Ghost and marketing agency
An agency running a Ghost publication, where the good material is the gated material
An agency that publishes on Ghost has put its thinking behind a signup on purpose. That is the business model and it is also the shape of the corpus: everything worth reading is invisible to anything reading pages, and everything visible is a teaser. The install is a single paste. What to index, and what not to, is the whole decision.
Why this pairing is its own job
The Ghost install guide covers the tag, and the marketing agency guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- The gate is the product. Members only posts are not merely unindexed, they are unindexable by design, which means the assistant's material is the marketing pages plus the first few paragraphs of each post.
- Code injection is part of the page layout rather than the post content, so the widget renders on the gated post and on the teaser a signed out reader sees. It is present at the paywall, which is where the answerable questions are: what a tier includes, what it costs, what happens when it renews.
- The obvious fix is to upload the members archive as documents so the assistant is more useful. That hands the paid material to anybody who asks, quoted and cited, on the same page as the signup button.
- The commercial terms an agency prospect asks about late, asset ownership at the end of an engagement, notice periods, who holds the ad accounts, belong on pages rather than posts, and pages sit outside the tag structure the navigation is usually built from. A crawl following your own links may never reach them.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the Ghost guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a marketing agency site specifically.
Index the membership, not the writing
Start from what somebody at the paywall is deciding. What each tier includes, what it costs, how often you publish, what happens on renewal, whether a tier can be cancelled and how. Those are the questions asked in front of a signup form and every one of them is answerable.
The posts themselves contribute their teasers, which is enough for the assistant to say what a piece is about and not enough for it to give the piece away. That is the correct amount.
If you also sell services, index the service and engagement pages beside the membership pages. A reader who arrived for the newsletter and stayed for the retainer is the most valuable path on the site, and it currently runs through pages nobody links to.
Do not upload the members archive as documents
It is tempting and it is the one action that undoes the business. The assistant answers from whatever material it holds, without knowing which parts were meant to be paid for, and it cites what it used. A signed out visitor asking about this week's piece gets a sourced summary of it.
The distinction that matters is that the gate is enforced by the publication and not by the corpus. Anything you put into the corpus is available to anyone who can open the widget, which is everyone.
If you want the assistant to be more useful to members specifically, the honest version is publishing more of the marketing side rather than moving the paid side into the material.
Link the pages, or the crawl will not find them
Ghost separates posts from pages, and navigation is often built from tags and collections that only gather posts. A terms page or an engagement page can exist for years reachable only by somebody typing its address.
Link them from the footer, or from the about page, or list them somewhere a crawl following links will pass through. This is a two minute change that decides whether the highest value commercial material on the site is in the corpus at all.
Where the answerable material lives
| The tiers page, in the tier's own words | What each level includes, what it costs, the billing period and what happens on renewal. This is the material the widget is standing next to when it matters. |
|---|---|
| Service and engagement pages | What a retainer or a project produces, at what cadence, with what reporting. Written as deliverables rather than adjectives, since every agency claims the same qualities. |
| Public post teasers | Enough to say what a piece covers and who it is for. Useful for routing somebody to the right signup, and deliberately not enough to substitute for reading it. |
| The terms nobody links to | Asset and account ownership at the end of an engagement, notice periods, how out of scope work is quoted. Pages rather than posts, and therefore usually outside the navigation. |
The first thing to get right
Write the answer to what do I actually get for the paid tier as a page, in plain terms, and link it from the footer.
At the gate that is the only question, and right now the answer is implied by a signup form. It is also the only page on the site whose value is unaffected by the fact that everything else worth reading is deliberately unreadable to a crawl.
The failure that belongs to this combination
The assistant summarises this week's paid post for a reader who has not paid
It happens the day somebody decides the corpus is too thin and uploads the archive to fix it. The intent is reasonable and the consequence is immediate: the material is now answerable, and the widget is on the same page as the paywall.
The reader does not need to bypass anything. They ask what the piece says and receive a sourced summary, which for a publication whose product is analysis is most of what they were going to pay for.
Keep the paid archive out of the material entirely. If the assistant seems thin without it, that is a signal to publish more marketing pages, not to move the product into the corpus.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a marketing agency visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Does the widget show on members only posts?
- Yes. Code injection is part of the page layout rather than the post body, so it renders on gated posts and on the teaser a signed out visitor sees. That is where it earns its keep, because the questions asked at a gate are about membership rather than about the writing.
- Can it answer questions about a post somebody has paid to read?
- Only from the part that is public. The gated body is not material it holds, and it should stay that way, because anything in the material is available to every visitor regardless of whether they subscribed.
- Can it use our client work as examples?
- Only what is published with permission, in the approved wording. Confidentiality terms in agency contracts commonly outlast the engagement and often cover the existence of the relationship, and the assistant repeats whatever it is given without knowing what was under contract.
Keep reading
- Installing on GhostPaste one tag into Settings, Code injection, Site Footer. What to do about AMP pages, member posts, and a theme missing ghost_foot.
- Everything for a marketing agencyService definitions and engagement terms convert. A price quoted for work nobody has scoped is the trap on an agency site.
- Selling a course on Ghost, where half the site is deliberately unreadablePaid lessons are gated, so the assistant only ever reads the offer. What it should say when it renders beside a lesson it cannot see.
- Installing on your own domain when the portal also holds your clientsOne portal, several client domains, a footer field stored per domain. Where the tag goes, and why the gated case studies stay unread.
- One agency, many Webflow projects, and the key that ends up in all of themOne key pasted into a client project answers on their domain with your material, and a transferred project takes the footer code with it.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.