to link it in your menu bar, you just come over here to settings and you just type in the specific page that you want to add. So for example, we can just click on this little plus sign at a label, then add in the URL. You can copy and paste it from up top there to go over here and copy and paste it in. That's everything. And then that's it. Then when you're ready to save, your menu, just click on the Save button. 9. How to blog with using Ghost: Let's get started blogging with a ghost. So this is where this content management system really shines. So we come to our website. I went ahead and created an example post right here. So let's just take a quick look at it in so first off, this is why everyone likes go so much. This looks beautiful. So we have the title of the website right there. Boom, front and center the piece of content to feature image right there. Then contents, nice readable H2 title tag, image, a gallery. So again, like attention to detail, seal the galleries kinda like a little bit wider, a little bit more padding, so it's a little bit more narrow and easy to read. And then we have the little Author by or at the bottom there. Ghost is really great for blogging. So anyways, how do you blog? So let's jump over to our post section right here. Now to add in a new post and click this button right there to add a new post, or you can click the plus sign over here. So let me go ahead and click on the button to add a new post in. Okay, so now you have a few things just to pay attention to. First thing, if you want to add any feature image, It's right here. All you do is click on this little plus sign, then you add in the image that you would like to be associated with your blog posts. And now over here, this is the post title. This is important because this is your H1 a title tag. Then you can just jump in and start writing your blog posts. To start, start writing your blog posts. There we go. Alright, so few, little details also to be aware of, you want to navigate over here, see where it says Settings. This is really helpful because this is where you can adjust the settings for your blog post. So one thing that I really love about goes is that they don't add dates to the URL structure. And that's really nice because that's appropriate SEO. And right here you can just change the post URL as you want. So custom, we'll just a custom URL. There we go. Now we have a published dates. I know a lot of you ask like, how do I hide deeds, et cetera, et cetera? Well, with ghost, decant, everything has to have a specific date associated with it right here. That's going to be front and center, but normally I hate dates, but actually ghost is pretty good because when you update your posts, you can just update the date. So that's wonderful because that's great SEO. So some, you know, again, it's not a huge deal. If your content's going to be six months old, even a year, two or two years old if it's like an evergreen piece of content, but it is nice that whenever you jump into your content updated, you can just update the date. Now right over here is we can add in tags for your specific blog post. So tags work the same way is categories. So for any type of content oriented website, I would recommend four to six tags that are related to what your website is about. Bad categories. Bad at tags are things like thoughts or blogs or things like that. I don't know. Like if this website is again about like vlogging, then a great big tag would be like vlogging tips of blogging gear, how to vlog cameras, whatever, that sort of thing. Now write down here we have posed access so you can change like who has access to this is going to be public if the zoning going to be a members only members are people who navigate to your website and boom, click this button and go ahead and subscribe to your website. And then you can also have paid members. And so you can offer a subscription oriented service on your blog and it's, everything's just built in. And then the excerpt means like that's the excerpt for your website. Okay. So you, for your individual blog posts. So let's just go ahead and type in web, say creative pro. Alright, so we're right here. That's the excerpt for my website, and so you can control that right there. Okay, so we come down here, we have met a Twitter card, facebook card. So again, the cards that just influences how your blog post will look when it's shared on a social media website. Metadata, again, how your piece of content is going to appear in the Serbs, which means search engine results page. So your Meta title. And so again, for the title of any type of blog posts, I definitely recommend blog post. Title comes first page separator, and then name Of website, then the Meta description. Again, just describe it. The blogposts about chemical URL. All right, so let's back out that, okay, and that's it, whatever that simple. Then right over here you have email newsletter in code injection. So over here you can send a test e-mail if you want to see what this piece of content would look like when someone receives it via email. Don't get code injection. So again, like if you want to add in any type of code, like some type of Google AdSense or share buttons or whatever. It's really nice that you just have this built-in. We can add in any type of code to the header or the footer 0, right? So anyways, that's it for settings. All right, so here's art piece of content. Now, as we begin writing the piece of content, we click this plus sign. And then right over here you can add in different things. So you can add in images. So images self-explanatory. If you want to add an image, that's what it's gonna look like right there. Little bit of animation go along with it. Or you can scroll down, oh, sorry, this is the blog post. There we go. So right here you can add in a gallery if you want as well. So we have, That's what images functionally do. So markdown is actually very helpful. So markdown allows you to add in different types of I just code or whatever it is you want to add in quickly and easily. So for example, let me click the plus sign. So click on Markdown. For example, if