Moving from Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to Ghost for my email newsletter (and blog)

I'm going to tell you how I realized that The Fiery Well is no longer marketable and how that realization lead to the decision to switch from Kit to Ghost for my email newsletter as I revive The Fiery Well as a blog and give myself permission to be directionless for a while.

In the beginning, The Fiery Well was a blog. A personal one.

Did you know that The Fiery Well had started as a WordPress blog in 2013? I wrote about various things as I navigated life and came out of the broom closet. It took a few years, but as I built my reputation on social media as a tarot and website witch, The Fiery Well slowly developed into a marketing website. Meaning, I was using it to sell my services, such as web design, consultations, tarot readings, and eventually my community membership.

When I launched the membership in 2020, my writing became less reflective and more informative. My website became home to a community of witches that I supported with their tech, systems, websites, and more. And eventually what I was writing lived only behind a pay wall: pieces to answer questions from my community, tutorials, and workshops.

From blogging to newsletters to email marketing

It wasn't until about 2018 that I started sending a newsletter. I would email my small but mighty list about new blog posts, tarotscopes, website tips, and all sorts of things. All of it was chaos, and fun, but none of it was intentional marketing.

In 2020, I left Mailchimp for Kit (known as ConvertKit at the time) and have been pretty happy about the switch. The focus at Kit at the time was on the subscriber and the content, not the design (my, how things change) and it was a lot easier to send emails. It was the anti-Mailchimp (and still is in other ways.)

Deliverability was great–that was rarely a problem. And their new creator network, love it or hate it (I'm a mix), grew my list exponentially even when I was completely absent.

Kit quite simply made it easy to send a lot of different emails to a lot of different audiences: tarotscopes, newsletters, freebies, community updates for my now-retired membership, and more. The more emails I sent, the more I would wax and wane between wanting to send a generic newsletter and only send marketing emails. It was organized chaos-marketing chaos-and it was great–up until the end of 2024 when life came at me.

In 2025, after five years of near-weekly emails, I sent just one: to announce I had moved my website from WordPress to Ghost (and a few other notes.)

My life and business had gone through hell and I didn't know what else to do.

Switching from WordPress to Ghost

For a bit of a backstory, I've been using WordPress near-exclusively for over a decade. I loved WordPress. It had given me a creative outlet, not only from a web design perspective, but also a programming one. I could dig into the guts and make any website I was working on do exactly what I needed it to do. I even created a few custom themes and plugins along the way. WordPress was the foundation for my growing business.

So why go to Ghost all of a sudden? In a word: panic. (Yes, exactly what I tell folks not to do.)

I had such dreams and plans for 2024. What started as one of the most exciting years quickly twisted into one of the most painful of my personal life. And then it ended as one of the most depressing of my business life: I had to abandon one business idea due, among other things, to my diminishing capacity. And then, a few months later, I had to abandon another–the one I had really wanted to do for the longest time: I was going to make the push to return to web design full time.

But then the middle aged white male co-creator of WordPress had a conniption fit that disrupted everything WordPress. I went from simply not liking the guy (always follow your gut) to losing all trust in the project's leadership and, for a while, I lost faith in the project itself.

Did I really have to lose WordPress? On top of everything else?

It was as if the gods were saying: Just. Stop. Everything.

And so I did.

I shut down. My brain. My business.

Everything.

Between life and business, I was exhausted and burned out.

So I burned it all down.

I watched the flames of burning down The Fiery Well settle into warm embers and cold ash.

I moved most of my site over to Ghost as a way to move away from WordPress and still hold on to something. To give me breathing space. To entice me to come back someday.

You can't force clarity, but clarity can force you

And then, as it does, the dust began to settle a year later. My life calmed down. Things got quiet. In a good way. A really good way. So good that the urge to work again came through. What's more: the urge to write returned.

And in February of 2026 I finally wrote something. And published it on my blog. And did the same thing again in March. It felt good. It felt like I was starting again. But not quite starting over. I was happy just to be writing and publishing again. To be focused on something again.

