Writers love writing.

But most of them don’t love doing the work required to get more opportunities to write.

They’d much rather spend their days writing for clients and hope that new business comes through referrals or people stumbling across their content.

I know because I was the same way for the first 4 years of running my writing business…

When the referrals and inbound leads were flowing, life was great.

I could focus on doing what I loved without worrying too much about where my next client would come from.

But when things dried up?

I was anxious as hell.

I never knew where my next client was coming from.

And even when I had clients, there was always that nagging thought in the back of my mind…

“What the hell am I going to do if one of these clients decides to leave?”

It was a horrible position to be in.

My income depended on something I had little control over.

I knew I needed to start reaching out to potential clients, but I hated the idea of cold outreach.

The thought of messaging strangers and trying to convince them to buy my writing services made me cringe.

Mainly because I knew how annoying it felt when people reached out to me.

So, I avoided it for a long time…

But I knew I couldn’t keep building a business where my ability to earn depended on someone remembering to refer me.

…or the LinkedIn/Medium algorithm deciding to show my content to the right person.

I needed a way to create my own opportunities.

This is what led me to develop the LinkedIn cold outreach framework I’ve since used to generate $177,400 in ghostwriting revenue.

And the funny thing is I rarely try to sell anything in my initial messages.

Instead, I focus on being so helpful that prospects start wondering what it would look like to actually work with me.

By the time we talk about money, they’re already interested in what I can do for them.

Let me show you how it works…

Why do writers avoid outreach?

First, we have to deal with the elephant in the room.

A lot of writers avoid cold outreach because of fear.

Fear of rejection.
Fear of annoying people.
Fear of coming across salesy

And I get it…

Nobody enjoys putting themselves out there only to be ignored or told to piss off.

But much of this fear comes from how we think about cold outreach.

Cold outreach isn't about convincing strangers to buy something they don’t want.

And if you treat it that way, it will always feel uncomfortable and scary.

A better way to think about cold outreach is as an opportunity to help someone.

For example, imagine you notice someone walking down the street with their backpack wide open…

Their laptop is sticking out, and it could fall out if they keep walking.

Would you ignore them because you’re afraid of bothering them?

Probably not.

Why?

Because you have information that could help them avoid a problem they might not have noticed.

This is how I think about cold outreach.

I look for people with problems I can solve.

And when I spot an opportunity to help, I reach out and share what I’ve noticed.

Sometimes they’re interested.
Sometimes they’re not.

And that’s fine.

Some people would rather their laptop fall out their bag before they take action.

Others have opened their bag deliberately… I dunno. Maybe a social experiement.

Others might have left their bag open on purpose… I dunno. Maybe it’s a social experiment.

Whatever the reason, the point is this:

Your goal with outreach isn’t to convince everyone to buy from you. It’s to find people who could benefit from what you know and help them move forward.

Once you start approaching outreach this way, it becomes a hell of a lot easier.

Step 1: Find leads

If you’re gonna do outreach effectively, you must know who you’re trying to reach.

I’ve spoken to ghostwriters who’ve told me they help “founders who need ghostwriting,” and they’re surprised when they struggle with outreach.

You MUST be specific about the type of person you want to work with.

If you don’t know WHO your service is for or WHAT you’re helping them achieve, finding good prospects will be hard.

I’ve written an entire article on how to create a ghostwriting offer your ideal customer can’t refuse, so I won’t go too deep into that here.

But once you’ve got your offer, you should have a much clearer picture of your ideal customer.

You should be able to say something like:

I specialize in helping AI professionals build authority and attract leads for their paid courses through LinkedIn content.

The next step is to go where your customers are!

At the time of writing, LinkedIn is still one of the best places to find leads.

I personally use Sales Navigator to source mine.

But just because someone could benefit from your services doesn’t mean they can afford them.

This is why I look for signs a prospect has an established business or a clear way of making money.

For example:

• Founders running revenue-generating AI businesses.

• Consultants selling high-ticket implementation services.

• Entrepreneurs with established products or offers.

• Founders whose companies have recently raised funding.

Of course, none of these automatically means someone has the budget or desire to hire a ghostwriter.

But they’re useful signals when deciding who to prioritize.

Next, check whether they’re active on the platform you’re using, which is easy with Sales Navigator.

After all, there’s little point sending messages to people who barely use LinkedIn.

I’ve broken down my process in How I Find High-Ticket Ghostwriting Clients on LinkedIn, including how I identify prospects worth reaching out to.

So give that a read if you want the full breakdown.

For now, remember this:

Know exactly who you’re targeting, go where they are, and prioritize people who are active and have the means to pay you.

Step 2: Find a problem you can help them solve

Remember the person walking down the street with their backpack open and laptop sticking out?

Well, now we’re looking for the LinkedIn equivalent.

People who have a problem you can help them solve, but might not realize it’s costing them opportunities.

This is where a little research goes a long way.

Before reaching out to a prospect, I spend time reviewing their LinkedIn profile, content, and business.

I’m trying to understand two things:

1. What are they trying to achieve?

2. What might be stopping them from getting there?

For example:

• An AI startup founder might have a great product and a growing business, but barely posts on LinkedIn. They could be missing opportunities to build awareness and attract potential customers.

• An AI educator might post consistently but struggle to get their ideas in front of the right people. Their problem might not be consistency, but how they’re communicating their expertise.

• A consultant might have years of experience and a high-ticket offer, but their LinkedIn profile does a terrible job of explaining what they do. Potential clients might be visiting their profile and leaving without understanding how they can help.

The key is to look for gaps between where someone is and where they could be.

But just because you spot a problem doesn’t mean the prospect sees it as one…

Like I said before… Maybe they’re running a social experiment. Who knows?

You’ll never know unless you start a conversation with them.

Even if they do acknowledge it’s a problem, it doesn’t necessarily mean solving it is a priority.

So you must start a conversation.

But HOW you start that conversation can determine whether they stop to listen.

Step 3: Offer free consulting

Continue with the example of the person walking around with their backpack open…

If you noticed their laptop was about to fall out, you’d probably walk over and let them know.

They’d thank you, zip up their bag, and carry on with their day.

Problem solved.

This only happens because zipping up a bag is quite easy.

If they were carrying a ton of things and didn’t fancy putting everything down, they might ask you to help close it.

That's the kind of person you're looking for.

Someone who could solve the problem themselves, but might appreciate a helping hand.

Again, you won’t know who they are unless you start the conversation, so you must start a conversation.

Whether they need your help or not doesn’t matter.

This still gives you an opportunity to build trust with the prospect by letting you demonstrate your expertise.

For example, let’s say I found an AI educator whose LinkedIn content isn’t attracting enough potential customers for their courses.

I’d send a message like this:

Hey [NAME], thanks for accepting my connection request. Saw you’re an educator in the AI space, hence the connection.

I’ve been looking at how AI educators are using LinkedIn to attract students, and I noticed a few things that might be useful for you.

Mind if I share them?

If they’re interested, I can put together a short Google Doc or Loom video showing what I’ve noticed and what I’d recommend changing.

And I don’t hold back the useful stuff, either.

I want them to walk away with something they could genuinely implement themselves.

The goal is to show I understand their problem and know how to help them solve it.

Sometimes they’ll take the advice and implement it themselves.

Great.

Other times, they’ll have questions or realize they’d rather have someone else handle the work.

This is when the conversation can naturally move toward working together.

Step 4: Get them on a call

Once you’ve shared your free consulting and the prospect finds it useful, the next step is to get them on a call.

I use this to build more rapport.

And it’s another touchpoint with you, which means they move further down the funnel.

When we’re on the call?

I want them to tell me more about:

• What they’re trying to achieve

• What’s stopping them

• What they’ve already tried

So I can give them more free consulting on what they’ve got to do to get from point A (where they are) to point B (where they want to be).

The funny thing is, much of the advice I give on these calls is just a deeper explanation of what I’ve already shared in the Google Doc or Loom.

But now I can tailor it to their specific situation.

And as they start opening up about their challenges, I often discover problems I wouldn’t have spotted just by looking at their public profile.

But toward the end of the call, if I believe I can help them implement what we’ve discussed, I’ll let them know.

Something as simple as:

“By the way, if you’d rather have someone handle all of this for you, that’s something I can help with. Would you be open to booking another call to discuss what this may look like?”

Notice I’m still not forcing a pitch…

I’m giving them the option to take the next step.

If they’re interested, great.

Now we can talk about what working together might look like.

And if they’re not?

That’s fine too.

They still walk away with advice they can use, and I’ve built a relationship with someone who might need my help later.

In a few months, I could follow up to see where they're at.

Step 5: Make the offer

So they client has accepted the call and you booked it from the discovery call.

If you’ve reached this point, the prospect likely wants to work with you.

The first thing to do is make sure you’re both on the same page.

I like to start by recapping the problems they’ve told me about during our conversation.

Something like:

So, from what you’ve told me, you’re struggling to turn your LinkedIn content into leads for your courses. You’re posting consistently, but you’re not getting the results you want, and you don’t have the time to figure out what’s going wrong. Is that right?

Then I shut up and let them respond.

If I’ve misunderstood something, this gives them a chance to correct me.

Once we’re aligned, I’ll explain how I can help them solve those problems by connecting what I do to the outcomes they’ve told me they want.

Then I’ll ask, “Do you feel like this is something you need?”

If they say yes, “On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being I don’t ever want to speak to you agai, and 10 being, let’s get the ball rolling, where would you say you are?”

If they say 8, 9, or 10, great.

I’ll move on to discussing the investment.

But if they say anything below 8, I’ll ask, “What would get you up to an 8, 9, or 10?”

Because their answer usually tells you what’s holding them back.

Either way, this gives you a chance to address their concerns before asking them to make a financial commitment.

And if I can resolve those concerns, I’ll check whether they’re comfortable moving forward.

Once we’re on the same page, I’ll state the investment.

For example:

“To help you implement everything we’ve discussed, the investment would be $X per month.”

And then…

I shut up.

Seriously.

One of the worst things you can do after sharing your price is start talking because you’re uncomfortable with the silence.

Give them space to make a decision.

If they say yes?

Congratulations.
You’ve landed yourself a new client.

Send the payment link and any paperwork needed to get started.

But if they say something like, “Let me think about it.”

Don’t immediately assume the deal is dead.

Ask what they need to think through.

There might be a concern you haven’t addressed or a question they haven’t asked.

And if there is, help them work through it.

Sometimes that leads to a yes.
Sometimes it doesn’t.

Either way, your job is to help them make an informed decision, not force them into one.

Final thoughts

Cold outreach doesn’t have to feel like selling.

You don’t need some fancy sales script.

You don’t need to pressure strangers into booking calls.

And you certainly don’t need to send hundreds of generic messages hoping someone bites.

Instead, focus on finding people you can genuinely help.

Understand their problems.
Show them you can solve those problems.
And give them opportunities to take the next step when they’re ready.

That’s essentially what my entire framework comes down to.

It’s the approach I’ve used to generate $177,400 in ghostwriting revenue.

Of course, not everyone you reach out to will become a client.

Some people will ignore you.
Others will take your free advice and disappear.

But that’s just part of the process.

So keep going and track your metrics!

Thanks for reading!

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I recently spoke with a ghostwriter who told me they’d been working on projects here and there, but struggled to lock down retainers.

This puzzled me because retainer projects are pretty much all I’ve ever done.

So I asked to see his process, and it immediately made sense…

He was trying to get prospects, who were complete strangers, to commit to 3–6 months of ghostwriting on a monthly retainer.

You might be thinking, “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?”

Well…

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t land high-ticket retainers by pitching the retainer off the bat.

Asking someone who has no idea:

• What it’s like to work with you

• Whether you can deliver on the promise you’ve made

• Whether what you’re proposing will work for them

…to commit thousands of dollars every month is a huge ask.

And understandably, most people will say “No.”

I mean, would you get into a long-term relationship with someone you bumped into at the cafe that same day?

Probably not.

Things are no different online.

So if you want to land more retainer clients, start by reducing the commitment.

Sell them an initial offer designed to solve an immediate problem.

Give them a quick win and a taste of what’s possible if you keep working together.

I call this a progressive offer.

And it’s become one of the most important parts of how I turn new clients into $3,000–$5,000/month ghostwriting retainers.

Let me show you how it works…

Trust is not given…

In September, I paid a business consultant $6,000 to help me grow my business.

I had been connected with this guy on LinkedIn since September 2024.

We had interacted for 2 years before I ever pulled the trigger and bought his services.

Now, I want you to think about the last time you handed someone a significant sum of money…

Did you wake up one morning, find a complete stranger on the internet, and immediately throw thousands of dollars at them?

Of course you didn’t.

You probably did your homework first.
You looked at what they’d done.

Asked questions…

Maybe spoke to them a few times.

And even after all of that, there was probably still a tiny voice in your head wondering, “Is this going to be worth it?”

Given you went ahead with the transaction, you obviously believed the answer was “Yes.”

Prospects you reach out to on LinkedIn go through the exact same process.

Except… they haven’t had 2 years to build trust with you.

Asking them to commit $3,000–$5,000 every month for the next 3-6 months is a huge commitment if they never initiated the interaction.

They don’t know whether:

• You’ll understand their voice.

• You’ll understand their business.

• You’ll be able to deliver what you promised.

Heck, they don’t even know if they’ll enjoy working with you.

So the odds of them agreeing to chuck you $5,000 every month are pretty slim.

What do you do when the prospect hesitates?

This is what I asked the ghostwriting prospect who had been struggling with landing retainer clients.

He told me, “They usually say they need to think about it, so I assume it means I haven’t done a good job of selling them. So I try to convince them by showing them more of my work.”

In other words, he tries to explain the value again.

He talks through everything they’d get if they just trusted him and handed over the cash.

He’d show them examples of his work.

And continue handling objections like we’re told to do on sales calls.

Do they end up buying?

No.

Sales folks would boil this down to poor closing skills, but the real flaw lay further up the chain.

Point being…

There’s only so much proof can do when someone has never worked with you.

Your portfolio can prove you’re a good writer.
Your testimonials can prove other people enjoyed working with you.
Your case studies can prove you’ve generated results before.

But none of them can prove what their experience working with you will be like.

And that’s ultimately what they’re being asked to bet thousands of dollars on.

When a prospect says, “I need to think about it,” they’re telling you there’s still some uncertainty around the decision.

And if you’re trying to sell a multi-month retainer to someone you’ve only recently met, some of that uncertainty may simply come from the size of the commitment.

Throwing more proof at them doesn’t necessarily solve that.

Neither does getting better at handling objections.

Because maybe the objection isn’t something you need to overcome in the first place…

Maybe you’re simply asking them to make too big a commitment, too soon.

The progressive offers framework

Solving this problem is easier than it may seem…

Instead of asking a stranger prospect for a big commitment right off the bat when they don’t know you, ask for a smaller commitment and increase it as you earn their trust.

I call this the Progressive Offers Framework.

Read more

Recently, I spoke with a prospect who told me they’ve been struggling to find ghostwriting clients.

… And they were 100% convinced it was because they sucked at sales.

So I asked, “How many people have you spoken to this month?”

They didn’t know.

Okay...

“How many calls have you booked?”

They looked at me like I was speaking another language.

This is a problem I see with a lot of ghostwriters…

They’ll say:

• “I suck at sales.”

• “My outreach isn’t working.”

• “I can’t get clients.”

But they don’t have clear insight into what part of the sales process is broken in their workflow.

And because they don't know where things are going wrong, they can't make the tweaks needed to improve.

So they feel hopeless.

Trust me, I know… I’ve been there.

For years, I barely tracked any of this stuff.

If I wasn’t getting clients, I’d assume I needed to:

• Send more messages

• Get better at sales

• Change my offer

• Find better prospects

And while one of those may have been right, I had no friggin’ idea because I didn’t have the numbers.

So now I track every stage of my client acquisition process to give me a holistic view of what’s working and what’s not.