I want like bullet points. I use the markdown block, that's literally it. So 0.1.2 exedra. Alright, so let's click the plus sign over here. Now, HTML, fantastic. So you can insert HTML code. So for example, if you want to promote an Amazon Associates product and you get the code from Amazon Associates, you'd click the HTML block, then just copy and paste the code in right there. And you'd be good to go. Now we have Gallery. So a gallery is a gallery I just showed you that divider. Divider just sets a line to help break up your blog post to make it a little bit more visually appealing and readable. And then let's come down here to the plus sign email content. This is a really helpful, this is not to be, I want to really emphasize this. So what this does is that this is only visible when it's delivered in the email. So for example, like you could write a blog post, for example, if you write 300 words and then have a call to action described through e-mail list. So you can have like a quick little introduction paragraph right up top there. And then to read more, subscribe to the list, something like that, whatever. But what this will do is that any content you put it here. So I'll put this, any content here will only be visible by people who are getting this via e-mail. So again, just take a step back and think about how wonderful and creative you could do that. Because you're going to take a step back and say, Well, why should I subscribe and get blogposts just sent to my e-mail when I can just visit the website and get the content over here. Well, because of this type of content, you can actually have a compelling reason for people who are subscribed. And that's really it. Okay, so that's really one of those powerful features I think that goes has just built in just so smart e-mail content. I love this block, It's so helpful. Then right down here you have all your dip various embeds. So again, like you want to embed a video, someone's Twitter feed or a specific tweet, Unsplash, Vimeo, CodePen, Spotify, SoundCloud. You know, if you have a podcast, really simply just click that button and then boom at what you want in, and that's it. It's really nice. So anyway, he's now when we're all kinda set and ready to publish it, click on the Publish button. Now you can schedule it to be published later, and then you can set it up to send by NO2, totally up to you. So if you want this to go to your email list, again, you can toggle it on and off. And right now I have free member setup, but you can also set up a subscription service. So for example, if you have subscribers, you can send this e-mail only to subscribers. So you can take a step back and be like, Okay, I'm going to create a post, grieved the post title. I'll say something like subscribers only or whatever. Or I could type it down here like subscribers only, neck gives people compelling reason to subscribe and then have a go little 300 word paragraph that kinda leads into what the content is going to be about and then write the entire blog posts in this section right there. So when people get the email, they get owned. Only people who are on the list get the content, for example, or I could sell only people who are paying members and get this specific blog post, whatever. This is what, this is what goes this great is why in the introduction, I said that goes as a strong focus on content marketing, email list, and building a subscription revenue service. Because it does all this is just built in to goes to.org and something that's really powerful and that's really it. And so just go ahead and click on Publish when your blog post is ready. And it'll be sent out automatically to anybody who subscribed your website based on your settings. Anyways, that is it for how to blog with ghost. 10. Managing your email subscribers: Managing subscribers for your website. So within goes, subscribers are actually referred to as members. Again, if people click the little subscribe button, boom, and they sign up. Now how does this whole thing works? So on the backend, the first thing that you need to do is navigate over to where it says members. This is going to show you everybody who has subscribed to your website. So you can add in at different labels in, and you can also sort by members. So who's a free member, who's paid, and then all members. Now you can also go over here and click on this new member right here, then just add in a test member for example, that's what I did. Just so you kind of understand and can see like, what's your content's going to look like in someone's email, me, click on the little gear icon. You can import and export all members. Okay? So this is what it looks like within someone's email. So you can just adjust and edit everything the way that this appears pretty easily, but this is one of those emails specific only pieces of content. So I wrote a blog post and then I just tested this out to see what it looks like. And again, I use that email block within the blog post. Really interesting. And so you can just adjust everything over here. So for example, like we have the vlog Gao and then no reply and the like, we can customize all this to have a, have a little bit more of a personal touch. Anyways. So let's go back to numbers. Now what I want you to do is click on the gear icon right here, and then navigate over to where it says email newsletter. Go ahead and open up that then right here. That's it. So this is where you can customize the look and feel of your e-mail. So let's go ahead and click on customize. Oh, okay, So right over here you have your header image, publication icon, publication title, header style, feature, image, body, then email, footer text. So any like legal ease you want to add in, you can do that right there. Maybe Toby bought unsubscribe or whatever. That's really it. Okay, then you kind of just can view the way your email will appear over here. So let me go ahead and cancel. Okay, So default news I recipients. Let's go ahead and expand that. So sends email by default. Again, when you publish a piece of content, you can choose if it goes to free or paid members. So not really that