When I sent you the October update last month, I honestly thought that things would cool down a bit. That the November update will be a bit empty. But hey, here we are – and there are lots of things I want to tell you about.
- 💬 I want to hear from you: Share your experience with Magic Pages
- 🤝 Affiliate Program: Refer customers to earn cash
- ✨ Magic Pages Free Trial: 14 Day Free Trial available for all new Ghost sites
- 🧑💻 Contributing to Ghost: Making Ghost even better for you
- 👻 New Ghost Features: New Settings, Editor, Recommendations, and more
💬 I want to hear from you: Share your experience with Magic Pages
First off, I want to hear from you. Yes, you! And no – I am not just asking you for a testimonial (though, that would be nice, too).
There are nearly 30 Magic Pages customers now – but only around half of you has actually gone ahead and created a website. So, if you haven't done it yet, I am wondering – why not?
Is there something that's stopping you? Something simply not working? A bug that I haven't found yet? No time? I'd appreciate a quick reply, since I am curious and want to make sure you're getting the most out of Magic Pages.
And hey, if you have already created a Magic Pages website – how has the experience been so far? Any hiccups along the way? Anything that went super smoothly?
🤝 Affiliate Program: Refer customers to earn cash
Magic Pages now has an affiliate program! I have tried multiple different marketing approaches in the past 1-2 months to promote Magic Pages. I spent some money on paid ads, but I feel like the group of people who benefit from Magic Pages is just too narrow for that to work.
Instead of pumping that money into big ad giants, why not re-invest with...a bit more purpose? Most of you are creating content online in one form or another. Some of you are even running membership businesses on the Ghost sites that were created with Magic Pages.
So, if you decide to recommend Magic Pages, I want you to benefit from it as well.
Here's the deal: if you refer somebody to Magic Pages, you will get 15% commission of that sale – because you've done the heavy lifting. Since the Magic Pages payment infrastructure is built on Lemon Squeezy, I am using their affiliate tools as well. It's pretty neat, so go have a look :)
✨ Magic Pages Free Trial: 14 Day Free Trial available for all new Ghost sites
Last week, on 31 October, it was not only Halloween, but also a public holiday in the German federal state of my employer (yes, I have a day job 😉). Since that was a Tuesday and my inner clock did not grasp the concept of staying in bed, I decided to challenge myself: Could I design and develop a free trial of Magic Pages in a day?
And well, the answer is.........no.
I worked the whole day and got the basic concepts right, but lots of things just didn't work. But I continued working on it, and as of a few days ago, the 14 day free trial of Magic Pages is live!
No need to get your credit card out right at the beginning – you can start creating your Ghost site for 14 days, see if it's a fit, and then upgrade. To avoid abuse, the email newsletters are limited to 100 for the trial period – and you cannot set a custom domain until you upgrade. But other than that, it's the exact same experience.
This also has some impact on the affiliate program I have announced above. It may take up to 2 weeks from the time somebody signs up through your affiliate link to the time they actually make a purchase. I have tested it though – Lemon Squeezy tracks it accurately, and all affiliate sales are accounted properly 🙌
🧑💻 Contributing to Ghost: Making Ghost even better for you
As you know, the entire business of Magic Pages is built on Ghost – open source software, developed by a small core team and many, many volunteers.
Now, I recently became more active in the Ghost community, both in the official forum and the r/Ghost subreddit. Honestly, it's been a great time for me – I deepened my knowledge of Ghost, could help people with their problems, and see how non-developers actually use it. My goal is not to promote Magic Pages there, but to actively give back to the community that enables me to run this business.
So, in line with this, I have also made my first contribution to the Ghost source code itself. Recently, Ghost has released a new settings screen (more on that below) and there was a small bug. So, I fixed it.
I want to do this more often in the future. If I see bugs, why wait until somebody else fixes it. The sooner it's solved, the sooner you will have the bug fixes on your Magic Pages Ghost sites.
👻 New Ghost Features: New Settings, Editor, Recommendations, and more
And last, but not least, I wanted to highlight a few Ghost features that were added (or changed) in the last month. Have a look at them, because I think that they are actually pretty great 😉
- Post History: This is super handy for Ghost sites with multiple editors. Now, you can go back to a previous version of your posts with just a few clicks: https://ghost.org/changelog/post-history/
- New Editor: The Ghost team has re-written the entire editor. Most things stayed functionally the same, but the new underlaying tech will allow for many new cool tings in the future: https://ghost.org/changelog/new-editor/
- Recommendations: You know this cool new thing, where every newsletter platform lets you recommend others? Yeah, well...Ghost can do that too, now. But it's way more awesome, to be honest. Because you're not stuck to a specific platform. You can recommend publications on ConvertKit, Substack, oter Ghost sites, and literally anywhere else: https://ghost.org/changelog/recommendations/
- New Settings Design: The Ghost settings have been completely re-designed to allow for more efficiency. I really like the new design and the search bar makes it super easy to find things: https://ghost.org/changelog/refreshed-settings/
- Ghost Bookmarker Tool: Ever stumbled upon a link you want to share in your newsletter or blog post? Well, Ghost just published a bookmarker tool that saves links right into your Ghost drafts: https://ghost.org/changelog/bookmarker/
So, this is it – lots of cool new things happened in the last month and I am more excited than ever to work with Ghost.
Let me know if you have any questions about any of these new Ghost features or the Magic Pages topics I shared with you.
Speak soon,
Jannis