It also allows me to forecast what future revenue could look like, which helps me set goals and targets.

But most importantly, I know where to look when I’m not getting clients.

If people aren’t accepting my connection requests, I know there’s a problem at the top of my funnel.

If I’m booking plenty of calls but nobody is buying, I know the problem is further down or potentially with my offer (depending on why they didn’t buy).

And that’s the whole point of tracking this stuff…

You can’t improve what you don’t understand.

So in this article, I’m going to break down the 8 metrics I think every ghostwriter should track to land more clients.

1. Connection acceptance rate

The first stage of your client acquisition process is connecting with prospects.

So it’s important to measure the percentage of people you send connection requests to who accept.

The formula is simple:

Accepted connections ÷ Connection requests sent × 100

For example, if you send 395 connection requests in a month and 305 of them accept, your connection acceptance rate would be 77.22%.

305 ÷ 395 × 100 = 77.22%

Now, what’s considered a good connection acceptance rate on LinkedIn?

As a rough rule of thumb, I look at it like this:

• Below 20% → Poor: Something probably needs investigating.

• 20–30% → Okay: There’s room for improvement.

• 30–50% → Good: Your targeting and approach are probably working.

• 50%+ → Excellent: You’re getting a very strong proportion of prospects to connect.

Several factors influence your connection acceptance rate.

For example:

1. Who you target

2. Whether they already know you

3. How active they are on LinkedIn

4. How strong your profile is

I once worked with a client whose connection acceptance rate was 10%.

After digging into the profiles of the people he connected with, I discovered most of them weren’t active on LinkedIn.

Once we realized this, he invested in Sales Navigator, turned on the filter to show only profiles active in the past few months, and his connection acceptance rate shot up to 40%.

This is why it’s important to know your connection acceptance rate…

If people aren’t accepting your requests, you won't have enough conversations to land clients.

And instead of assuming you need to do more outreach, the number tells you there’s something earlier in the process you need to fix.

2. Response rate

Getting someone to accept your connection request is great.

But it means nothing if you can’t get them to talk to you.

So the next metric I track is response rate.

It measures the percentage of conversations you start that receive a response.

The formula is:

Responses ÷ Conversations started × 100

So if you start 124 conversations and 16 people respond, your response rate would be 12.90%.

16 ÷ 124 × 100 = 12.90%

Now, what’s considered a good response rate?

As a rough rule of thumb, I look at it like this:

• Below 10% → Poor: Your messaging or targeting probably needs work.

• 10–20% → Okay: You’re getting responses, but there’s room to improve.

• 20–30% → Good: A healthy percentage of prospects are engaging.

• 30%+ → Excellent: Your messages are consistently starting conversations.

Of course, these numbers will vary depending on whether your outreach is warm or cold, who you’re targeting, and what you say.

But if your response rate is consistently low, there are several things that could be at fault:

• Your opener feels automated.

• You’re pitching too quickly.

• Your message is too long.

• You’re asking generic questions.

• There’s no obvious reason to respond.

• You’re talking to the wrong people.

Personally, I’m a big believer in permission-based selling.

So my goal with the first message isn’t to convince someone to buy my ghostwriting service.

It’s simply to get a response.

Once they do, I can start asking leading questions to qualify whether they're a potential customer.

A low response rate isn’t a justification to start more conversations…

Investigate why the conversations you’re already starting aren’t going anywhere.

• Test different opening messages.

• Change who you’re targeting.

• Compare warm outreach against cold.

Then track whether your response rate improves.

Remember, at this stage, you don’t need to make the sale…

You just want to begin an engagement.

3. Conversation-to-call rate

Now we’re getting deeper into your client acquisition funnel.

One of the most important parts of this process is getting the client on a call.

Hence why I track my conversation-to-call rate.

It measures the percentage of conversations that eventually result in a booked call.

The formula is:

Calls booked ÷ Conversations started × 100

So if you start 100 conversations and book 8 calls, your conversation-to-call rate would be 8%.

8 ÷ 100 × 100 = 8%

What’s considered a good conversation-to-call rate?

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d look at it like this:

• Below 3% → Poor: Very few conversations are progressing into genuine opportunities.

• 3–5% → Okay: You’re booking calls, but there’s probably room to improve.

• 5–10% → Good: A healthy percentage of conversations are progressing.

• 10%+ → Excellent: Your targeting, conversations, and qualification are working extremely well.

A warm audience will probably convert to calls at a much higher rate than completely cold prospects.

How you talk to prospects in the DMs will heavily influence how many calls you book.

If a prospect feels like all you’re trying to do is make a sale, they’ll sniff it out and become more resistant to getting on a call.

But if they feel like you’re genuinely trying to help, they’ll be far more open to continuing the conversation.

This is why I’ll talk to the prospect until I uncover a problem I can help them solve.

Then I’ll ask permission to send them a Google Doc to help with the problem they told me they have.

The doc includes everything they need to do to solve their problem.

If they find it useful, have questions, or want to go deeper, then I’ll suggest jumping on a quick call.

So the call becomes the natural next step in the conversation rather than something I’m trying to force them into.

That said, if your conversation-to-call rate is low, there are several things I’d investigate:

1. You’re having conversations without uncovering problems.

2. You’re talking to people who don’t need what you sell.

3. You’re pitching before earning permission.

4. You’re missing buying signals.

5. You’re suggesting calls without first demonstrating any value.

6. You’re spending too much time talking to unqualified prospects.

So look at what happens inside the conversations you’re having.

• Are you uncovering genuine problems?

• Are you demonstrating enough value?

• Are you recognizing when somebody wants more help?

Because if people are responding but nobody wants to get on a call, the problem is probably what happens after they respond.

4. Follow-up-to-call rate

As the popular sales maxim goes, “The fortune is in the follow-up.”

And that’s because not every prospect will book a call during your first conversation.

Sometimes, they’ll just disappear.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t interested.

People:

• Get busy.

• Forget to respond.

• Don’t consume the resource you sent them.

• Read your message and tell themselves they’ll reply later.

…then life happens.

So you’ve got to follow up.

But I track this metric because I want to understand how effective my follow-up is.

It measures how many of my follow-ups eventually result in a booked call.

The formula is:

Calls booked from follow-ups ÷ Follow-ups sent × 100

So if you follow up with 50 prospects and 5 eventually book a call:

5 ÷ 50 × 100 = 10%

What’s considered a good follow-up-to-call rate?

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d look at it like this:

• Below 3% → Poor: Your follow-ups probably aren’t recovering many opportunities.

• 3–5% → Okay: Some prospects are reengaging, but there’s room to improve.

• 5–10% → Good: Your follow-ups are consistently recovering opportunities.

• 10%+ → Excellent: A strong percentage of prospects are turning into calls after initially going quiet.

Following up with warm prospects who already expressed interest should naturally perform better than following up with completely cold leads.

But the most important point is you shouldn’t interpret silence as rejection.

I’ve had people apologize for not responding after I followed up, and it led to a call.

But if your follow-up-to-call rate is consistently low, I’d investigate:

• Whether you’re following up with the right prospects.

• How long you wait before following up.

• Whether your message gives them a reason to respond.

• How many times you follow up before moving on.

  Want more breakdowns on building and scaling a ghostwriting business?

5. Discovery call show rate

I like to use a two-step sales process because it gives me another opportunity to build trust before presenting my services.

So my objective in this call isn’t to make a sale.

I just go deeper into showing the prospect:

• What needs to be done.

• What order I’d do it in.

• Why I do it in this order.

But there’s a catch…

Prospects will only show up to this call if they believe they’ll get value from it.

Hence why I track my discovery call show rate.

It measures the percentage of people who book a discovery call and actually attend.

The formula is:

Discovery calls attended ÷ Discovery calls booked × 100

So if 10 prospects book a discovery call and 8 show up:

8 ÷ 10 × 100 = 80%

What’s considered a good discovery call show rate?

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d look at it like this:

• Below 60% → Poor: Too many prospects are disappearing before the call.

• 60–70% → Okay: Most are showing up, but you’re still losing a significant number.

• 70–85% → Good: A healthy percentage of booked prospects are attending.

• 85%+ → Excellent: Very few prospects are dropping out before the call.

If you’re booking plenty of discovery calls and hardly anyone shows up, something is probably breaking down before the call.

Maybe:

• You’re asking for calls too quickly.

• You haven’t demonstrated enough value beforehand.

• The prospect doesn’t understand why the call is worth their time.

• You’re booking calls with poorly qualified prospects.

• Too much time passes between booking and the call.

This is another reason I like sending the free resource before suggesting a call…

By the time I ask them to speak, I’ve already given them something useful, they’ve consumed it, and now they want to go deeper.

So the call is more of a continuation of the value.

If they feel like it’s a sales ploy, they’ll pull out.

So if your discovery call show rate is low, figure out why the people who already booked don’t think the call is worth showing up for.

Follow up!

6. Discovery-call-to-consultation rate

After adding value by telling the prospect what to do on the discovery call, I let them know I can help with that.

So I’ll say something along the lines of:

“By the way, this is something I can help you implement. I don’t have much time now to talk about it, but if you’re interested, we can jump on another call and I’ll explain how I’d help.”

And then they tell me whether they’re interested.

I deliberately separate the two calls…

By telling them the next conversation is about my service, they know I’m going to sell to them.

There’s no bait and switch.

If they agree to the consultation, they’ve given me permission to have that conversation.

And if I’ve added enough value throughout the process, they're highly likely to say “Yes.”

This is why the next metric I track is my discovery-call-to-consultation rate.

It measures the percentage of discovery calls that turn into consultations.

The formula is:

Consultations booked ÷ Discovery calls attended × 100

So if I have 10 discovery calls and 4 prospects agree to a consultation:

4 ÷ 10 × 100 = 40%

What’s considered a good discovery-call-to-consultation rate?

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d look at it like this:

• Below 20% → Poor: Very few discovery calls are becoming genuine sales opportunities.

• 20–30% → Okay: Some prospects are progressing, but there’s room to investigate.

• 30–50% → Good: A healthy percentage of qualified prospects want to explore working together.

• 50%+ → Excellent: Your discovery process is consistently producing strong sales opportunities.

Again… your rate will depend heavily on how qualified your prospects are before they get on the first call.

So if plenty of prospects attend your discovery calls but hardly anyone wants a consultation afterward, they probably don’t believe you can help them.

And this may be because:

• You’re getting the wrong people onto calls.

• You aren’t diagnosing their problem properly.

• They don’t see enough value in solving it.

• There’s no urgency to act.

• Your service isn’t positioned as the logical solution.

• They simply aren’t a good fit.

7. Consultation show rate

The next metric I track is consultation show rate.

This measures the percentage of prospects who book a consultation and actually show up.

The formula is:

Consultations attended ÷ Consultations booked × 100

So if 8 prospects book a consultation and 7 attend:

7 ÷ 8 × 100 = 87.50%

What’s considered a good consultation show rate?

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d look at it like this:

• Below 70% → Poor: You’re losing too many highly qualified prospects before the sales conversation.

• 70–80% → Okay: Most prospects are attending, but there’s room to improve.

• 80–90% → Good: The vast majority of prospects are showing up.

• 90%+ → Excellent: Almost everyone who books is making it to the consultation.

I pay particular attention to this metric because by this point, the prospect has:

• Spoken to me in the DMs.

• Received free consulting.

• Attended a discovery call.

• Learned what solving their problem involves.

• Agreed to another call specifically to hear how I can help them.

So if someone willingly books that second call and shows up, I can safely assume they have serious buying intent.

This is a hot lead.

It’s also why a low consultation show rate would concern me much more than a low discovery call show rate.

Something has changed between the two calls…

Maybe:

• Too much time has passed between them.

• The prospect isn’t as committed to solving the problem as you thought.

• You haven’t made it clear what the consultation is for.

• You don’t create enough urgency to continue.

• Something during the discovery call created doubt.

If plenty of prospects book consultations but don’t show up, the problem isn’t generating more leads.

Investigate why they didn’t show up.

This will tell you what’s breaking down in your pipeline.

8. Client conversion rate

Finally, we get to the metric everyone cares about…

How many consultations turn into paying clients?

This is your client conversion rate.

The formula is:

Clients won ÷ Consultations attended × 100

So if you hold 7 consultations and close 1 client:

1 ÷ 7 × 100 = 14.29%

What’s considered a good client conversion rate?

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d look at it like this:

• Below 10% → Poor: Your sales process probably needs work.

• 10–20% → Okay: You’re closing clients, but there’s plenty of room to improve.

• 20–30% → Good: You’re converting a healthy percentage of qualified prospects.

• 30%+ → Excellent: Your sales process is converting strongly.

By this point, I’m less willing to blame lead generation if someone isn’t buying.

Think about everything that has happened before the consultation.

The prospect has:

• Engaged in a conversation.

• Told you about a problem.

• Consumed your free consulting.

• Booked and attended a discovery call.

• Seen what solving their problem involves.

• Agreed to another call specifically to hear about your service.

• Actually showed up.

This person has buying intent.

And when people genuinely want something, they’ll usually find a way to get it.

I’ve seen people who are struggling financially take out financing to buy the latest iPhone.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean every qualified prospect can or should stretch themselves financially to buy your service.

But if qualified prospects consistently reach the end of your sales process and don’t buy, it’s a good time to look at your sales skills.

Something about your ability to make the sale needs work.

Maybe it’s how you communicate the value, present your offer, handle objections, or justify the investment.

But this is the beauty of tracking the entire process….

You can identify exactly which number needs to improve to get more clients.

Final thoughts

Remember the prospect I mentioned at the beginning?

They were convinced they sucked at sales.

But they didn’t know:

• How many conversations they were starting.

• How many people were responding.

• How many calls they were booking.

• How many prospects were showing up.

• How many consultations were turning into clients.

So in reality, they had no idea whether sales was the problem.

They were just guessing based on how they felt.

This is the worst way to run a business because you can’t fix a problem if you don’t know where it is.

So before deciding you suck at sales, outreach, or getting clients…

Track the numbers and analyze them.

They’ll usually tell you where to look.

Thanks for reading!

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LinkedIn has helped me generate over $15M in sales pipeline for clients.

For one particular client, I built a $1.1M sales pipeline in just 24 hours.

And it’s simply because I know:

• What types of content do well.

• What posts make people raise their hand.

The first is helpful when building your content strategy.

But it doesn’t specifically narrow in on the p…

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I publish a lot of content every week.

This includes:

• Emails.

• LinkedIn posts.

• Substack Notes.

• Substack articles.

• Content for all of my clients.

But I don’t remember the last time I ran out of ideas for what to post.

To caveat that…

I’d be lying if I said that was always the case.

When I first started writing in 2020, I practically had no system.

This is probably why I ended up losing my hair a year later…

I’d wake up, see what was trending, spend some time researching it, then write something about it.

It worked sometimes…
Quite a few of my articles went viral.

But other times, I’d spend hours scrolling around looking for something that inspired me.

And when nothing did?

I had the perfect excuse not to publish that day.

This process was draining.

Mainly because my ability to stay consistent depended on me feeling creative every single day.

I knew this approach would never scale.

Especially as I started publishing more content and eventually started creating content for clients too.

So I created a system…

It tells me:

• Exactly what is being published.

• Where it’s being published.

• When it’s going live.

• What I need to work on next.

And in this article, I’m going to share it with you.

This is the exact system I use to stay consistent on LinkedIn and Substack while managing content for multiple ghostwriting clients.

My publishing targets

As Stephen Covey famously said, “All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things."

This principle applies to your content.

Before you build a content publishing system, you need to know what it's supposed to produce (a.k.a. the mental/first creation).

For me, the minimum is:

• 3 emails per week

• 7 LinkedIn posts per week

• 28 Substack Notes per week

• 2 Substack articles per week (1 free + 1 paid)

That’s 40 pieces of content every week.

… and this is just for me.

It doesn’t include any of the content I create and manage for my ghostwriting clients.