important over here, then the email addresses. So this actually quite important, so support email addresses. So I definitely would suggest updating this. Like by default it's going to have the sub-domain block out that goes to Io. That's not trustworthy. I'd rather heavy like Dave, that lockout.com, something like that, something that people would actually like click and open, not some corporate IT. No reply e-mail. So just go ahead and update that to a real e-mail address that you actually have access to. And then newsletter sign-up replies, scoots you wherever you want. Okay. So like when people hit the Reply button because people are going to reply, I can just hit reply and send myself an email. So where is that reply go? That's what that's what you adjust over here with newsletter replies, email, newsletter, open rate Analytics. Obviously you want that you want to know like hey, or people opening your list, et cetera. Because again, within the member section, so if we click on this, you get a bunch of different emails. Emails, you get a bunch of different analytics. So for example, this EMOs receive two emails, they open to emails. So average open rate. And so yeah, you can just pay attention that conscious maybe remove people who are not opening your emails, et cetera. All right, let's go back here to your email newsletter customizer, and then that's it, Okay, Right here we have email, newsletter, open analytics. And so you can toggle this on or off to your liking. And that is it. And so when you're ready, just go ahead and click on save settings when you've adjusted everything it to your liking. 11. Create a paid memberhsip: Creating a subscription or revenue source for your blog and website. So again, this is something that goes really shines because it's all built in with ghosts.org. So you're going to need a Stripe account, go through the rigamarole to create an account, okay, you're going to submit your business information, phone number, etc. You're gonna have to create a real accounts. This is your stripe dashboard. Now once you create your account and you're logged into stripe, then go back to your website. And then we want to click on our best friend, which is the little gear icon. Didn't want to click on a membership. All right, so now we have a few different options. We have customized portal. No, we're not talking about the game Portal. This is the portal for how people subscribe to your website. Okay, So right over here you have the sign-up page. And so when people click on the subscribe button over there, this is what's going to appear right here. So again, you can just change things as you like. So you can change the button, text can add in different icons. Show porno button, whatever. Now if we click over here to the count, this is your the subscribers account. This is what's going to look like their name, their payment plan, etc. Then we have links. And so this is actually quite important because you can send out monthly, yearly, free, your account, account plans, et cetera. So for example, like if you're writing a blog post on your website and you want people to subscribe, you can maybe have a call to action within your blog post. So you just want to come over here and get this piece of content. So for example, you can come over here, I'll take this one just as an example. And maybe you like within my blog post, I can go ahead and just add a button, link the button to that URL. And this is what it'll look like. Or maybe I have a YouTube channel and I will just want to link to this, okay? Like subscribe to my website and then people click on the subscribe link, then they open up, then boom, the right over here. So again, you can just change the copy here to make it a little more interesting and compelling, etc. and that's really it. So let's go ahead and click on cancel. Alright. So subscription access, again, you have a lot of granular detail. Anyone can sign up, you can change that. Only people I invite. Nobody. Okay. If you want, then access to post-Soviet public numbers only pay members. And so again, if you want to have a private blog where everybody has to subscribe in order to read the content. You can just do that from right here. Just set this up paid members only or maybe just make it so locate. At a minimum, you have to subscribe to my website in order to get access. You could also do that. And so the good and bad. So that's going to obviously hamper your SEO because Google's was not going to Ranking Index piece of content that are hidden totally up to you though. So again, if you have some type of other traffic source that you want to draw it like, for example, you're a YouTuber and you want to drive, and you want to like maybe your finance YouTuber and you won't have these detailed pieces of content about how to do something within m1 finance animal. That's where you can kind of just get creative. Anyways, right down here we have membership tiers, we have free and then exit. We can expand this, then the welcome page. So this is important when people subscribed to your email list. Regardless if it's free or paid. Direct people like go ahead and create a thank you page. So you should want to create Like dislike. It would go ah, com slash. There you go. I can't spell. Thank you. Thank you. There we go. And so that's important because when people subscribe and they go through everything signup, have them automatically be directed here and then just let them know like what to expect. And then if they have a descending for free, That's where you can then incorporate maybe some pricing tiers like hey, sign up and get a discount, something like that. You can leverage it like that. Okay, so it's really important that a thank you page, again, just to let people know what kind of content they're going to be getting, what they can expect and then a call to action if you want, if you're going to be going to paid route. All right, so now let's go ahead and actually set up a premium pricing plan. So connect with Stripe. Okay. So we're already logged in. So all you have to do is yes, we want to use this in test mode. And I want to make sure