Publish your creative work to the right people and run a fully-fledged membership business.
Protected content in Ghost allows you to set up a site where members need to login to view your content. This allows you to grow a real audience and generate sustainable income from your work with recurring subscriptions.
Choose your business model
There are three methods of running memberships using Ghost:
- Free — collect members who sign up for free
- Paid only — run a premium publication, blog or newsletter and prevent free members from being able to sign up at all
- Free + paid — combine the two and publish both free and paid content.
You'll need to consider which one of these business models you'd like to use so you can configure your Ghost site to support this with the appropriate sign up methods and payment options.
Then all that's left to do is to start creating content and assigning the appropriate access level to each post.
Post access levels in Ghost
Ghost supports these business models using simple post access levels which can be selected with a simple drop down menu in the Post settings area.
This is the same place where information such as a feature images, post URLs and custom meta data is added — so you can prepare your content for distribution from a single menu.
Public
The public access level allows you to publish content that is visible by anyone who visits your website.
Public content is great for:
- SEO and getting content ranked in the search engines
- Sharing articles on social media
- Promoting your website in any other way.
Members only
Publishing members only content allows all logged-in members (free or paid) to access it.
This type of content is most commonly used by:
- Completely free email newsletters that anyone can sign up for without a credit card
- A "Freemium" option — attracting new members to your site so you can convert them to paid subscribers later.
Paid-members only
Content that is set to paid-members only is only visible to members of your site who have an active subscription in Stripe.
This type of premium content
Specific tiers
When using Tiers, it's possible to protect content so only paid members with an active subscription on the selected tiers can access it.
Further reading
Team Ghost
Team Ghost
Kym Ellis