So now you see why I need a content publishing system…

There’s no way I could manage that volume if I woke up every morning wondering what to post.

The other reason you need to know what your outputs are is that you can’t build a publishing system if you haven’t defined what “consistent” means for YOU.

For me, that means 40 pieces per week.
For you, it might mean 5.

The number itself isn’t so important.

What matters more is that you know it.

So get clear on how much content you need to create each week.

Once you have a number, you can work backward to figure out how you’ll manage the load.

TL;DR: Your publishing target gives the rest of your system something to work toward.

Defining the category & content pillars

If you’re going to create a lot of content, you need to know what you’re going to talk about.

This is where you need a category and content pillars…

A category is simply a broad subject you want to become known for talking about.

The central topic of my content is ghostwriting.

But “ghostwriting” is far too broad to guide everything I publish, so I break the category into four content pillars:

• Business scaling: How to build a ghostwriting business that can grow beyond you.

• Case studies: Breakdowns of things I’ve done, results I’ve generated, mistakes I’ve made, and lessons from working with clients.

• Offer & positioning: How to package your skills, choose who you serve, position yourself, price your services, and attract better clients.

• Writing development: How to become a better writer and create better content for yourself and your clients.

My pillars have different names across LinkedIn and Substack because I created my LinkedIn strategy first and never bothered updating them.

But pretty much everything I create falls into one of these four buckets.

This gives me boundaries for what I create.

My idea capture system

Now we know HOW MUCH content I need to publish and WHAT I’m going to talk about.

The next question is, “Where the hell do I get all the ideas from?”

My answer depends on the platform.

LinkedIn

My idea capture system for LinkedIn is pretty weird…

I save other people’s posts.

That’s it.

Whenever I see a post that:

• Says something I want to weigh in on.

• Makes an argument I agree or disagree with.

• Covers a topic I could approach differently.

• Uses a format I want to recreate with my own ideas.

…I save it.

Then when it’s time to write my LinkedIn content, I open my saved posts and start working through them.

I guess you can say I use other people’s posts as a prompt for what I want to say.

This is pretty effective because it lets other people validate formats and ideas before I post.

Substack

Most of my articles come from two places:

1. Conversations I’m having with prospects.

2. Wins I’ve generated for myself or my clients.

Prospect conversations tell me what people in my target market are struggling with.

If I keep hearing the same question or problem, there’s probably an article in it.

Content on wins gives me proof.

Whenever I spot one of these ideas, I add it to my Notion database.

The harder part of this process is deciding whether an article should be paid or free.

At the moment, I’m using this simple rule of thumb:

WHAT to do = free content

HOW to do it = paid content

And that’s pretty much it.

I’m not coming up with 40 completely new ideas every week.

Most of the other content I publish is derived from these core ideas.

This is important because creating 40 pieces of content per week is insane if you assume every piece needs an original idea.

And this brings me to the next part of my publishing system…

The content publishing strategy

Now we get to the part where everything starts working together…

I started publishing consistently on LinkedIn before Substack, so my LinkedIn system is much more developed.

I publish 7 LinkedIn posts per week, but I don’t decide what goes out each day randomly.

Every day has a job:

• Monday → Education / MoFu: Teach something related to the previous Sunday’s free Substack article.

• Tuesday → Education / BoFu: Teach something related to Wednesday’s upcoming paid Substack article and promote it in the P.S.

• Wednesday → Story / ToFu

• Thursday → Education / ToFu or MoFu

• Friday → Story / ToFu

• Saturday → Education / MoFu: Teach something from a random Substack article.

• Sunday → Story / ToFu

This does two things…

First, it makes sure I’m creating content for people at different stages of my funnel.

My stories reach and connect with a broader audience.

My educational content demonstrates my expertise and helps nurture people who already know me.

And my bottom-of-funnel content gives people an opportunity to go deeper with my paid content.

Second, I never have to decide what type of LinkedIn post I should publish that day.

If it’s Wednesday, I know I need a story.

If it’s Monday, I know I’m educating people using something from the Substack article I published the day before.

This removes another decision from my content operation.

How LinkedIn feeds Substack

Remember earlier when I said I publish 28 Substack Notes per week?

I’m not coming up with 28 completely new ideas.

For every LinkedIn post I write, I create three additional Notes based on the same idea.

Then I publish the original LinkedIn post as a Substack Note too.

So:

1 LinkedIn post → 4 Substack Notes

Do that seven times:

7 LinkedIn posts → 28 Substack Notes

But this relationship also works in the opposite direction.

How Substack feeds LinkedIn

I publish two long-form Substack articles every week:

• Wednesday → Paid article

• Sunday → Free article

Those articles become source material for my LinkedIn content.

My Monday LinkedIn post is based on the free article that went live the previous day.

This gives me another chance to promote the article after it's published.

Then on Tuesday, I publish educational content related to the paid article coming out on Wednesday.

The post gives people something valuable on its own, then I’ll casually mention the upcoming paid article in the P.S.

Essentially, the article is simply where readers can go deeper.

And LinkedIn feeds my emails

There’s one final loop…

Remember the three emails I publish every week?

I don’t create those from scratch either.

I look at my LinkedIn content from the previous week and identify the three posts that performed best.

Those become the basis for the following week’s emails.

Put all of that together, and my publishing system looks like this:

Here’s how the system feeds itself:

Substack article → LinkedIn post → Substack Notes → Email

But this isn’t rigid.

Sometimes an idea can start in the middle or at the end.

For example, let’s say a Substack Note gets more attention than anticipated…

I would create a LinkedIn post that dives deeper into the idea, or an article that expands on it.

The point is, every piece of content has the potential to create another piece of content.

This is how I publish 40 pieces every week without needing 40 completely different ideas.

I just take a smaller number of ideas and distribute them across different formats and platforms.

And since every format has a predefined role in the system, I don’t have to figure out what to publish from scratch every day.

I just keep the system fed with good ideas.

Tip: Batch work one week in advance

One final thing makes this entire system much easier to manage…

I batch everything.

I don’t write a LinkedIn post, switch to a Substack article, jump into client work, then come back to another LinkedIn post.

This would drive me insane (and it did when I used to do it).

Instead, I group similar tasks together and work on them in dedicated blocks.

My current writing schedule looks like this:

• Monday + Tuesday (9 am–12 pm): Write my Substack articles.

• Wednesday–Friday (9 am–12 pm): Write LinkedIn posts for myself and all of my clients.

… and I’m always working one week ahead.

This gives me breathing room if something unexpected happens.

It also gives me enough time to spot patterns in how my content performs and adapt my strategy before the next batch goes out.

I’m rarely scrambling to finish something hours before it needs to go live.

But the biggest benefit of batching is focus…

Every time you switch between different types of work, you have to mentally reload the context required to do that task.

Writing a long-form Substack article requires a different headspace from writing a short LinkedIn post.

And writing for myself requires a different voice and context from writing for a client.

So instead of constantly switching gears, I stay in one mode for several hours at a time.

This also makes my workload predictable.

TL;DR: Batch similar work together

And work far enough ahead that one bad day doesn’t derail your entire publishing schedule.

But not so far ahead that you can’t adapt quickly to changes on various platforms.

Final thoughts

Consistency isn’t always a discipline problem.

… and working harder isn’t always a solution to being more consistent.

Sometimes, you just need a system.

It doesn’t need to be complicated, as long as it informs you of:

• WHAT you need to create.

• WHERE your ideas come from.

• WHEN everything needs to be created and published.

• HOW your content moves through the system.

And most importantly… it allows you to achieve a desired outcome.

For me, this outcome is publishing at least 40 pieces of content every week while managing content for multiple ghostwriting clients.

For you, it might only be five pieces.

The number doesn’t matter.

What matters is you have a system that can produce your desired outcome consistently, without relying on you waking up inspired every morning.

… because there will be many days when you don’t.

Thanks for reading!

One of my ghostwriting clients has been paying me $5,000 (and sometimes more) for the past 15 months.

The 2020-2024 version of me would’ve scoffed at this statement.

Back then, I was a generic content writer making $2,000-$3,000/month.

The only ways I believed I could make more money were to:

• Become a better writer.

• Find more clients.

• Work longer hours.

My 2025 financial year dispelled this whole belief.

I repackaged my offer and built a 6-figure business in just 8 months.

But creating the offer was still only half the battle…

An offer sitting in a Google Doc doesn’t make you any money.

Someone has to buy it.

And getting that first person to hand you thousands of dollars can feel like the hardest part when you don’t have:

• A huge reputation.

• Endless testimonials.

• A sophisticated sales system.

• People constantly asking to work with you.

I didn’t have any of that.

So how did I do it?

Rather, how would I do it if I had to start all over again?

Here’s exactly what I’d do…

1. Start with an offer worth $5,000

Before you start looking for clients, you need something worth selling.

In my previous article, I broke down how I built my ghostwriting offer using four components.

WHO → WHAT → HOW → INVESTMENT

In simple terms:

• WHO do you help?

• WHAT do they want?

• HOW will you help them get it?

• WHAT do they need to invest?

I won’t repeat the entire framework here.

But there’s one thing you need to understand before trying to land a $5,000 client…

You’re not trying to convince someone your writing is worth $5,000.

You’re looking for someone with a problem where your writing can contribute to an outcome worth considerably more than $5,000 to them.

In other words, your job is simply to supply demand.

If someone already wants to build their authority, generate more opportunities, and spend less time creating content, you don’t need to convince them those things are valuable.

You just need to demonstrate that your offer is a viable way to get them there.

This is why choosing the right prospect matters so much.

Trying to sell a $5,000 ghostwriting offer to someone who:

• Doesn’t care about building an audience.

• Has nothing valuable to sell.

• Loves writing their own content.

• Has plenty of time to do it.

• Can’t afford $5,000/month.

…is going to be an uphill battle, no matter how good you are at sales.

Trying to manufacture demand that doesn’t exist is friggin’ hard.

It’s much easier to find someone who already has the problem, desire, and money required for the exchange to make sense.

So find those people.

2. Send 50 LinkedIn connections per day

Now you need to get in front of people who could buy your offer.

I’d do most of this on LinkedIn.

And if I were starting from scratch, I’d aim to send 50 connection requests to ideal customers every day and start around 50 conversations.

There are two groups of people I’d target:

• Warm leads

• Cold leads

Warm leads are people who have already interacted with you in some way.

Maybe they:

• Liked or commented on your content.

• Followed you.

• Viewed your profile.

• Sent you a connection request.

• Messaged you.

These are the easiest people to start with because there’s already some familiarity.

But this assumes you’re creating content and have an optimized profile, which I highly encourage.

I’d regularly go through these people and check whether they match the ICP I defined earlier.

If they do, connect with them.

Don’t overcomplicate the message either…

Something as simple as:

“Hey [name], saw you [interaction] and you’re a [ICP reference], so thought I’d connect. How’s [ROLE] going?”

…is enough.

You’re just opening the door.

If you don’t already have a large audience, you’ll probably run out of warm leads pretty quickly, so it’s a good idea to supplement your warm outreach with cold outreach.

Cold outreach is reaching out to people who match your ICP but haven’t interacted with you before.

For this, I’d use LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Take the ICP you created in the previous article and turn it into filters for things like:

• Job title.

• Industry.

• Company size.

• Geography.

• Seniority.

• Keywords.

If you don’t know which filters to use, give your ICP to ChatGPT and ask it to translate it into a Sales Navigator search.

Then start working through the results.

But pay attention to their prior activity on the platform because if they’re not active, there’s a high chance they won’t connect with you.

I learned this the hard way when I ran outreach for my ghostwriting clients.

We spent months connecting with people who hadn’t been active on the platform for ages, so most of our requests went unanswered.

So make sure the people you’re trying to connect with are active on the platform.

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Last year, I went from making $2,000-$3,000/month to $14,000+/month.

And I didn’t have to:

• Learn any new skills.

• Work longer hours.

• Take on more clients.

I simply made my offer stupidly obvious to my ideal customer…

… and priced it accordingly (this is important).

These little tweaks changed my life.

And in this article, I’ll show you how you could change yours too.

A bit about me

For the first four years of working for myself, I struggled to get things off the ground.

I was a generic content writer, writing blog posts for pretty much anyone who asked, as long as it involved AI.

Since I didn’t make much money from any individual project, the only way I knew to make more money was to do more work.

It sucked!

At one point, I worked 60+ hours a week to just about survive.

I knew if I wanted my business to reach the heights I had envisioned for it, something had to change.

And in 2025, the penny finally dropped…

People don’t pay for skills.
They pay for what they believe will get them what they want.

In other words, nobody wakes up thinking, “I really need 4 blog posts this week.”

They envision an outcome.
Then they look for vehicles that can help them get there.

The more responsibility you take for getting them from where they are to where they want to be, the more valuable your offer becomes.

And the more you can charge.

This realization changed my business.

I repackaged my offer and made $100,000 in 8 months.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for how I built my offer…

1. Pick ONE ideal customer

When you’re just getting started, I strongly recommend going narrow.

This feels counterintuitive because you’re technically reducing the number of people who can buy from you.

But it’s the smartest thing you can do because:

1. It’s easier to become known for solving one problem extremely well for one specific type of person.

2. When you’re known for solving one problem, people associate you with it and come to you for help.

3. It’s easier to find people you can help.

4. You reduce the competition (and don’t have to compete with more experienced/credible people).

5. Your offer becomes easier to build because you can design it around one type of person’s problems.

Over time, your target customer will expand (if you want it to) as you become more known.

But it’s always best to start with someone specific.

So the most obvious question becomes “How do I choose?”

My best suggestion is to start with an industry you already know well.

This gives you an advantage over generic writers and makes your ideal customer more confident you can write about that industry's technicalities.

For example, before I started ghostwriting, I already had years of AI experience, so I wasn’t starting from scratch.

But defining the industry isn't enough because there are different types of people within it.

This is why you must go deeper on WHO your offer is for.

I used to write for AI and data companies that helped people upskill in those areas, but I realized it made more sense to shift my writing from companies to individuals.

Why?

Because people generally prefer following people over company pages.

This means an individual can pull in more traffic with their content than a company can, then divert those eyes to the company's offerings.

Who’s the best person in the company to do this for?

The founder.

Why?

• The founder controls the company's finances

• The founder is incentivized to grow the company (they will make more money)

• The founder’s reputation can directly influence the company’s reputation, which makes building their audience commercially valuable.

Getting clear on this defines the most important part of your offering…

Who you help.

So your headline after doing this would look something like this:

I help [X].

We’ll add what you help them do later.

For now, we just need to know exactly who we’re talking about.

2. Identify your ideal customers’ reasons to buy

Now you know WHO you want to help.

The next step is understanding WHY they will be willing to pay.

Remember, an offer is simply an exchange of value.

Your customer gives you money.

You give them something they believe is worth more than the money they gave you.

If you don’t understand why they would make that exchange, you’ll most likely run into two problems:

1. You’ll create an offer based on an assumption that doesn’t appeal to your ideal customer.

2. You’ll lack confidence when it comes time to sell it.

So this step is crucial.

At a high level, the reason we buy things is simple…

We believe the thing we pay for solves a problem for us.

This problem can be anything:

• Effieciency

• Boredom

• Hunger

• etc.

People who pay for ghostwriters often do so for two reasons:

1. They don’t have time to write themselves but want to achieve a specific objective through writing.

2. They don’t know how to write themselves and have no desire to learn, but want to achieve a specific objective through writing.

Trying to sell your ghostwriting offer to someone who doesn’t fall into one of these two categories will be damn near impossible.

And assuming the specific objective your ideal customer wants to achieve through writing will weaken your offer's stickiness.

So you must dig deeper to discover WHAT the specific outcome your ideal customer wants to achieve through their writing.

You can form hypotheses on this based on WHO you’re serving.

For example, if you serve founders of AI education companies, they'll likely want leads.

But lead generation can’t be the only thing they want, since they could have invested their money in other lead-generation mechanisms, such as paid ads.