that this is also in test mode. So there we go. All you have to do is connect with Stripe, that's it. Click that button, then everything kind of takes care of it for you. And so unnamed account? Yep. Okay. Let's go ahead and click on Connect. It's going to vote your account and then just fill out this information as needed. Okay, So once you go through that entire process of adding in your checking account, your routing number, business information, et cetera. You're going to land on this page where you've successfully generated a key. And then just copy this to your clipboard, then navigate back over to where you were. Setting up stripe, then copy and paste in your qi right here, and then click on Save. It's drapes settings. And there we go. Okay, so now everything is should say you're connected and you're good to go. So let's click on, Okay. All right, so now we can come down here and click on Expand. Now right here, we can add in different price points. So we come down here, you can change the currency. So you have set prices and paid member settings. So we have prices $5 a month, how many a year? And then the welcome page and that's it. 12. Helpful Ghost Integrations: And finally, integrations for our ghost.org website. So it goes that work, you do have a few built-in integrations that you can take advantage of. So we have Zapier Slack, A&P, Unsplash n of first promoter. So Zapier is actually quite important and so is automation for your favorite absolutely. For example, you want to use convert kit with ghost, no problem, but you're going to have to sync the data that you're collecting from Ghost to convert kit. That's what Zapier does. That takes care of that for you. Now we have slack, That's a messaging app for Teams. Google Accelerated Mobile Pages, Unsplash the place to get images. And then we have first promoter. Very interesting. So let's go ahead and clean figure this one. So at first, promoter allows you to do is to create your own dedicated referral programs. So for example, you can just, hey, let's add a bean affiliate for me and refer people refer your email subscription service, and then people sign up, then you have affiliates, whatever that simple. So first promoter, you are going to actually have to create an accounts. Okay? So this is affiliate referral tracking for SAS. So for SaaS companies. Now let's go here to pricing and then this is the current pricing for first promoter. Then once you sign up, create an account, then you just put in your affiliate and referral checking ID here. And then you're able to have dedicated referrals or dedicated affiliates however you want to think of it. And that's really it. So let's go back. Yep, I wants to leave. Okay, so we have a bunch of other integrations up top there. Now by integrations, It's not like you click it and then install a button and it's good for you, good to go. Unfortunately, for example, Google Analytics, it's going to do is direct you to a how-to page with like how do you integrate this? So for example, like with Google Analytics, all you have to do is sign up to Google Analytics, create an account. Then once you finish green account, you want to come down here and you just went to go to the code injection section of the website over here to go here to code injection and then put your Google Analytics code right there. Not too complicated. And so let's go back to integrations. Let's go two more. And now there's a whole host of dedicated guides about how to integrate different types of services. So for example, you want to have maybe a physical product you want to sell you something like snip carts. Snp card's great because it doesn't require like a subscription fee. It just charges 2% of anything you sell. But again, goes.org, it's not really designed for e-commerce, So we wanted to e-commerce. I would definitely stick to like WordPress and WooCommerce or Shopify. Goes is definitely more geared for blogging, collecting emails, getting people to subscribe to your email list, etc. Otherwise, over here you just have a wide variety of different integrations. So it'll tell you how to install, use any one of these various services. So for example, like gum road, okay, maybe we're going to use gum road to so some type of like eBook, no problems. We come over here, it's easy to gum road and just literally walks us through the process of the navigate your product on gum road, get the embed code, then paste it into the block editor over there. So again, like the HTML editor, again, a very simple stuff. You don't really need many of these pages once you've kinda figure out how the different aspects work. Like for example, my HTML block if I had like Amazon Associates code, whatever. And so that's what you can kind of leverage with the integrations. These are all just kinda like user guides about like how do you install and set this up on your website. Pretty self-explanatory. And then right down here, again, the built-in integrations are quite nice. Particularly first promoter, I think that's really unique, interesting, so interesting avenue. And so overall, I'm quite impressive ghost, I think it's a unique offering, really good blogging platform with good SEO, beautiful design. It's about getting people to subscribe, subscribe to your e-mail with as either a free member or a paid member. You can integrate first promoter to have your own referral program. Really nice and really interesting. And then right down here we can add a custom integration if we really want. So if there's some type of like something that you have a dedicated need for, you can just type in your integration over here and then go ahead and click on Create. And then you just navigate over here and add in the web hook. So if you're a little bit more tech savvy, you can leverage this. But anyways, that is it for this tutorial. 13. Conclusion: All right everyone, that's it for this course and how to create a professional website and blog it using ghost. Hope you enjoyed it, Hope you got a lot of value out of it. Anyways, I just want to take a quick second and say, thank you very much for enrolling and have a great day. Bye bye.