Many publishers use Ghost to deliver superb content on their site and newsletter, then use Outpost to supercharge their membership growth.
Increasingly, we find that more publishers want to offer podcasts to their subscribers.
There are many ways to host and distribute a podcast.
For publishers who want to let their paid podcast subscribers listen to their personal paid subscriber-only link on Spotify, we recommend Supercast (Supercast charges per paid subscriber: review their pricing here). Other options for paid podcasts on Ghost that we support includes Transistor.FM, but that currently does not support paid podcast subscription listening on Spotify.
Supercast is a podcast publishing and distribution service that is part of the Spotify Open Access program. For publishers who offer premium levels of subscription, this lets you provide podcast access to your paid subscribers anywhere they get their podcasts, including Spotify.
Supercast has its own system for charging subscriptions, but in this integration, your subscribers pay you through your Ghost site. (Word of warning: do not mix and match and have subscriptions running through two services; madness and customer service hell lives down that route.
To enable Supercast integration in Ghost and Outpost, after you have set up a Supercast account:
- Go to your Outpost Control Center
- Navigate to Integrations
- Select Supercast
- Grab the API key from Supercast (go to Settings in Supercast, then API, generate new podcast access token)
- Paste the API key in your Outpost control center's Supercast integration
You will also want to tell Supercast that you are using Ghost and to set up your account so that there is no payment option on Supercast.
This integration is set up to allow you to provide podcast access to specific tiers of memberships.
A very common use case we see is publishers only providing premium podcast access to paid subscribers, or paid subscribers on specific tiers.
To do this, select Paid members only, and check 'remove this benefit when user downgrades to free.'
Since Supercast charges per paid subscriber whether they are using the feed or not, Outpost's integration allows you to either provision everyone who fits the criteria OR to provide a button on your site where those with the benefit can turn it on. The second option (Invite Only mode) lets you offer the Supercast paid podcast benefit widely, while only being charged for those who actually activate it.
We've also written some email templates for you. These can be found in Outpost control center, Basic Autoresponder -> Other -> Integrations.
We also have integrations for Transistor (paid or free, or both), and free-only options including Megaphone, Podbean, Dovetail, OmnyFM and YouTube.
Image credit: NASA