So it’s safe to assume they want leads through thought leadership.

In other words, they want to be seen as a reputable figure in their area of expertise so it attracts people to buy from their business.

Understanding this will make it much easier to find ideal customers because you can look for signals.

For instance, if you see someone who fits your ideal customer profile but seems to have everything figured out on the surface based on their content, they would most likely hire you because they want to save time.

And if you meet someone who fits your ideal customer profile but their content sucks, they would most likely hire you to help them establish themselves as a thought leader in their area of expertise so they can generate leads.

But all of this is still an assumption!

You still need to test these hypotheses in the market.

But for now, you have enough to keep building.

You know WHO you help (e.g., founders of AI education companies).

And you have a hypothesis for WHAT they want help with (e.g., building authority that attracts potential customers to their business).

Now you’re in a much better position to make them an offer in exchange for what you want.

3. Define the vehicle

You’ve chosen WHO you help and WHAT they want.

The next logical step is to define HOW you’ll help them get it.

We already know the vehicle is ghostwriting if you’re reading this article.

But you could ghostwrite in dozens of ways.

For example:

• X posts.

• Whitepapers.

• Email courses.

• Lead magnets.

• LinkedIn posts.

• Substack articles.

• Email newsletters.

• Instagram content.

• Long-form articles.

Truth be told…

Your customer cares far more about getting the outcome than the specific deliverables you use to get them there.

This is why you don’t need to go overboard with bundling a bunch of stuff in here to make it seem like your customer is going to receive a ton of things.

I made this mistake.

I said I would ghostwrite for my client, but I also included outbound connection requests and outreach, which increased my output and limited my capacity.

After adding two extra clients, I was overstretched because I’d accidentally built an offer that required far too much of my time to fulfill.

You’ve just got to focus on the minimum requirements to help the client achieve what they want.

So let’s say you’re doing LinkedIn ghostwriting…

HOW you help your ideal customer achieve their desired outcome may include:

• Profile optimization

• Two 60-minute calls for idea extraction

• Content strategy building

• 20 LinkedIn posts

• 60 minutes of daily engagement (5x p/w)

And that’s all.

Remember, every additional deliverable requires additional time, which reduces the number of clients you can serve and increases the cost of fulfilling your offer.

So keep it simple.

If removing a deliverable wouldn’t significantly reduce your customers’ chances of achieving the outcome, then don’t add it.

4. Set the investment

Now you know:

• WHO you help.

• WHAT they want.

• HOW you’ll help them get it.

The next step is deciding what they’ll have to give you in exchange.

Remember, an offer is an exchange of value.

Your ideal customer gives you what you want, and you give them something they believe is worth more than what they gave you.

That last part is important…

If you charge someone $5,000 and they believe your offer is only worth $3,000, buying from you makes no sense.

But if they believe paying you $5,000 could create $20,000 worth of value for them, the decision becomes much easier.

This is why I don’t recommend pricing your ghostwriting based purely on:

• Number of posts.

• Word count.

• Hours worked.

• What other ghostwriters charge.

• How long each deliverable takes you.

Those things matter to you because they determine whether the service is profitable to fulfill.

But your customer is thinking about the other side of the equation: “Is what I get worth what I have to give up?”

And “value” doesn’t necessarily mean direct revenue.

Maybe your ghostwriting helps them:

• Save 10 hours every week.

• Generate qualified leads.

• Build authority in their industry.

• Grow an audience they can sell to repeatedly.

• Create opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

• Avoid spending years learning how to write themselves.

The more valuable the outcome is to your ideal customer, the more room you have to charge for helping them achieve it.

And the faster you can help them get what they want, the more you can ask for.

But there’s a catch…

Your ideal customer determines whether your offer is worth it.

This is one reason choosing the right ideal customer matters so much.

Imagine you help someone generate five qualified leads per month.

If their average customer is worth $500, those leads have one level of potential value.

If their average customer is worth $50,000, those exact same five leads could be worth considerably more.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should go back and change your offer.

You just have to consider WHO you’re helping and what the problem is worth to them.

So here’s a rule of thumb I’d follow for defining your starting price:

1. Define your minimum hourly rate.

2. Break your offer into every task required to fulfill it.

3. Estimate how long each task will take you per month.

4. Multiply the total hours by your hourly rate.

5. Multiply that number by 3.

For example, let’s say your minimum hourly rate is $50.

And your offer requires:

• Profile optimization: 2 hours

• Idea extraction: 2 hours

• Content strategy: 2 hours

• Ghostwriting: 10 hours

• Engagement: 20 hours

That’s 36 hours of work (which you will fulfill across 4 weeks).

36 × $50 = $1,800.
$1,800 × 3 = $5,400 → final price

Why multiply it by three?

Because you’re not an employee getting paid for every hour you work.

The additional margin needs to account for things like:

• Admin.

• Revisions.

• Software.

• Sales.

• Client communication.

• Time between clients.

• Hiring other people (eventually).

It also gives you room to make a profit.

If you charge your hourly rate multiplied by the hours required to fulfill the service, you’ve simply created a job for yourself.

But this calculation only gives you a pricing floor.

You still need to compare that number against the value of the outcome to your ideal customer.

If your calculation says you need to charge $5,400, but your ideal customer would never pay more than $2,000 to solve the problem, you probably have an offer, market, or ideal customer problem.

On the other hand, if solving the problem could reasonably be worth tens of thousands of dollars to them, $5,400 may make perfect sense.

Your goal is to find the point where:

The investment is high enough to make the service profitable for you, but low enough relative to the perceived value that buying feels like an obvious exchange for them.

Final thoughts

I used to think making more money as a writer meant becoming better at writing.

But that’s not true.

My Medium blog impressions and followers were skyrocketing, yet I was still struggling to make ends meet.

It got so bad that I had to move to my parents retirement home in Ghana to give my business a chance at survival.

Eventually, I realized writing ability is only one part of the equation.

The other part is how you pacakge and sell your writing ability.

This is why two ghostwriters with the same skills can have vastly different earnings…

One may simply have attached their writing to a more valuable problem for a more valuable customer.

And this is the foundations of an offer that can’t be refused.

You’ve got to give someone what they want and make them feel like what they have to invest to get it is a no-brainer in order to get what you want.

It’s an exchange of value.

So don’t obsess over stuffing lots of deliverables into your package.

Get obsessed with understanding the person on the other side of the transaction.

Know exactly who they are.
Understand what they want.
Figure out the simplest way you can help them get it.
Then price it so the exchange makes sense for both of you.

Your first attempt probably won’t be perfect.

That’s why you take it to the market, listen to what people tell you, and keep refining it.

That’s exactly what I did.

And eventually, the same writing skills that struggled to make me $2,000-$3,000/month helped me build a six-figure business in just 8 months.

Thanks for reading!

At the end of 2024, I was tired of being a generic content writer.

I worked 60+ hours most weeks, yet still struggled to make enough money to make ends meet.

Something needed to change.

So I narrowed my focus and created a ghostwriting offer specifically for founders of companies that trained people about AI.

Now I just needed someone to buy it.

Fortunately, I already knew a few people who would be a great fit.

A couple of years earlier, I worked as a machine learning engineer, which helped me rub shoulders with some super smart people.

During that time, I met someone who would eventually become my first ghostwriting client.

At the start of 2023, he reached out for advice on building his online presence.

I’d already spent years writing online by this point, so I gave him everything I knew.

We talked about content.
Positioning.
Building an audience.

We even built a project together that he wrote about and shared on Medium.

The post blew up.

It was his first taste of virality.

But after that engagement, we both went our separate ways.

Fast-forward to December 2024…
We crossed paths again.

By this time, his LinkedIn following had shot up to around 52,000 followers.

Clearly, he’d done pretty damn well without me.

But despite building an audience most people would kill for, he needed help taking things further.

And this time, instead of giving him advice for free…

He became my first ghostwriting client.

Over the following 21 months, we published hundreds of posts, experimented with different ideas, and learned a hell of a lot about growing an AI engineer’s personal brand on LinkedIn.

Today, he has more than 112,000 LinkedIn followers.

That’s over 60,000 additional followers since we started working together.

In the remainder of this article, I’ll break down exactly what we did, what worked, and what I’d do differently if I were starting again today.

The client and where we started

By the time we started working together, my client had already cracked LinkedIn growth.

But it came at a major cost…

Time.

Creating content was taking him up to 10-20 hours a week.

This meant he had less time to focus on building, which was what he loved.

Building also helped him stand out from other creators writing low-level, generic content at high frequency.

Most people were just paraphrasing what others were saying.

You could tell he knew what he was talking about.
He built and showed you how to draw your own conclusions.

This was a big reason he had grown so quickly.

After I gave him some advice on building his online presence in 2023, he went all in.

He:

• Created free courses to help machine learning engineers improve their skills.

• Shared what he was learning.

• Documented what he was building.

• Published content 7 days a week.

It worked.

By December 2024, he had around 52,000 LinkedIn followers, and his posts were regularly reaching large audiences.

So there wasn’t some broken content strategy for me to come in and fix.

If anything, that would’ve been stupid.

My job was to preserve what was already working while removing him from as much of the writing process as possible.

He wanted to get back to coding.

I wanted to take the responsibility of creating content off his plate without making the content worse.

Fortunately, we already had a lot of trust.
We’d known each other since my machine learning engineering days.
He’d experienced my writing firsthand.

We’d built something together.

So unlike most new client engagements, I didn’t have to spend much time proving anything.

The bigger challenge was extracting the complex AI concepts from him and explaining them in a way that’s consumable and exciting for his audience.

The strategy behind 60,000+ new followers

This client is different from anyone else I’ve ghostwritten for.

He understood his audience and knew the subjects he wanted to talk about.

So he basically wanted me to focus on execution.

He would bring the expertise and ideas.
I helped package them into content people wanted to consume.

So this engagement relied more heavily on my ability to write than any other client I’ve worked with.

That being said, we still needed some structure around what we were doing.

Here’s what that looked like…

1/ We clarified the objective

The main reason he reached out to me was to save time.

But to write good content for him, I needed to understand the outcome he wanted from his content.

And this turned out to be 5 things:

A) Build authority

A major part of this engagement was maintaining and expanding my client's perception with the wider public.

He hated the thought of being seen as a content creator because there was a big stigma in the AI space at the time that most of the people creating content couldn’t build an AI system.

So he wanted to be known as the guy who builds things and creates content about it.

In other words, his content needed to reinforce his expertise in building production-ready AI systems.

B) Build an engaged audience

The next most important objective was being seen as a guide.

My client’s content was targeted at:

• Practicing AI engineers

• Founders

• Project managers

• Tech leads

• Teams interested in building with AI

… and he wanted to be seen as their teacher.

Essentially, if someone got better at building AI systems because of his content, we wanted them to point back to him as someone who helped them.

C) Generate leads

When we met, my client only had a paid newsletter, but there was always an intention to build digital products in the long haul.

So we wanted to build a reliable audience of potential buyers for when a course was launched.

But my client was also interested in getting into consulting at the time, so we wanted to appeal to people looking for AI consultants.

D) Grow the wider ecosystem

LinkedIn was only one layer (and the largest) of his content ecosystem.

In 2024, he was already on Substack.

And he wanted to push some of the massive traffic he was getting on the platform towards his Substack newsletter.

E) Differentiate his content

Back then, everyone and their dog was making AI content.

But my client was adamant that he wanted his content to stand out through three levers:

• Depth

• Clarity

• Practicality

This made his content hard to replicate, since most people at the time focused only on clarity.

2/ We created a content calendar

Like I said earlier…

This client already knew what he wanted to talk about.

The issue was everything was in his head.

Typically, I would extract this information through interviews, but over time, I realized this wasn’t going to work for this client.

Our interviews usually turned into strategy sessions, so I barely had a chance to ask questions.

Instead, I created a space in his client dashboard where he could add ideas he wanted me to turn into content.

If an idea had a deadline for publication, he would mark it in the dashboard.

This system went through several iterations before we finally landed on something:

• I thought was effective for growing, nurturing, and converting his audience.

• He thought would keep his content on brand.

And it looked something like this:

• 3 top-of-funnel posts p/w to reach a larger audience.

• 3 middle-of-funnel posts p/w to educate and nurture his existing audience.

• 1 bottom-of-funnel post p/w to push the audience toward a paid product.

This gave us structure without taking control away from him.

He still had a huge influence over what we talked about.

I just made sure every piece of content had a job and fit into the bigger picture.

Read more

Most ghostwriters I see on LinkedIn fall into one of two camps:

1. They post constantly without a clear strategy.

2. They barely post because they don't know what to talk about.

I used to fall into the first camp.

I’d wake up, open my database of LinkedIn posts I’d saved from other creators, find something I liked, and rewrite it using one of my own stories.

And unsurprisingly, hardly anyone reached out wanting to work with me.

This leads me to rule number one of ghostwriting (and business as a whole)…

You can’t copy other people’s strategy without understanding why it worked.

You’ll forever be one or more steps behind the people you’re stealing from, which means you lose any chance at a competitive advantage.

Rule number two is to act with intent.

Every post you publish should have a reason for existing.

You should know exactly what you want the reader to think, feel, or do after consuming it.

Then there’s the other camp of ghostwriters. ..

Those who barely post because they don’t know what the hell to talk about.

And I get it.

Coming up with something interesting to say every day is difficult.

But you have to take care of your own garden if you want someone to trust you with theirs.

Fortunately, you don’t need a groundbreaking idea every time you post.

Most of my LinkedIn content falls into one of 7 categories:

1. Case studies

2. Category opinions

3. Actionable advice

4. Curation

5. What I did this week

6. Random ideas from content I’ve consumed

7. Vulnerable shares

Each serves a different purpose.

And together, they help potential clients understand:

• What you know

• How you think

• What you’ve done

• Who you are

So if you never know what to post - or you’re posting without knowing why - steal this framework instead.

Let’s start with the first…

1. Case Studies

Case studies work because they allow prospective clients to experience the result before they buy.

It works just like movies do…

Think back to the last movie you watched.
Mine was American Gangster.

For the duration of it, you’re immersed.

You can feel the main protagonist's emotions.

I remember shouting at my TV when I sensed the drive-by was about to happen to Frank Lucas.

A good case study has the same effect on readers.

They see someone experiencing a problem they recognize.

They follow their journey.

And when they see their desired outcome fulfilled by someone else, they think, “That could be me.”

This is the emotion you want to provoke.

But before I show you how to do it, let’s backtrack to where you can find case studies.

There are 3 main sources:

• Something you’ve done for yourself.

• Something you’ve done for a client.

• Something someone else has done that you can analyze.

If you’re just starting out, the first one matters most.

You must be your first case study because you’ll have far more conviction talking about something you’ve done.

Now, let’s get into the structure of a case study post…

1.1 Lead with the result

LinkedIn only gives you a small amount of space before hiding the rest of your post behind “...see more.”

So you need to give people enough context to care within those opening lines.

The best way I’ve found is to lead with the result.

Don’t make people wait until the end to find out what happened.

Use the outcome achieved as your hook.

For example:

I made my ghostwriting client $14,452 in 24 hours from one LinkedIn post.

Now they know exactly what happened.
But they don’t know how it happened.

That's what keeps them reading.

1.2 Show where they started

Next, paint a picture of how difficult circumstances were before the outcome.

• What wasn’t working?

• What was desired?

• What was at stake?

This is how we relate to prospective clients.

They are likely going through a similar issue, so when they see someone where they are, it gives them the most powerful substance a human can have…

Hope.

1.3 Explain the transformation

Now show them how you helped move the client from Point A to Point B.

Explain the key decisions and actions that made the transformation possible.

• What did you notice?

• What did you change?

• Why did you change it?

This is your opportunity to demonstrate expertise without ever having to say, “I’m an expert.”

You show them WHAT you did and WHY it worked.

Which naturally makes the ideal prospect curious about what you could do for them.

1.4. Show the transformation

Finally, show what changed because of the actions taken.

