Hey there, welcome to your new home on the web!

Unlike social networks, this one is all yours. Publish your work on a custom domain, invite your audience to subscribe, send them new content by email newsletter, and offer premium subscriptions to generate sustainable recurring revenue to fund your work.

Ghost is an independent, open source app, which means you can customize absolutely everything. Inside the admin area, you'll find straightforward controls for changing themes, colors, navigation, logos and settings — so you can set your site up just how you like it. No technical knowledge required.

If you're feeling a little more adventurous, there's really no limit to what's possible. With just a little bit of HTML and CSS you can modify or build your very own theme from scratch, or connect to Zapier to explore advanced integrations. Advanced developers can go even further and build entirely custom workflows using the Ghost API.

This level of customization means that Ghost grows with you. It's easy to get started, but there's always another level of what's possible. So, you won't find yourself outgrowing the app in a few months time and wishing you'd chosen something more powerful!

For now, you're probably just wondering what to do first. To help get you going as quickly as possible, we've populated your site with starter content (like this post!) covering all the key concepts and features of the product.

You'll find an outline of all the different topics below, with links to each section so you can explore the parts that interest you most.

Once you're ready to begin publishing and want to clear out these starter posts, you can delete the "Ghost" staff user. Deleting an author will automatically remove all of their posts, leaving you with a clean blank canvas.

Your guide to Ghost

• Customizing your brand and site settings
• Writing & managing content, an advanced guide for creators
• Building your audience with subscriber signups
• Selling premium memberships with recurring revenue
• How to grow your business around an audience
• Setting up custom integrations and apps

If you get through all those and you're hungry for more, you can find an extensive library of content for creators over on the Ghost blog.

Getting help

If you need help, Ghost(Pro) customers can always reach our full-time support team by clicking on the Ghost(Pro) link inside their admin panel.

If you're a developer working with the codebase in a self-managed install, check out our developer community forum to chat with other users.

Have fun!

As you grow, you'll probably want to start inviting team members and collaborators to your site. Ghost has a number of different user roles for your team:

Contributors
This is the base user level in Ghost. Contributors can create and edit their own draft posts, but they are unable to edit drafts of others or publish posts. Contributors are untrusted users with the most basic access to your publication.

Authors
Authors are the 2nd user level in Ghost. Authors can write, edit and publish their own posts. Authors are trusted users. If you don't trust users to be allowed to publish their own posts, they should be set as Contributors.

Editors
Editors are the 3rd user level in Ghost. Editors can do everything that an Author can do, but they can also edit and publish the posts of others - as well as their own. Editors can also invite new Contributors & Authors to the site.

Administrators
The top user level in Ghost is Administrator. Again, administrators can do everything that Authors and Editors can do, but they can also edit all site settings and data, not just content. Additionally, administrators have full access to invite, manage or remove any other user of the site.

The Owner
There is only ever one owner of a Ghost site. The owner is a special user which has all the same permissions as an Administrator, but with two exceptions: The Owner can never be deleted. And in some circumstances the owner will have access to additional special settings if applicable. For example: billing details, if using Ghost(Pro).

Ask all of your users to fill out their user profiles, including bio and social links. These will populate rich structured data for posts and generally create more opportunities for themes to fully populate their design.

If you're looking for insights, tips and reference materials to expand your content business, here's 5 top resources to get you started:

• How to create a premium newsletter (+ some case studies)
  Learn how others run successful paid email newsletter products
• The ultimate guide to membership websites for creators
  Tips to help you build, launch and grow your new membership business
• The Newsletter Guide
  A 201 guide for taking your newsletters to the next level
• The proven way to find your niche, explained
  Find the overlap and find a monetizable niche that gets noticed
• Should you launch a referral program?
  Strategies for building a sustainable referral growth machine

It's possible to extend your Ghost site and connect it with hundreds of the most popular apps and tools using integrations.

Whether you need to automatically publish new posts on social media, connect your favorite analytics tool, sync your community or embed forms into your content — our integrations library has got it all covered with hundreds of integration tutorials.

Many integrations are as simple as inserting an embed by pasting a link, or copying a snippet of code directly from an app and pasting it into Ghost. Our integration tutorials are used by creators of all kinds to get apps and integrations up and running in no time — no technical knowledge required.

Zapier

Zapier is a no-code tool that allows you to build powerful automations, and our official integration allows you to connect your Ghost site to more than 1,000 external services.

Example: When someone new subscribes to a newsletter on a Ghost site (Trigger) then the contact information is automatically pushed into MailChimp (Action).

Here's a few of the most popular automation templates:

Custom integrations

For more advanced automation, it's possible to create custom Ghost integrations with dedicated API keys from the Integrations page within Ghost Admin.

These custom integrations allow you to use the Ghost API without needing to write code, and create powerful workflows such as sending content from your favorite desktop editor into Ghost as a new draft.