Why I Migrated From Ghost to Webflow

It's been quite a ride since starting Freak.Marketing back in 2021. Back then I had retired a personal blog I had on stevelongoria.net and decided to rebrand as Freak.Marketing. Coming from the static site generator world (Hugo to be exact), I wanted to go in a different route since I no longer did much coding/programming. I barely used the terminal anymore and hadn't touched a line of code in a couple years. Unless you count installing basic scripts onto websites.

I wanted something that was truly plug and play, I didn't want to have to maintain a server or update node packages via the terminal. So I went with Ghost.org and just focused on writing content. I really enjoy Ghost's editor, it's very clean and minimalist but that's about where my appreciation ends with Ghost.

What I didn't like about Ghost

  1. It's very much geared toward getting users to pay a monthly subscription to access "premium" content. That's not the route I wanted to take my website. I want to offer online courses for a fixed price and 1-on-1 coaching. You can disable Ghost's membership functionality and just make it a normal blog so this isn't a huge deal.

    While using Ghost the past couple years, I simply just left the membership functionality in place but made it free. When you publish all of your content for free anyways, there's not much incentive for anyone to sign up. Because of this I never really got a great sign up rate with this option. On the flip side, if I were to put my posts behind a paywall and make people sign up to read them, I'm not getting any SEO benefit from the content. This is why I'm not a fan of Ghost's business model. I think it could be improved if you could easily let each new visitor read the first 2-3 articles, no matter what they are and then once they try to read any more articles/posts they're prompted to sign up. This would allow you to still get SEO benefits from all your content you publish and provide enough incentive to get people to sign up.

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