And don’t limit this to the headline metric.

What did the result do for the client?

Did they:

• Sell out their workshop?

• Generate more qualified leads?

• Free up their time?

• Build a more predictable pipeline?

This is where you bring the story full circle.

The prospect saw someone like them at Point A.
They watched you help them reach Point B.

And now they associate you with the bridge between the two.

They might not hire you immediately.

But you’ve given them a pretty damn good reason to remember you.

2. Category Opinions

I’m not a fan of Andrew Tate.

But we can still take a few marketing lessons from his online rise.

One of the most valuable lessons is the power of strong opinions.

Tate knew how to get people talking.

He would say something outlandish…

Some would agree.
Others would disagree.

And both sides went to great lengths to defend or discredit him.

All of this brought Tate more engagement and recognition.

That’s the power of opinions…
They give people something to react to.

The crazy thing is, we all have them.

But we don’t use them.

Why?

Because we don’t want to piss anyone off, so we water down what we really think to fit in.

Here’s the catch…

If you want to get attention, you don’t need everybody to agree with you.

As Tate showed us, disagreement can spread your ideas to people who agree with you.

So don’t be afraid to share your opinions.

Just follow this structure when you do:

2.1 State what you believe

Your opinion is the most interesting part of these posts, so start with it to grab attention.

For example:

“The dumbest thing a writer can do is write every day.”

This is attention-grabbing because it:

1. Goes against societal norms

2. Leaves enough room for people to wonder, “but why?”

The key here is to share things you genuinely believe.

Don’t manufacture a controversial opinion because you think it’ll get engagement.

Say what you actually think.

Then be prepared to defend it.

2.2 Explain why you believe it

Remember, we’re posting on LinkedIn to get people to buy from us.

And in order to achieve this, we must convince people:

• We know what we’re talking about

• We can get results for them

• We’re decent people

Reasoning shows people you’re capable of achieving all three.

… hence why you must justify your opinions.

This can be difficult for some because in everyday life, you don’t owe anyone an explanation for what you believe.

But we use these posts to show how we think.

So give people the reasoning behind the opinion.

2.3 Give them evidence

Evidence gives people grounds to believe your opinion.

Anyone can say:

“The dumbest thing a writer can do is write every day.”

But why should I believe you?

This is where you bring in:

• Personal experiences

• Client stories

• Experiments

• Examples

• Data

For example, maybe you tried writing every day, and your work quality dropped.

Showing what led you to that conclusion gives people a chance to relate (or dissociate).

This is what will make the right people reach out.

3. Actionable Advice

Whenever I need financial advice, I speak to my dad.

Whenever it’s something operational, like planning a trip, I speak to my mom.

Why?

If I asked my dad for operational advice, he would tell me to ask my mom.

And if I asked my mom for financial advice, she would tell me to send her the money.

The point is...

Context matters.

My dad has been a high earner for most of my life and has always handled the family finances.

My mom has always handled operational things.

Both are experts (to me) in their respective areas, so it makes sense to listen to them about that specific thing they’re good at.

How does this relate to you?

Well, you’re an expert at something and have your own opinions about how it should be done.

Sharing that knowledge in an actionable way will set you apart from people dishing out generic advice.

Because I want to learn how to make $1M from someone who has made $1M, not some random person dishing out second-hand advice from their pastor.

So share actionable advice about what you know.

But do it like this...

3.1 Use a listicle format

Readers love lists for two reasons:

1. They tell you exactly what you’re getting.

2. They’re easily consumable.

From a writer’s perspective, they’re great because they force you to break a broad idea into bite-sized steps.

You can structure the post around:

• Steps

• Mistakes

• Lessons

• Rules

• Questions

• Tools

• Examples

• Do’s and don’ts

The most important thing is that you give a clear promise, then organize the advice in a way that’s easy to follow.

3.2 Make it something people can implement within 24 hours

I have a simple rule for actionable advice:

The reader should be able to implement it within 24 hours.

Why?

Because the purpose of actionable advice is to help prospects get a quick win.

You want them to taste what it would be like to work with you.

This way, they will associate achieving their desired outcomes with you.

3.3 Use examples to make it extremely clear

Examples remove the need for interpretation.

For instance, let’s say I told you to “Write more specific hooks."

You might understand what I mean… but you still have to figure out what “more specific” looks like.

Now, let’s say I added this:

Don’t write hooks like → “Here's how I generate leads from LinkedIn.”

Instead, write hooks like → “I got 17 inbound leads from LinkedIn last month. Here are the 3 hooks responsible for most of them.”

Now you can see what I mean by “more specific.”

There’s no guessing.

So when you write actionable advice posts, remove as much ambiguity as possible.

Don’t just tell people what to do…
Show them what doing it well looks like.

4. Curation

Michael George bought 2M acres of land.
Put 55,000 chickens on it.
Turned the land into a profitable business.

Here’s the story…

There is no story.

I completely made it up.

But that’s not the point…

I want you to think about what those first three lines did:

• Did it make you feel like I’d done my research?

• Did that make you trust me a little more?

• Did my content seem more credible?

If you answered “yes” to even one, that’s my point.

When you consistently share relevant and valuable information from other sources, you demonstrate that you pay attention to your market.

Over time, people start seeing you as someone who finds interesting that is worth knowing.

And that’s valuable.

Your prospects are busy.

They don’t want to spend hours:

• Reading every report

• Listening to every podcast

• Following every expert

• Keeping up with everything happening in their industry

You can become their filter.

Find the useful stuff.
Remove the noise.
Give them what matters.

There are two main ways I like to curate content:

4.1 One-to-one curation

This is where you take one person, resource, idea, or piece of content and build a post around it.

For example, you could:

• Break down an interesting case study.

• Share something you learned from a podcast.

• Analyze somebody’s strategy.

• Explain an interesting piece of research.

• React to an idea from a book.

But don’t just repeat what they said.

Add your interpretation.

• Why did you find it interesting?

• What can your audience learn from it?

• What did they miss?

• How could somebody apply the idea?

The original source gives you the material.

Your perspective gives people a reason to follow you for it.

4.2 One-to-many curation

This is where you collect multiple useful resources, people, examples, or ideas into one post.

For example:

I spent 10 hours researching the best resources for learning AI.

Here are the 7 I’d actually recommend:

You’re doing work your reader doesn’t want to do themselves.

You find everything.
You filter it.
You organize it.

And you hand them the useful bits.

4.3 Decide whether you want to tag people

There’s one more thing to consider when curating people on LinkedIn…

Are you going to tag them?

I like to decide this before writing the post because it can influence how I approach it.

If you’re praising somebody’s work or sharing an analysis they’re likely to appreciate, tagging them can make sense.

They might respond.
They might reshare it.

And their audience might discover you as a result.

But if you’re criticizing their work or saying something they’re unlikely to want associated with them, you probably don’t need to drag them into the conversation.

Good curation is pretty simple…

Find useful information → filter out the crap → add your perspective.

5. What You Did in the Week

Being you is one of the coolest jobs on the planet.

Nobody knows what it’s like.

Leverage your position to your advantage by giving them “a week in the life” sample.

Note this isn’t only for other people’s benefit.

It’s a great strategy to keep yourself accountable.

As Pearson’s law states:

“That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”

So, kill two birds with one stone.

Do cool stuff, then talk about it.

People enjoy following people who are winning, so make an effort to show you’re improving.

If that means sharing some numbers, so be it — but you don’t have to.

6. Random Ideas From Content You’ve Consumed

Hopefully, you’re constantly learning and growing.

This is fertile ground for content.

Take something that’s been on your mind and connect it to something you know.

For example, this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about “how to put yourself out there as a business leader.”

My search led me to insights from the dating world, which gave me a completely different perspective on gaining visibility.

This connection is where the interesting content comes from.

Someone else might consume the exact same information and reach a completely different conclusion.

In other words, nobody else could write the post exactly like you.

And that’s what sets you apart.

7. Vulnerable Shares

One of the most powerful tools in storytelling is vulnerability.

It allows people to create connections with one another like almost nothing else.

Exposing your wounds helps people see beyond your flesh.

And it’s there where they can begin sharing a deeper emotional experience with you.

For example, I once shared a post about going bald at 25 and what it taught me about business.

Suddenly, a bunch of baldies started coming out and sharing their stories too.

We had a shared experience.
And shared experiences create connection.

Here are a few types of vulnerable content that tend to make a mark:

• Mistakes you’ve made → especially ones your audience might be making too.

• Costly lessons → things you wish you’d understood sooner.

• Stories that scared you → moments where you failed, struggled, took a risk, or didn’t know what would happen next.

The key is to be genuine if you want that emotional connection to happen.

Don’t make stuff up.

And don’t force vulnerability because you think it’ll perform well.

Reflect on things that have genuinely happened to you.

Figure out what they taught you.

Then share the story in a way that helps someone else make sense of their own experience.

People might hire you for what you know.

But they connect with you because of who you are.

Final thoughts

When I first started posting on LinkedIn, I didn’t have a content strategy.

I found posts I liked, rewrote them using my own stories, published them, and hoped someone would reach out.

This is why nobody reached out.

Every post you publish should have a reason for existing.

That’s not to say you should become a LinkedIn influence, but you do need the right people to understand:

• What you know.

• How you think.

• What you’ve done.

• Who you are.

• Why they should trust you with their content.

That’s what these 7 types of posts are designed to do.

You don’t even need to use all seven every week.

Just use them intentionally to build the perception you want prospective clients to have of you.

And remember….

Don’t create content just to attract an audience.

Create content that makes the right people want to work with you.

Thanks for reading!

When I first started ghostwriting, finding clients was probably the part I struggled with most.

I’d been freelancing for years, but almost every client I’d worked with up until that point had come through one of two ways:

1. Inbound - someone would find my content and reach out.

2. Referrals - someone I’d worked with would recommend me to somebody else.

I had no problem with this…
Until I decided I wanted to scale my business.

The problem with solely depending on organic lead generation is that you have no control over how quickly your business grows.

I couldn’t magically post something that would book me more calls.

So at times, it felt like I was hoping and wishing.

In 2025, I decided to do something about it…

I got serious about learning how to speak to people.

More specifically:

• Learning how to identify people I wanted to work with

• Get on their radar

• Start conversations

• Turning some of those conversations into clients.

LinkedIn became the obvious place to do it.

There are millions of professionals on the platform publicly telling you:

• What they do

• What they’re building

• What they care about

• What problems they’re trying to solve

So you don’t have to sit around hoping the right person discovers you (even though they will if you’re posting valuable information consistently).

Over the past year, I’ve developed a relatively simple process for identifying clients and getting them on calls.

It’s how I find potential high-ticket ghostwriting clients, build relationships with them, and create opportunities to work together without immediately jumping into their DMs with a sales pitch.

Here’s how it works…

Step #1: Create your Ideal Customer Profile

You can’t find what you can’t define.

This is partly what held me back for the first 4 years of my business…

I knew I was a content writer, and I mostly wrote AI content, but I couldn’t put a finger on who I worked with.

So when it came time to look for new prospects, I didn’t know who to reach out to.

A major reason I made $100,000 in 8 months with just 3 clients was that I clearly defined who I helped.

This is called an “Ideal Customer Profile,” or ICP for short.

It’s essentially a description of the type of person you want to work with.

At a minimum, you should know:

• Industry: What space do they operate in?

• Role: Are they a founder, CEO, consultant, executive, etc.?

• Type of business: What kind of company are they running?

• What they sell: What’s the actual product or service?

• Who they sell to: Who are they trying to reach?

• Buying habits: What makes them buy?

• Economics: Does investing in ghostwriting make financial sense for their business?

• Budget: Can they comfortably afford what you charge?

As a rule of thumb, you should be able to describe the type of person you’re looking for clearly enough that if I gave you 100 LinkedIn profiles, you could quickly tell me which ones you’d want to speak to.

That’s the whole point…

Once you know exactly who you’re looking for, finding them becomes considerably easier.

Step #2: Find people who match your ICP

Finding what you’re looking for is far easier once you know what it is.

There are a few ways to do this on LinkedIn, but they can all be separated into two groups:

1. Warm leads

2. Cold leads

A warm lead is someone who has already had some form of contact with you.

This could be through either:

• A like or comment on a post

• A view of your profile

• A follow

• A connection request

• A direct message

These are the easiest people to start with because they’ve already shown some level of interest.

I’ll regularly go through these people and check their profiles against my ICP.

If someone fits and we aren’t already connected, I’ll send them a connection request.

I don’t overcomplicate the message either.

Something like, “Hey [name], saw you [type of engagement], so thought I’d connect.”

That’s it.

Since they already know who you are, you don’t need to introduce yourself.

If they’ve sent me the connection request, I’ll do something slightly different…

I’ll look through their profile to try and find a natural way to break the ice and start a conversation.

From there, I can start figuring out what problem they have - more on this in the next section.

But you can’t just rely on warm leads because they can dry up quickly.

And depending on the size and quality of your audience, that might not be enough to consistently grow your business.

So this is where cold outreach comes in…

A cold lead is simply somebody who fits your ICP but has had no meaningful interaction with you before.

For these, I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Rather than guessing which filters to use, I give my ICP to ChatGPT and ask it to translate that description into something I can search for.

I’ll use those recommendations as a starting point and adjust the filters based on the results.

But pay close attention to whether these people are active on LinkedIn.

I learned this the hard way when I used to offer outreach as part of my client delivery…

For most of the accounts I managed (including mine), our connection acceptance rate (the number of people who accepted our connection request vs. how many requests were sent) was 30% or more.

But one client was sitting at around 10%.

It hurt my head for weeks trying to understand why his was so low since we used the exact same process across the board.

So I started digging through the prospects we’d been contacting, and eventually I realized most of them hadn’t been active on LinkedIn for months.

We weren’t necessarily sending terrible connection requests…
We were sending them to people who weren’t around to accept them.

So yeah… making sure people are active on the platform is super important.

Sales Navigator has a filter that shows only people who have been active within a certain timeframe… I highly recommend you use it.

Step #3: Identify the problem

An ICP fit doesn’t necessarily mean they want what you’re selling.

So you’ve got to start a conversation to figure out what’s going on.

But there’s a catch…

People HATE being pitched in their DMs.

And the second somebody realizes your “friendly conversation” is a poorly disguised sales script, there’s a good chance they’ll ghost you.

So before I message someone, I’ll usually try to become a little familiar…

I’ll engage with some of their content.
Maybe leave a comment.

If there’s an opportunity to get a conversation going in the feed, even better.

But I don’t spam them.

I just want to make my name more recognizable when I eventually appear in their inbox.

But even if I haven’t interacted with them beforehand, you can still reach out…

The first message just has to be low friction.

A few rules to follow when doing this:

1. Don’t pretend like you’ve been long-time buddies.

2. Don’t write some long paragraph introducing yourself and what you do.

3. Don’t immediately explain your services.

One of the most reliable ways I’ve found to start is to reference something from their profile and ask a genuine question that gives them two possible situations to choose between.

For example:

Hey Sarah, Thanks for accepting my connection request. I saw you recently launched Acme. How’s it going? Do you get leads from LinkedIn or something else?

I don’t want to spend the next six months talking about their weekend plans.
I just want to figure out whether they have a problem I can solve.

If they respond, “Honestly, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s bringing in leads and I enjoy creating the content.”

Great.
They’re not somebody I need to pursue.

Disqualify them and move on.

But if they say, “Yeah, it’s going okay, but […].”

You’re in.

There’s a gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Your next job is to show them how to close this gap.

Here’s how you do it…

Step #4: Ask if you can send them a free resource

Once they’ve revealed the gap, offer to help them.

Let’s say they tell me:

“I’m posting pretty consistently, but it doesn’t seem to generate any business.”

I might respond:

“I have a few ideas on what might be causing that and how to fix it. Mind if I put something together and send it over?”

Notice I’m asking for permission first…
This is important.

