@Grant Rogers

If you scroll down on event settings you will see a section named Email Templates. 
The first template here is the invite itself which you should customize to your own tone of voice. 
Within this template is a green variable called "prospect.networking_event_url". 
This is a personalized URL for registration by the recipient of that email.
This is required to stay as the variable otherwise it can cause some complications with managing the registration list and controlling those invited if it is a private event. 

When you have these details setup you can populate the guestlist. 

You can do this through a few methods
1. Clicking the Event Details tab of a draft event will show you a box for GUESTLIST with a button for add a guest. this will add prospects one by one
2. Clicking the Event Attendees tab of an event will open the event pipeline for guest management, you can add a prospect one by one or through importing a csv as you would in your fundraising pipeline
3. You can go to any other pipeline or your directory and bulk select (clicking the checkbox next to each name desired to be invited) then copy them all in bulk to the event pipeline. When you bulk select a green banner shows at the top, clicking the Copy To link will open a box to select the target pipeline. Select the event you created and select guestlist - NOT YET INVITED as the stage.

et voila you have populated the guestlist. 

Now that you have:
- the event set up with event details
- the emails are set up in your voice
- determined if you want the invited stage to automatically send out reminder and last call emails
- the guestlist populated

You will click the green button "Publish Event & Send Invites"

What this button will accomplish is two things:
1. you will switch your event from draft to live allowing registrations to flow in
2. you will send out the event invite to all prospects in your guestlist

When someone registers, they will then be moved to the "RSVP - Yes" stage and a registration confirmation email will be automatically sent to the registrant. 

While the event is live and upcoming, if you would like to invite more, all you need to do is add the prospect(s) to the invited stage and the invite will again be automatically sent out. 

Feel free to ask any other questions on this system. Congratulations on getting your first event set up!