Spectral Web Services
Newsletter digests
A few options, and a product forthcoming!
It's a frequent question on the Ghost forum: How can I send my members a digest of recent posts, instead of sending them entire posts? Here are some options.
What's built in:
You can configure your newsletter to include your three most recent posts at the bottom. This probably isn't enough for most users, but if you haven't seen it, it's worth checking out, in any case. Find it in the newsletter settings section of the Ghost dashboard.
Manual options:
All of these options are going to involve creating a post and manually collecting links. Basically, you identify the posts that you'd like to have in your newsletter digest, and paste them in, using whatever format you choose.
Bookmarks
Some folks use bookmark cards for linking recent posts. This is a quick way to get posts into your newsletter without much work, and the bookmark card works fine in emails. Here's an example from my own newsletter.
Product cards
Another option is to use a product card. This gets you control over all of the text, at the expense of having to paste it in yourself. Still, it can look pretty good. Here's a screenshot borrowed from Lynchburg Agenda's weekly newsletter. Chain a few of those together, followed by a few bookmark cards, and you've got yourself a newsletter digest.
More work, but also more control.
Paragraphs or lists
Of course, there are no rules that you have to use a Ghost card. You could instead write a summary of each article, and link it using the built-in Ghost tools.
(I wanted to find an example from one of the many Ghost newsletters I'm subscribed to. I failed.)
Automated options:
I've previously written about an automation I did for Golden Today, which collects all her recent Ghost posts into a newsletter digest each day.
Her newsletter uses full texts for posts (although the same approach could be used to just show the excerpts), and looks like this (image gallery used because her daily newsletter is LONG!):
Yes, this whole thing is one Ghost newsletter. Actually, I omitted about half of it. That thing is HUGE.
This remains one of my favorite projects. I took what was a whole lot of manual effort over on WordPress, and turned it into a much easier process on Ghost.
And one of the best parts? Her newsletter goes out via Ghost! So no extra costs for Mailgun, no dealing with synchronizing subscribers across platform. I use the API to collect posts and make a scheduled newsletter over on Ghost, which Barb can tweak if she likes.
One of these days, I need to do the last bit of work to make newsletter digests a general service. 😄