Sending someone a random PDF, Loom, or link they didn’t ask for still feels like you’re trying to sell them, and it’s just annoying.

I hate unsolicited voice messages and calls lol.

So ask for permission.

If they say “Yes,” then you can move on to free consulting.

In this stage, the goal is to help them understand the problem and what they need to do about it without asking for anything in return.

But there’s an important distinction here…

I primarily want to show them WHAT they need to do.
Not necessarily every single detail of HOW to do it.

The goal is simply to give them enough clarity to understand something needs to change.

This lets their mind wander… “But how the hell do I implement all of this?”

And here’s where your ghostwriting services come in.

But let’s backtrack a little…

How do I create the resources if they accept?

I’ll take the problem the prospect has told me about and pass it into ChatGPT.

Then I’ll give ChatGPT the process I use to solve that particular problem and ask it to create a short, personalized brochure explaining what this person needs to do to get from where they are to where they want to be.

So if somebody tells me:

“I’m posting consistently, but I’m not getting any leads.”

The brochure might identify that they need to:

• Clarify who their content is targeting.

• Connect their content to problems their customers pay to solve.

• Introduce more proof.

• Create clearer pathways from content into their offer.

• Build a system for converting attention into conversations.

I’m giving them the roadmap.

Then I’ll record a Loom walking them through the brochure.

I’ll explain what I’ve noticed, why I think these things matter, and what I’d focus on if I were in their position.

Then I send them both the brochure and the Loom.

It’s considerably more effort than firing off another generic DM.

But that’s kind of the point…

You want to demonstrate what it would be like to work with you.

However…

Sending the resource isn’t the end of the process.

Sometimes you’ll spend time putting everything together, send it over and...

Nothing.
They don’t respond.

This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not interested.

People are busy.
Messages get buried.

They tell themselves they’ll watch it later and completely forget.

So follow up:

“Hey, did you get a chance to check out what I sent over?”

If they haven’t, follow up again later.
And continue following up until you get a clear answer.

If they haven’t said “Go away, I’m not interested,” then the door is still open.

I’m not saying you should message them every morning until they block you…

But I’m also not going to assume silence automatically means rejection and throw away a potentially good opportunity because I was afraid to follow up.

TLDR; Sometimes people need reminding.

Anyways…

After a prospect has gone through what you’ve sent them, you’ve got to move them towards a call.

Step #5: Move the conversation toward a call

If they’ve gone through the resource and liked what you’ve shared, it’s time to get them on a call.

Again, I try to keep this pretty low friction.

I’ll usually say something like:

“If I were to open up 15 minutes on my calendar to dive a little deeper into this, would you be open to hopping on a quick call?”

If they say yes, I’ll send them my calendar and let them pick a time.

The important thing here is that I’m not trying to sell them on that call.

Why?

Because I still don’t know enough.

They’ve told me about a problem.
I’ve given them some ideas for what they need to do to solve it.

But now I want to understand what’s really going on.

So I’ll use those 15 minutes to dig deeper.

I’m essentially trying to understand four things:

• Where are they now?

• Where are they trying to get to?

• What’s stopping them from getting there?

• Is this an urgent problem?

The last question about priority is super important.

Because many people have problems they’re not ready to solve just yet.

So there’s no point trying to force them.

If they tell me:

“Yeah, I definitely want to fix this, but probably later in the year.”

Cool.

I’ll make a note and follow up later.

But if they tell me:

“This is something I need to sort out now.”

And I believe I can genuinely help them get the outcome they’re looking for, then I’ll suggest another call.

Something along the lines of:

“Based on everything you’ve told me, I think I can probably help. Would you be open to another call where I can walk you through how I’d approach this?”

That’s the call where we move away from WHAT they need to do and start talking about HOW I can help them do it.

And that’s where the actual sales conversation begins.

I’ll walk them through:

• How I’d solve their problem

• What working together would look like

• Answer any questions they have

… and if everything makes sense, make them an offer.

How I structure that conversation is beyond the scope of this article.

But the important thing is what has happened before I ever try to sell them anything.

By this point:

• I know they fit my ICP.

• They’ve told me they have a problem I can solve.

• I’ve given them something useful for free.

• I’ve spoken to them and understood the problem more deeply.

• They’ve told me solving it is a priority.

• And I believe my service can genuinely help them get the outcome they want.

So when I finally get onto a sales call, I’m not trying to convince some random person on LinkedIn that they need ghostwriting.

I’m speaking to someone who has already told me they have a problem, wants it solved, and knows I might be able to help.

This is a much easier conversation to have.

Final thoughts

Getting more clients doesn’t necessarily stem from being in front of more people.

If the people you’re in front of don’t want what you’re selling, they won’t buy.

So who you’re speaking to matters far more than how many people you’re speaking to.

Better targeting makes everything that comes afterward easier.

This is why the objective of this process isn’t to spam enough people until somebody eventually says yes…

It’s to identify people I’d genuinely like to work with.

We:

• Get into their world.

• Start a conversation.

• Figure out whether they have a problem we can solve.

• Help them before asking for anything.

…and when it makes sense, create an opportunity to talk about working together.

Not everyone will respond.
Not everyone will consume what you send.
Not everyone who gets on a call will become a client.

That’s part of the game.

But I’d much rather have fewer conversations with people who could genuinely become great clients than send hundreds of generic DMs and hope someone bites.

Because ultimately:

High-ticket client acquisition starts with finding the right people, not sending more DMs.

Thanks for reading!

I bootstrapped my online service business to $100,000 in 8 months.

And a big reason I was able to grow so quickly was because I got better at creating offers people wanted to buy.

So naturally, as I started pushing toward my next milestone of $1M/year, I kept thinking about the same thing…

How can I make my offer better?

I added DM management and outreach to my LinkedIn ghostwriting package.

A few people bit.

Then I experimented with additional services I could sell to existing clients.

I introduced email ghostwriting.

Clients bought that too.

On paper, everything was working.

I was finding more ways to generate revenue from each client.

But one pretty massive problem remained...

Every improvement to my offer created more work for me.

I had virtually no time left to take on additional work.

I was increasing how much each client could pay me while simultaneously reducing my capacity to serve more clients.

Not exactly a brilliant scaling strategy.

But this is where I’ve found myself over the past six months…

Revenue has continued growing.

But I’ve also become increasingly trapped inside the business required to generate it.

If I want my ghostwriting business to keep growing, I need to offload the work that depends on me.

I need other people to produce outcomes without constantly asking me what to do.
I need recurring tasks to happen the same way every time.
I need processes that don’t live exclusively inside my head.

In other words...

I need systems.

More specifically, I need Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

Over the past several months, I’ve been building a framework to identify the things I repeatedly do, document how they’re done, hand them off to somebody else, and gradually remove myself from the process.

I’m not going to pretend this framework has already built me a $1M/year ghostwriting business.

But I am using it to build one.

In this article, I’ll break down the SOP framework I’m using to make that transition, how I’m implementing it in my ghostwriting business, and what I’m learning as I make myself less necessary to its day-to-day operation.

Why I started taking SOPs seriously

A few months back, my dad gave me a surprise early morning call.

This was strange because everybody in my family knows I take my working hours seriously, so unless something is important, they usually leave me alone.

I answered the phone.

His voice was staggered.

“Kurt, your grandmother has passed away.”

I had a feeling something was wrong that morning.

Around 7 AM, I’d heard my mom, who was on vacation at my home in Ghana, rushing out of the house.

But I didn’t even bat an eyelid.
I was working.

My dad continued, “You’re the only one from the family in Ghana at the moment. Are you able to pause what you’re doing and go and be with your mom at the hospital?”

That question hurt me.

“Whaaatt? Of course I can be there. Where is she? I’m going right now.”

I ordered an Uber.

Then I sat on the edge of my bed trying to process the fact that my grandmother had just died.

But something else was bothering me too.

Why did my dad feel like he had to ask whether I could make time to be there for my mom?

My mind immediately went back to all the times my parents had asked me for favors during working hours.

My response was usually some variation of, “I’m working. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid.”

I’d always considered that a reasonable boundary.

And to some extent, it was.

I run my own business.

Nobody pays me a salary at the end of the month regardless of what I produce.

But sitting on my bed that morning made me realize I’d taken that reality much further than I wanted…

My business had become so dependent on me that the people closest to me felt like asking for my time meant asking me to stop earning money.

If I’d fixed that earlier, maybe my dad wouldn’t have felt like he was inconveniencing me during one of the worst moments our family had experienced.

Hopefully, you never need something like this to happen before realizing something needs to change.

But there are usually warning signs long before you reach that point.

You might have become the bottleneck in your business if:

• Every problem lands back on your desk.

• Every task requires your approval before it moves forward.

• Your team constantly asks you the same questions.

• You repeatedly explain the same processes to different people.

• You context-switch between ten different responsibilities every hour.

• Your business slows down, or completely stops, the moment you take a day off.

• You just never seem to have enough time.

This is where I found myself.

I felt less like a business owner and more like an air traffic controller trying to stop everything from crashing.

When I started bringing other people into the business, I was still involved because they needed me to explain how things worked.

This may be manageable when you only have a handful of clients.

But growth increases complexity.

My lack of systems was costing me time.

And, more importantly, it was beginning to affect how available I felt I could be outside the business.

So I started looking at everything I repeatedly did inside my ghostwriting business and asking a different question:

How can I make this happen without me?

That question eventually became the foundation of the SOP framework I’m using today.

My SOP framework

Once I realized I was the bottleneck, my first instinct was to start documenting everything.

But this created another problem…

I didn’t want to spend hours creating documents nobody uses for processes that didn’t need an SOP.

I needed to be deliberate about what I systemize to make the most of this session.

So I created this framework:

Identify → Do → Document → Delegate → Remove

Let me break each step down…

Step #1: Identify what keeps repeating

Start by identifying repetitive tasks.

To make this easier, I separated my business into 6 departments:

• Prospecting/Sales

• Onboarding

• Marketing

• Fulfilment/Operations

• Offboarding/Upsell

• Admin/HR

Then, within each department, I identify all the sub-tasks.

For example, in marketing I have:

• Social content management

• Email content management

• Tracking growth metrics

And then I detail the tasks within each SOP.

So let’s take social content management in this instance…

Individual tasks within this include:

• Content scheduling

• Formatting LinkedIn posts

• Saving & managing published content

Read more

I’ve struggled to get consistent reach on LinkedIn since returning in 2024.

And I think I know why…

I started posting on LinkedIn between 2020 and 2022.

And back then, I mostly wrote about AI and machine learning.

So naturally, that’s what a large portion of the audience I built knew me for.

Then I disappeared for 2 years...

When I returned in 2024, I wanted to set the foundations for my ghostwriting business.

So people who originally followed me because I wrote about AI and ML were now seeing posts about:

• Ghostwriting.

• Content strategy.

• Writing for other people.

• And whatever else I happened to be learning along the way.

You can probably see the problem.

I built an audience around one thing and returned expecting them to care about something completely different.

Unsurprisingly, many of them didn’t.

My reach suffered.

Most of my posts struggled to get anywhere near the distribution I’d experienced during my earlier years on LinkedIn.

And more importantly, my content wasn’t doing a particularly good job of attracting new ghostwriting clients.

The second part is what bothered me more.

I don’t particularly care about collecting impressions just to watch a number go up.

I run a ghostwriting business.

But if I’m going to spend hours every week creating content for myself, I want that content to help the right people discover me, understand what I do, and potentially become customers.

So in July of this year, I decided to do something about it…

I gave myself 31 days to deliberately increase my reach on LinkedIn.

I:

• Experimented with how I created content.

• Paid closer attention to distribution.

• Looked at what was and wasn’t getting my posts in front of new people.

And by the end of those 31 days, my LinkedIn analytics spiked.

91,397 impressions.

Up 383% compared with the previous 31 days.

Now, 91,397 impressions isn’t a great achievement for most people.
Some creators generate that kind of reach from a single post.

But this is exactly why I think this experiment is worth breaking down…

I wasn’t starting with an account generating millions of impressions every month.

I was trying to revive an audience I’d built around a completely different subject and get more of the right people discovering what I do today.

This is a common problem.

In this article, I’m going to break down exactly what I changed over those 31 days, why I think my impressions increased by 383%, and, most importantly, whether that extram attention helped me generate new business.

Why I decided to focus on impressions

I know what you might be thinking…

“Aren’t impressions just a vanity metric?”

They can be.

Getting 100,000 impressions from people who will never buy from you isn’t necessarily better than getting 10,000 impressions from people who might.

But here’s the way I looked at it:

My business depends on people knowing I exist.

And content is one of the main ways I want that discovery to happen since that’s what I’ll be doing for my clients.

The journey looks something like this:

Content → impressions → profile visits → conversations → clients

Obviously, most impressions won’t become profile visits.

Most profile visitors won’t produce fruitful conversations.

And most conversations won’t turn into clients.

But increasing the number of relevant people at the top of that funnel gives me more opportunities for some of them to eventually make their way through it.

This was my hypothesis going into this experiment:

If I could substantially increase the number of relevant people seeing my ideas, I’d increase my chances of attracting potential ghostwriting clients.

The word relevant is important.

I wasn’t interested in increasing my impressions at any cost.

I could probably have easily:

• Written about whatever controversial topic was trending that week.

• Created engagement bait.

• Started posting generic inspirational content designed to appeal to as many people as possible.

And maybe some of those things would’ve increased my reach.

But what would be the point?

I don’t need everybody on LinkedIn to know who I am.

So throughout the 31 days, I still wanted the content generating those impressions to strengthen the association between me and what I do.

Ghostwriting for Ed Tech Founders and my own school for ghostwriters.

More relevant impressions meant more opportunities for somebody in my target audience to discover a post.

More opportunities for them to visit my profile.

More opportunities to understand what I do.

And ultimately, more opportunities for some of those people to become clients.

That’s why I chose impressions as the metric to attack first.

The 31-day experiment

I consider pretty much everything I publish on social media an experiment.

Every post gives me another opportunity to test something.

So I didn’t suddenly wake up on July 27th and decide to completely change my LinkedIn strategy.

A lot of the experiments that eventually shaped this strategy started months earlier.

Gradually, I started noticing certain patterns in the posts that performed better than others.

By July, I had enough information to form a hypothesis about what might help me increase my reach.

Here are three of the biggest experiments that became part of that strategy.

Change #1: I shortened my posts to 1,000–1,200 characters

I used to write much longer LinkedIn posts.

There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the ideas.
The problem was getting people to read them.

LinkedIn is a feed.

People scroll quickly between posts, ads, comments, videos, and whatever else is competing for their attention.

And I started wondering whether I was simply asking too much of them.

So I experimented with shorter posts.

I settled on roughly 1,000–1,200 characters as a constraint.

It wasn’t some scientifically optimized number….
It was something I saw was working for another one of my clients.

So I tried it for myself.

My hypothesis was simple:

If people have limited attention, make the idea easier to consume.

And some of the results supported that hypothesis.

One of my highest-impression posts during this period was only 871 characters long.

This post generated more than 20,000 impressions.

Now, I’m not going to pretend it performed well because it had 871 characters.

Too many variables are involved to make that claim.

But it gave me another useful data point…

And when shorter posts repeatedly started appearing among my stronger performers, I decided the constraint was worth keeping.

But then I noticed something else.

Writing short posts wasn’t enough.

Change #2: I started using before-and-after images

Once I started shortening my posts, I quickly realized people weren’t suddenly reading everything I published because I’d used fewer words.

Some short posts still flopped.

So I started looking for another pattern.

And one stood out like a sore thumb…

Posts I made with a before-and-after image consistently outperformed everything else.

These were posts where I would mention a bit about my past and then transition to where I am now.

I think these did well because my image became a hook.
It gave context for what the post was about before they even read it.

If the transformation in the image interested them, the writing explained how I’d got from one to the other.

When I looked back at my strongest content before July, the pattern was pretty ridiculous.

All eight of my top-performing posts (by impressions) used before-and-after images of me.