I was taking things slow. I was writing more. Designing more (I'd taken on a client project for a new website as well!) and I wasn't pushing myself into any kind of schedule. I was allowing myself the space to breathe. To let things happen naturally and not force it. I didn't have a full business to run anymore. I had the space to think and write and play. I was forming ideas and making plans and connecting dots.

It was... freeing. And fun. I was having fun with my blog. Drafting and dreaming. Like the old days.

With my new-found writing momentum, I also decided to start emailing my list again in March. The first email felt great–like connecting with an old friend. But each email after that began to feel like a performance. It started to feel exactly the way I didn't want it to feel: forced.

By May, I was finding myself in a very uncomfortable place. The newsletter no longer felt like a natural extension of what I was doing. Rather, it felt like it was a place I had to show up. I found that I was emailing things I wanted to be publishing. And I was publishing things I felt I "should" be emailing.

I wanted to share what I was writing, but I was getting confused about what should go where and when. What this was revealing was a lack of clarity in my direction, my messaging, and my tech choices. Where was I supposed to put what?

And it's not just me.

I see it all the time in social media discourse around where to put things. Websites, blogs, email marketing, and newsletters are now becoming conflated with each other because of the tools available.

They aren't interchangeable, but they do work together.

The battle of choosing between Kit and Ghost

Despite the calls to "bring blogging back", blogging never died. However, the publishing tools are very different than they were even two years ago. They're vastly different than from when I was blogging back in the late 90's. There are very few blog first sites with open and free posts, engaged comments, RSS feeds, and a chronological feed. (I miss those.)

Today, blogging is now more of a mix of email and publishing to the web, either for free or behind some kind of access gate (you have to either pay or subscribe to access the majority of the content.)

There's the business push to obtain that coveted email address of your subscriber, and the tools today make it easier than ever to do so because of they are blurring lines. So let's take a look at some key differences between the tools I was using that were blurring the lines for me.

Kit is email focused–you start with a broadcast.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is an email marketing service that offers landing pages and what I would call a psuedo-blog:

• You can send emails without publishing them and you can publish posts without emailing them
• You have a lot of control now over how the email looks, but they retain most of the email formatting on the published side, which can look weird
• Behind the scenes is a powerful marketing tool with automations, workflows, segmentation, tagging and more.

When you use Kit, you can send more than just a newsletter. You can also set up fairly sophisticated marketing campaigns, sell subscriptions, and digital products.

Ghost is publisher focused–you start with a post.

Ghost, on the other hand, is a website, offering pages and blog posts:

• With Ghost you can also send emails without publishing them as posts and you can publish posts without emailing them
• You don't have a lot of options for the email formatting from Ghost–it goes out in a format very similar to the blog post
• Behind the scenes are revenue focused analytics for the blog and newsletter, blog categorization, and website management–pages, themes, RSS feeds.

With Ghost, it's a direct relationship between the inbox and the web. The focus is on the writing.

In my case the end result was effectively the same: something is emailed and something is published. So what was my issue? I was conflating them.

It made no sense to continue using both, despite the numerous attempts to do so. Having two places to publish was starting to keep me from writing at all. I froze with indecision on where to publish next. And that was no good. And, to top it off, I wasn't using either tool effectively.

And then the universe had a giggle.

While I was tormenting myself, I got an email from a colleague and former community member. It was a simple compliment but it hit a nerve: "Okay but how much do I love that your website is an old school blog now?"

I replied with thanks and said it was just temporary, but as soon as I hit send on that reply I couldn't stop thinking about it. Ghost was supposed to be temporary while I figured out what I wanted to do with The Fiery Well website and the business in general. Of course blogging didn't feel like work: I wasn't treating it as such.

I thought I would spend more time growing and emailing my list, honing my messaging over email, and build my business back that way. But the more I tried the less I felt compelled to do so.

Here was the universe going, "Here's your sign."