At that point, it would have been stupid not to investigate further.

So I started deliberately incorporating more of these images into my content.

And again, I saw a noticeable increase in impressions and profile views.

It also made sense when I thought about how people consume LinkedIn.

A before-and-after image creates an information gap almost instantly.

What happened between these two pictures?

The post underneath gives them the answer.

But even with shorter posts and stronger visuals, I still had another problem.

Despite having more than 18,000+ followers, I still wasn’t regularly breaking 1,000 impressions.

Something clearly wasn’t clicking with distribution.

That’s when I tried the experiment that produced the most interesting results.

Change #3: I started using LinkedIn’s celebration posts

For most of my time on LinkedIn, I published regular posts.

Nothing unusual.

Then I started paying more attention to LinkedIn’s built-in post formats.

One of them was the celebration post.

You’ve probably seen these before.

Instead of publishing a standard text post, LinkedIn allows you to select a celebration and attach a visual treatment to the post.

I had a theory…

LinkedIn built the feature.

So I wondered:

Would LinkedIn have some incentive to give posts using its native features more distribution?

I had absolutely no idea whether this was true.

And I still wouldn’t claim that LinkedIn deliberately boosts celebration posts without evidence.

But remember, I’m experimenting.

I didn’t need to know the answer beforehand.

I needed to test the hypothesis and see what happened.

So I started incorporating celebration posts into my content.

And they kept performing.

At the time of writing this article, five of my ten highest-performing posts are celebration posts.

And the post with the highest impressions is a celebration post.

Again, there could be several reasons for this.

• Maybe LinkedIn gives the format additional distribution.

• Maybe the celebration visual simply stands out more in the feed.

• Maybe the types of stories I naturally tell through celebration posts are more interesting.

• Maybe it’s some combination of all three.

I don’t know.

But it seems to be working well, so I will keep using it.

The results

Before getting into the results, there’s an important caveat…

This wasn’t a perfectly controlled experiment.

I wasn’t sitting there changing one variable at a time while keeping absolutely everything else identical.

For example, when I started experimenting with celebration posts, I didn’t always combine them with the before-and-after visuals that had already been working well for me.

Interestingly, the one time I did combine both...

It produced my highest-performing post of the entire period.

That’s something I’ll experiment with more going forward.

But despite the imperfect methodology, the overall change in my numbers was pretty significant.

My impressions increased by 383%

Over the 31 days, my content generated 91,397 impressions.

A 383% increase compared with the previous 31 days.

Only 34% came from people already inside my network.

The other 66% came from outside it.

This matters because I started this experiment to get my content in front of more people who didn’t already know me.

And that’s exactly what happened.

In total, my content reached 38,000 LinkedIn members during the period.

The content also generated 1,781 social engagements, including:

• 1,250 reactions.

• 485 comments.

• 42 saves.

• 4 sends.

• 51 link engagements.

My three highest-performing posts generated approximately:

• 26,000 impressions: https://lnkd.in/p/dNQSEnmt

• 11,000 impressions: https://lnkd.in/p/d7rkwvJ4

• 5,000 impressions: https://lnkd.in/p/dekUAtF2

But was I reaching the right people?

This was far more important to me.

I wanted more people in my target market discovering me.

I work with founders in the education technology space, so I was particularly interested in seeing whether the additional distribution was pushing my content toward people in and around technology.

When I looked at LinkedIn’s audience demographics, there were some encouraging signs.

My largest seniority group was Senior at 34%.

And 19% of the audience came from IT Services and IT Consulting.

For job titles, the audience included:

• Software Engineers: 7%

• Founders: 4%

• Data Scientists: 3%

• Artificial Intelligence Engineers: 3%

• Data Engineers: 2%

• Product Managers: 2%

• Machine Learning Engineers: 2%

• Co-Founders: 1%

Now, these numbers don’t tell me that 34% of the people seeing my content were prospective customers.

And LinkedIn’s demographics don’t give me a neat category called “EdTech founders who need a ghostwriter.”

So I don’t want to pretend the data tells me more than it does.

But it does show me that a meaningful portion of my distribution was happening among senior professionals, founders, and people working in technology, which overlaps considerably more with the people I want entering my world than completely random viral reach would.

My follower count barely moved

Despite increasing my impressions by 383%, I finished the period with:

19,113 followers.

That’s only a 1% increase compared with the previous 31 days.

So I dramatically increased how often my content was seen...
But this increase didn’t translate proportionally into audience growth.

And I think that’s an important reminder of something people often forget when looking at LinkedIn analytics:

Different metrics measure different things.

• Impressions tell me I got significantly better at distributing my content.

• Out-of-network impressions tell me I became better at reaching beyond the audience I already had.

• Follower growth tells me relatively few of those people decided they wanted to keep hearing from me.

And none of those numbers, by themselves, tell me whether I generated more ghostwriting business.

That requires looking further down the funnel.

I’m launching a new ghostwriting offer soon, so time will tell.

Final thoughts

The objective of this experiment was to get more of the right people discovering my content and increase the number of opportunities I had to turn that attention into business.

And in that respect, the experiment worked.

My impressions increased by 383%.
I reached 38,000 people.
And 66% of my impressions came from outside my existing network.

So I became significantly better at getting my ideas in front of people who weren’t following or connected to me.

But I did learn an important lesson…

Getting attention and converting attention are two completely different problems.

I can increase my impressions.
I can get more people onto my profile.
I can even get more of my target audience consuming my content.

But none of that automatically puts money in my bank account.

I still need to give those people a reason to follow me.
I need to make it obvious what I do.
I need to create content that builds trust in my ability to do it.

Eventually, I need a mechanism to turn some of that attention into conversations with potential clients.

That’s the next part of the experiment.

I’ve figured out several things that appear to help me generate significantly more distribution on LinkedIn.

Now I need to get better at capitalizing on that distribution.

Because impressions aren’t the end goal.

Attention is useful.
But only if you know what you want to do with it.

Thanks for reading!

The hardest part of ghostwriting isn’t writing well…

You can write an objectively great piece of content and still completely fail at your job.

Why?

Because your client reads it and thinks, “I would never say this.”

I’ve been writing professionally for more than 6 years, ghostwriting for 2.

And one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since becoming a ghostwriter is that good writing and good ghostwriting are two different skills.

Good writing requires you to develop your own:

• Voice

• Style

• Opinions

• Personality

• Way of communicating ideas

Good ghostwriting requires you to temporarily put some of those things aside and learn somebody else’s.

Your job is to make your client sound like the best version of themselves.

This goes much deeper than learning whether somebody likes short sentences, uses profanity, or says certain phrases.

Those are simply expressions of their voice.

In May of this year, I had to drop a client because we fundamentally disagreed on this (and a few other things).

He was extremely particular about capturing these expressions of his voice.

And while they matter...

They’re only the surface level of what makes a voice yours.

Your actual voice starts with how you think.

Your:

• Values

• Beliefs

• Opinions

• Worldview

• Personality

• Experiences

These are the things that make you (and your client) unique.

So when I start working with someone, I’m not solely focused on understanding how they express their voice...

I’m trying to understand how they think.

• What annoys them?

• What do they believe?

• What would they never say?

• What makes them sound unmistakably like them?

• What experiences shaped how they see the world?

The better you understand how your client thinks, the easier it becomes to write content that sounds like them.

And over the last two years of ghostwriting, I’ve gradually developed a process for doing exactly that.

In this article, I’m going to break it down.

What is a brand voice?

Before explaining how I capture a client’s brand voice, it’s probably worth defining what I mean by it.

The simplest definition I’ve come up with is this:

A brand voice is the recognizable way someone communicates their ideas.

And there are many things that contribute to it.

For example:

• Humor

• Rhythm

• Profanity

• Opinions

• Analogies

• Vocabulary

• Punctuation

• Sentence length

• Storytelling tendencies

• Phrases you repeatedly use

• Things you would NEVER say

• How directly you communicate

Put enough of these together consistently and people eventually start recognizing how you communicate.

But this is where ghostwriting gets complicated…

Capturing somebody’s voice and replicating every expression of their voice are NOT the same thing.

This was the disagreement I had with the client I mentioned earlier.

There were times when I’d send him a draft, and he’d respond, “I wouldn’t say that.”

So I’d go back to the transcript from our interview...
Find the exact sentence...

And copy and paste where he’d said it word for word.

But sounding like somebody isn't necessarily the same as copying how they speak.

The way people naturally communicate in conversation doesn’t always translate perfectly into written content.

When you’re talking, you:

• Repeat yourself.

• Go on tangents.

• Use unnecessary filler words.

• Start sentences without finishing them.

• Take 100 words to communicate something that could’ve taken 20.

Those things are technically expressions of your natural voice.

But blindly preserving all of them doesn’t necessarily make the writing more authentic.

Sometimes, it just makes the writing worse.

And this was one of the tensions between this particular client and me.

He wanted me to preserve expressions of his voice that I believed made the content less effective for the platform we were writing on.

And more importantly, they sometimes worked against the goals he’d told me he wanted the content to achieve during our onboarding.

I believed part of my job as a ghostwriter was to make judgment calls about what to keep and what to remove.

Because I’m not a transcriptionist.

Your job as a ghostwriter is NOT to reproduce exactly how somebody speaks.

It’s to understand them well enough to communicate their ideas in a way that still feels unmistakably like them, while adapting those ideas to the medium you’re publishing on.

If somebody rambles for three minutes before making their point during an interview, you don’t need to preserve the rambling to preserve their voice.

If they use the same filler phrase seven times, you don’t need to include it seven times.

If they explain something in a way that works perfectly in conversation but makes a LinkedIn post unnecessarily difficult to read, you should be able to restructure it.

You’re supposed to preserve the person, not every imperfection in how they communicate.

This is why I think brand voice exists on two levels.

On the first level, you have the underlying voice:

• Values

• Beliefs

• Opinions

• Worldview

• Personality

• Experiences

And on the second level, you have the expressions of that voice:

• Words

• Humor

• Rhythm

• Phrases

• Profanity

• Punctuation

• Sentence structure

You must understand both.

But the second should serve the first, not constrain it.

Good ghostwriting is an effective expression of how somebody else thinks.

Why capturing your client’s voice matters

When someone hires you to ghostwrite for them, they’re trusting you with their reputation.

Ultimately, it’s their name attached to everything you publish.

So everything you create needs to feel like something they would genuinely say and be comfortable putting their name behind.

There are three reasons this matters:

1/ The content feels authentic

You’d probably notice if you’ve been following someone for years and their content suddenly starts sounding like a completely different person.

Your job isn’t to replace your client’s voice with your own.

It’s simply to improve how they communicate their ideas while preserving who they are so the content still feels authentic.

2/ Your client trusts you

Every draft you send is an opportunity to demonstrate how well you understand your client.

If they constantly have to rewrite sentences, correct your language, or tell you, “I’d never say this,” they’re eventually going to question whether you’re capable of doing the job.

The closer your drafts sound to them, the more comfortable they become giving you control.

Of course, some people are natural micromanagers, so they’re unlikely to relinquish full control.

And you could capture their voice perfectly and they’ll still want to make changes.

At that point, you have to decide whether that’s the type of working relationship you want.

3/ The relationship becomes easier to scale

The better you understand your client’s voice, the fewer voice-related revisions you should need.

And ideally, as you work together longer, you’ll start anticipating the changes they would make before they even make them.

Less back and forth for you.
Less work for your client.

And a much smoother relationship for both of you.

How I capture my ghostwriting client’s brand voice

You’re not going to nail a client’s voice after one onboarding call.

And that’s okay…

The more:

• Material you consume

• Conversations you have

• Content you write

• Feedback you receive

… the better understanding you’ll have of how that person thinks and communicates.

But there are several things you can do to speed up that process.

Here’s what that looks like:

1/ Study everything they’ve already created

Before I start writing, I consume as much of my client’s existing content as possible.

This could include:

• LinkedIn posts

• X posts

• Newsletters

• Podcasts

• YouTube videos

• Interviews

• Emails

• Presentations

• Previous articles

If they’re comfortable sharing private material like Slack or WhatsApp messages, those can also be incredibly useful.

One of my clients even gave me access to their paid course.

This helped me understand their expertise and gave me hours of footage showing how they naturally explained concepts to other people.

But I’m not solely studying what they say…
I’m studying how they say it.

I’m looking for things like:

• Words they repeatedly use

• How long their sentences are

• How they explain complicated ideas

• Whether they use analogies

• How direct they are

• What makes them laugh

• How they tell stories

• What they have strong opinions about

• How technical their language becomes

• Phrases that repeatedly show up

The more material you have, the easier it becomes to separate genuine communication patterns from one-off expressions.

But existing content has limitations.

Especially when the client hasn’t created much of it themselves.

Which is why I also want to hear them speak.

2/ Record interviews with clients

I typically interview my ghostwriting clients twice a month.

But if they don’t have much existing content, I’ll increase this to four times a month for the first six weeks.

The primary purpose is to extract ideas and experiences I can turn into content.

But this also helps to identify client language.

The way somebody speaks naturally is often different from how they write when they know something is going to be published.

During a conversation, you get their:

• Natural phrases

• Cadence

• Humor

• Stories

• Strong opinions

• Analogies

• Tangents

• Emotional language

They’re not sitting there wondering whether a sentence has the perfect hook.

They’re simply… talking.

And sometimes, a throwaway sentence somebody says during an interview sounds more like them than anything you’ll find in their published content.

This is why I record my client interviews.

I currently use Fathom, which records my calls and gives me a transcript and summary afterward.

The transcript is particularly valuable.

I can search it.

Pull exact quotes from it.

Compare language across interviews.

And return to conversations months later when I need context.

Remember the client who would tell me, “I wouldn’t say that”?

The transcripts let me go back and show him the exact moment he said it.

So don’t just interview your clients for ideas.

Interview them for language.

Read more

I’ve been writing professionally for more than six years.

But I’ve only been ghostwriting for the last two.

In that time, I’ve made just over $200,000 writing content for other people.

And despite having years of writing experience before I started, the transition wasn’t as straightforward as I expected…

Because writing for yourself and writing as somebody else are two different skills.

When you’re writing for yourself, you:

• Control the ideas

• Determine the arguments.

• Set the voice.

… and if you want to change direction halfway through a piece, you don’t need anybody’s permission.

Ghostwriting doesn’t work like that…

You must learn how to take what’s inside somebody else’s head and turn it into content that sounds like something they would say.

This means you must learn how to:

• Generate and develop ideas.

• Extract someone else’s expertise.

• Recognize what makes something worth reading.

• Adapt your writing to different voices.

• Continually find new ways to communicate similar ideas.

And despite already being an experienced writer, I wasn’t particularly good at all of this when I started.

I had to learn.

Some of that came naturally from doing the job over and over again.

But a lot of my improvement came from simple habits I picked up along the way.

And they’re nothing revolutionary.

You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on courses or study writing for years to start doing them.

You just need to put in the reps.

So if I were trying to become a better ghostwriter today, these are five simple things I’d spend more time doing:

Tip #1: Do copywork

One part of becoming a better ghostwriter is improving as a writer.

And the best way I’ve found to improve as a writer is through “copywork.”

Copywork is exactly what it sounds like.

You find a piece of writing you admire, grab a pen and paper, and copy it word for word.

It might sound ridiculously simple.

But writers have been using variations of this technique for generations.

Benjamin Franklin famously taught himself to write better by studying essays from The Spectator.

He would take notes on the ideas, put the original aside, and later try to reconstruct the argument himself.

Hunter S. Thompson famously typed out The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms because he wanted to understand what it felt like to produce writing of that quality.

Gary Halbert, who is widely considered one of the most successful and highest-paid direct response copywriters in history, encouraged aspiring copywriters to hand-copy successful sales letters to internalize how effective copy was constructed.

Tracing great writing forces you to pay attention to how it was constructed.

At one point in my journey, I spent the first hour of every morning doing copywork.