I had to make a choice. Was I going to be an email marketer or a blogger? On top of that, a developing problem was my audience getting caught in the middle. Who was subscribed to the blog? Who was subscribed to my emails? Who was subscribed to both? And most importantly: who the hell was I talking to when I was writing? Is the audience the same? Not entirely!

My email list was built through Kit's Creator Network and they were expecting what was recommended to them. And my blog subscribers were expecting more of what was already on the website. There was very little cohesion between the two. After so much time away, both were pure chaos.

I felt everything coming apart again. That's when I had to get real honest with myself at this point, folks. This was the not so fun part: facing reality.

And that reality was: I have no cohesive brand message because I have no idea what my offerings are anymore. I wasn't even sure if I was going to continue operating a business under The Fiery Well. So why was I trying to act like I did?

What to sell when you have nothing to market

When I burned The Fiery Well down to the ground, I really burned it down.

I deleted three brand related websites. I deleted my archive of templates, freebies, downloads, workshops and more. I deleted my CRM, contracts, proposals, services... all of it. Beyond Witching Hours, which I can't host until Fall when both my kids are back in school, I have nothing to sell at this time.

Nothing to sell? Nothing to market.

Nothing to market? Not much reason to send a marketing email.

And that's a hard muscle to relax after half a decade of sending marketing emails.

Which is why blogging on the website, publishing articles through Ghost, felt so much more welcoming. It wasn't a place for me to try and market or build up excitement to buy something. It was a place for me to publish something, to share & connect my thoughts, and build a library of my perspectives. It was for me first and folks just came along for the ride.

Temporary was honestly looking to become long term because during this debate between these two tools I realized something even more important. I'm in a very different stage of life.

I'm a perimenopausal mother of two with diagnosed arthritis and undiagnosed ADHD. I need to move a lot slower than I initially thought or I risk burning out once again. I need easy right now. I don't necessarily need The Fiery Well to be a business right now. I need a place to express myself again.

That's the shift.

It's not about the tech–they all do the same shit in different ways today–it's about the priorities. The direction of the business should determine the tools, rather than the tools determining the direction of the business.

When you have no direction, choose a starting point and go with it

My direction now is mostly directionless. Yes, I'm working on and building things behind the scenes, but those aren't necessarily going to be The Fiery Well. And they're going to take a while.

So to use multiple tools, of any kind, right now when there is no direction is a waste of time, energy, and money. This is a period of transition as I figure out my next steps.

It became more clear when I asked myself what I wanted, rather than what tool should I use. Where do I want to invest my time, money, and energy into finding those next steps? Email or publishing? Publishing.

Okay. Who does that better, Kit or Ghost?

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is great as a platform, but today I need more than a landing page and less than a full website. And while Kit can function as a blog, it isn't one. Despite its attempts, Kit will always be an email marketing platform first and foremost. It's great when you're starting from scratch, don't get me wrong. I highly recommend Kit for that very thing, especially for the price. But that's not quite where I'm at.

Ghost, on the other hand, is not meant for email marketing. It's a website, a blog, and blog delivery system. There's no automations or workflows. It's meant for publishing, distributing, and monetizing writing. It's very straightforward (dare I say basic) and it's incredibly portable–if I leave I can take everything with me. It's open and accessible and, when I'm ready to get into their templating system, I'll have complete control over its look and feel.

I emailed my list at Kit to announce that, not only has the site moved to Ghost as of 2025, but in 2026, I'll be emailing them from there as well. This will be the first published and emailed post to my entire audience at once and I feel so relaxed about it. No more wondering. No more duplicating. No more managing. Just write and go.

What will I write about?

• Productivity? Probably.
• Website and tech advice? Without a doubt.
• Life and business? I'm here to share.
• Witchcraft and tarot? Yes, please.

That's it. No direction. Just vibes. I'm going back to basics and giving myself permission to work and play and build in public without the pressure of having to have a cohesive brand message or clear direction right now. At least for a while. I'll write what I want. Share what I want.

Back to where I started.