I had several writing styles I wanted to get better at, and I’d dedicate an entire month to studying one at a time.

For example, I spent one month copying viral LinkedIn posts from some of my favorite creators.

Every evening, I’d archive 5-10 viral posts, then the next morning I’d grab my notebook and write them out by hand.

The following month, I switched to long-form content and started copying articles and longer pieces from some of my favorite writers.

These days, I don’t spend an hour doing copywork every morning anymore…

But whenever I want to learn a new writing style, it’s still one of the first things I return to.

I simply find examples of the style or voice I’m trying to learn, then copy the work of people who already do it successfully.

As you repeatedly trace good writing, you start noticing patterns you might completely miss when casually reading it.

For example, you’ll be able to spot:

• Where the writer creates tension.

• How long they spend setting up an idea.

• Where they introduce an example.

• How they transition between arguments.

• Why they use a short sentence in one place and a longer one somewhere else.

• How they keep you reading without you consciously realizing it.

But I strongly recommend doing copywork with pen and paper.

Typing makes it far too easy to move quickly.

Writing by hand slows you down.

You’re forced to spend more time with every word, sentence, transition, and structural decision the writer made.

That friction is part of the point.

It forces you to pay attention to what’s happening.

So, the first tip to becoming a better ghostwriter:

Develop a habit of copywork.

Find writers who are already good at the type of writing you want to learn and repeatedly trace their work by hand.

Over time, you’ll start recognizing patterns you previously couldn’t see.

And eventually, some of those patterns will begin showing up naturally in your own writing.

Tip #2: Study interviews

The hardest part of being a ghostwriter is extracting good ideas from somebody else’s head.

Some clients make this ridiculously easy.

For example, one client I work with was creating content for two years before we started working together.

He single-handedly built his LinkedIn following to 50,000+ followers and simply brought me in so he could focus more on other aspects of his business.

So he knows what he wants to talk about.

For him, I created a space in his client dashboard where he can drop ideas he’s been thinking about.

All I have to do is interpret those ideas and turn them into content people want to consume.

But other clients can make the extraction process a living hell…

And it’s not intentional.

They simply haven’t spent years thinking about their experiences through a content lens.

So you’ll ask, “What’s something you’ve changed your mind about recently?”

And they’ll say, “Hmm. I’m not sure.”

Or you’ll ask about an interesting experience and get a two-sentence answer.

You can’t blame them for that.

And it’s not their job to know what makes good content…

It’s yours.

This means you can’t simply arrive at an interview with a list of 20 questions and mechanically work your way through them.

You have to learn how to probe.

If your client casually mentions something interesting, dig into it.

• “Why did you think that?”

• “What happened next?”

• “Can you give me an example?”

• “What did you do differently afterward?”

• “Why do you disagree with that?”

• “How did that make you feel?”

Sometimes the best material from an hour-long conversation will come from a five-minute tangent you never planned to discuss.

And your ability to recognize those moments and pull on the thread is what will help you create highly personalized stories and arguments that could only come from your client.

One of the easiest ways I’ve found to improve this skill is to study good interviewers.

Watch how people like Joe Rogan or Steven Bartlett interview their guests.

Don’t only listen to the guest’s answers…
Pay attention to the interviewer.

Notice how they:

• Follow up on interesting answers.

• Ask for clarification.

• Challenge assumptions.

• Get people to provide specific examples.

• Let certain conversations develop instead of rushing to the next question.

• Ask questions based on something the guest said 30 seconds earlier.

You’re essentially studying how somebody turns another person’s knowledge and experiences into an interesting conversation.

Personally, I don't naturally gravitate toward podcasts.
I prefer practical content tailored toward a specific subject I’m interested in.

But I do watch the news every day, and you can learn exactly the same skill there.

One of my favorite parts is when they bring in different experts to discuss geopolitics or whatever random niche subject I happen to be interested in that week.

I’ll listen to what the expert says.

But I’ll also pay attention to how the interviewer gets them to say it.

• What question opened up the conversation?

• What did they challenge?

• Which answer did they decide to probe further?

• When did they realize there was something interesting underneath the initial response?

Because these are essentially the same decisions I have to make when interviewing a ghostwriting client.

Don’t interview them just to fill an hour of conversation.

You’re searching for raw material.

Study how great interviewers find it.

Pay attention to the questions they ask, the answers they pursue, and the threads they choose to pull.

The better you become at asking questions, listening carefully, and knowing when to dig deeper, the more interesting material you’ll extract from your clients.

And better raw material makes writing great content a heck of a lot easier.

Tip #3: Create client-specific swipe files

No matter how good you become at writing, you’re going to have days when your mind goes completely blank.

You open a document.

Stare at the cursor.

And think, “What the hell am I going to write about today?”

That’s perfectly normal.

Unfortunately, your client doesn’t care.

They’re paying you to do a job.

If you’ve agreed to produce five posts that week, you can’t deliver four because you couldn’t think of anything interesting for Friday.

You need somewhere to turn when your creativity isn’t cooperating.

This is why I recommend creating swipe files.

A swipe file is essentially a library of interesting content you encounter that you can return to for inspiration.

Whenever you find an interesting:

• Hook.

• Format.

• Story.

• Visual.

• Argument.

• CTA.

• Content series.

• Way of explaining something.

…save it.

I’ve maintained swipe files for years.

But when I started ghostwriting, I made a pretty stupid mistake.

I only built them for myself.

The problem is that I create content in a completely different niche from all of my clients.

So whenever I ran out of ideas for a client, I had a massive library of inspiration I could use…

But very little of it was useful for them.

Fortunately, I found ways to bail myself out.

One of them was repurposing older client content.

I’d go through posts we published months earlier, find an idea that performed well, and figure out another way to approach it.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing this.

In fact, I still do it.

Your audience doesn’t remember everything you’ve ever published, and a good idea doesn’t suddenly become useless because you’ve discussed it once.

But you can’t rely on repurposing every time you run out of ideas.

Eventually, I realized I needed to start creating client-specific swipe files.

This meant paying closer attention to the content being created in each client’s world.

The easiest way to start doing this is simply to ask your client, “Whose content do you enjoy consuming?”

Then go and study those people.

Look at:

• What subjects they discuss.

• Which specific posts your client likes.

• Interesting formats they use.

• How they package complicated ideas.

• Stories they tell.

• Posts that generate unusually strong responses.

Save the best examples in a swipe file specifically for that client.

This gives you another advantage:

You learn your client’s taste.

If they regularly send you posts and say, “I love how this person writes,” that’s useful information.

They’re showing you the types of content they’d probably feel comfortable publishing themselves.

Obviously, the goal isn’t to copy those creators.

You’re studying them for inspiration.

Maybe you borrow the format but apply it to one of your client’s ideas.

Maybe an argument makes you wonder what your client thinks about the subject.

Maybe a hook gives you a completely different way to package something your client has already discussed.

The original piece is simply the spark.

Don’t wait until you’re staring at a blank document with a deadline in three hours to start looking for inspiration.

Build the library before you need it.

And don’t make the mistake I did by maintaining one giant swipe file for yourself.

Build one around each client.

Because sooner or later, you will run out of ideas.

When that happens, you’ll be pretty damn glad you did.

Tip #4: Experiment

As a ghostwriter, you’re ultimately being paid to produce an outcome for your clients.

So don’t be afraid to try things.

New formats.
New hooks.
New CTAs.
New ways of promoting an offer.
New ways of communicating an idea.

Some experiments will work.

Others will completely flop.

Both are useful.

About two weeks ago, I read a marketing piece that said, “Telling your audience not to do something can sometimes make them want to do it.”

I thought it was interesting.

So I pitched an experiment to one of my clients.

We were promoting one of their paid courses, and instead of approaching the promotion the way we normally would, we incorporated this idea into the campaign.

Did it work?

Nope.

The experiment flopped.

But I don’t consider that wasted effort.

It gave us another data point.

We now have slightly more information about what this audience responds to, what they don’t, and how we might approach the next promotion differently.

That’s the mindset I think you need as a ghostwriter.

You can study successful content all day.
You can build enormous swipe files.
You can analyze everything your competitors are doing.

But eventually, you have to put something into the market and see what happens.

There’s a famous story about Thomas Edison being asked about repeatedly failing while trying to develop the electric light…

The exact wording attributed to him varies, but the idea is that he didn’t view the unsuccessful experiments simply as failures.

He’d discovered thousands of approaches that didn’t work.

Every experiment eliminates another possibility or gives you information you didn’t have before.

Ghostwriting works the same way on a much smaller scale.

Maybe you try a new storytelling format and engagement tanks.

Good to know.

Maybe you change the way you introduce your client’s offer and suddenly more people click.

Good to know.

Maybe you write about a subject you’re convinced the audience will love and nobody gives a shit.

Again, good to know.

You’re collecting information.

And the longer you work with a client, the more of those data points you accumulate.

Eventually, you start developing a much clearer picture of:

• What their audience cares about.

• Which ideas resonate.

• Which formats work.

• How they respond to different CTAs.

• What you should probably stop doing.

• What deserves further experimentation.

So don’t become so obsessed with producing a winner every time that you stop taking risks.

Obviously, you shouldn’t experiment for the sake of it.

You’re still responsible for your client’s outcomes.

But when you have a reasonable hypothesis about something that might work, test it.

If it works, you’ve potentially found something worth repeating.

If it doesn’t, you’ve learned something.

Either way, you leave the experiment knowing more than you did before.

Tip #5: Read widely

You do not have all the answers.

And neither do the other ghostwriters in your niche.

So one of the simplest ways to become a better writer is to read widely.

Don’t only consume LinkedIn posts.
Don’t only read books about writing.
And definitely don’t only consume content from other ghostwriters.

Read:

• Newsletters.

• Articles.

• Essays.

• Sales pages.

• Books.

• Advertising.

• Journalism.

• Fiction.

• Content about subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with your work.

Because every time you expose yourself to a different type of writing, you expose yourself to another way of communicating an idea.

I’m currently reading a book about chess openings.

I want to improve my chess game, so the reason I picked it up had absolutely nothing to do with becoming a better ghostwriter.

But while reading it, I started paying attention to how the author teaches complicated sequences of moves.

They can’t dump everything on you at once.

They have to:

1. Explain one move.

2. Show you why it matters.

3. Explain the opponent’s likely response.

4. Introduce the next move.

5. Then gradually build those individual decisions into an entire opening.

The book is teaching me chess…

But indirectly, it’s also teaching me another way to think about teaching new ideas.

Before that, I was reading about Mortal Kombat.

In the newer Mortal Kombat universe, certain fighters possess something called Arcana, essentially a unique supernatural ability that manifests differently depending on the person.

It’s essentially another way of exploring the idea of discovering something unique within yourself.

But what interested me was how the Mortal Kombat scriptwriters took a familiar concept like finding your purpose and gave it a name that belonged specifically to their universe.

“Arcana.”

This is something you can learn from as a writer.

If you’re writing for someone who wants to become a thought leader, part of your job is helping them develop distinctive ways of communicating familiar ideas.

Sometimes that means creating language, analogies, frameworks, or concepts that people begin associating specifically with them.

Reading outside your usual bubble exposes you to different ways to:

• Introduce characters

• Explain unfamiliar concepts

• Build worlds

• Create tension

• Communicate information without overwhelming the audience.

And that’s the broader point...

Not everything you read needs to have an obvious professional purpose.

When you read widely, you start collecting different ways of...

• Explaining complicated ideas.

• Structuring information.

• Building arguments.

• Creating tension.

• Teaching processes.

• Telling stories.

• Using analogies.

• Keeping somebody interested.

Then those influences start showing up in your work.

You probably won’t know exactly what you’re going to take from something before you read it.

This is partly why reading broadly is so valuable.

If every piece of information you consume comes from the same people, on the same platforms, talking about the same subjects, eventually you're all drawing inspiration from the same pool.

The wider your inputs, the more material you have to draw from.

Get outside your bubble.

Read things because they’re useful.
Read things because they’re interesting.

You never know which idea, structure, analogy, or way of explaining something will eventually find its way into your writing.

Bonus Tip: Be open to clients’ suggestions

Occasionally, your client will come to you with an idea they want to post about.

And sometimes you might think, “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

But don’t dismiss their ideas straight away.

Probe further.

This happened to me last week…

One of my clients told me they wanted to create a post about an event they’d been invited to speak at, but they didn’t want to invite anybody to attend.

I was super confused by this.

If we weren’t trying to get people to attend the event, what were we trying to achieve with the post?

So I started asking questions.

The more we spoke, the more I realized the event itself wasn’t really the point.

They wanted to demonstrate credibility.

They were being invited to speak at a reputable industry event, and they wanted their audience to see that they were increasingly being recognized as an expert in their field.

Once I understood the outcome they wanted, I could think about how to package the post.

And after probing a little further, we realized there was no problem with including the registration link either.

So we created the post.

But here’s the important lesson:

This post wouldn’t have happened if I’d simply dismissed the original idea because it didn’t immediately make sense to me.

…and I’d probably piss off my client by ignoring what they wanted.

As a ghostwriter, you’re going to have moments where a client proposes something that doesn’t fit neatly into your content strategy.

Sometimes, the problem isn’t the idea…

Maybe, you just don’t have enough context yet.

So ask:

• What do you want people to take away from it?

• What outcome are you hoping it produces?

• Why is this important to you?

When you understand the intention behind the idea, you can use your expertise to figure out the best way to execute it.

At the end of the day, it’s their content.

Your job isn’t to force every idea through your own definition of what good content should look like.

Your job is to understand what your client is trying to achieve and help them get there.

So when a client suggests something you don’t think will work, don’t immediately reject it.

Get curious first.

You might discover there’s a good idea underneath it.

Final thoughts

Becoming a better ghostwriter takes time.

I’d been writing professionally for years before I started ghostwriting, and I still had plenty to learn when I began writing for other people.

Two years later, I’m still learning.

There will always be another writing style you haven’t mastered.

• Another client who communicates completely differently from everyone you’ve worked with before.

• Another format worth experimenting with.

• Another writer you can learn from.

• Another way to extract a better idea from a conversation.

You’re never really finished developing your craft.

But improving doesn’t need to be complicated.

None of the tips I shared will transform your skills overnight.

But if you practice them consistently, you will:

• Develop better instincts.

• Recognize good ideas faster.

• Ask better questions.

• Become more adaptable.

And gradually, you’ll become much better at taking what’s inside somebody else’s head and turning it into something worth reading.

Which, ultimately, is what good ghostwriting is all about.

Thanks for reading!

One thing people don’t always realize about ghostwriting is that you’re not always starting from zero.

Sometimes, a client already has an audience.

This particular client came to me with around 8,000 LinkedIn followers.

On paper, it may sound like she already had an established personal brand.

But when I dug deeper, I realized many of those people weren’t necessarily following her because of her…

As part of my onboarding process, I audit a client’s LinkedIn presence before we start creating content.

One thing I review is their existing messages (with their consent, of course).

I want to understand:

• Why are people reaching out?

• What do they associate this person with?

• What are they asking them for?

• Why are they connecting in the first place?

When I looked through hers, I noticed a pattern…

A lot of people wanted jobs.

Which made complete sense.

My client had spent more than a decade working in senior roles across some of the biggest technology companies in the world.

And when we started working together, she held a senior position at another massive technology company.

Being attached to companies like that naturally attracts attention.

People wanted to connect with her because they wanted:

• A referral.

• An introduction.

• Career advice.

• Or potentially access to an opportunity inside the company.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean they cared about her (or what she had to say).

They cared about what she represents: an opportunity to access what they want.

In other words, if she left the company tomorrow, a lot of the attention would likely disappear with it.

That was the problem we needed to solve.

She had a big brand behind her.
My job was to build a big brand around her.

Over the following 13 months, we grew her LinkedIn audience from roughly 8,000 to 24,000 followers.

And here’s what makes that result particularly interesting…

She left the company just two months into our engagement.

So the vast majority of that growth happened without the big corporate brand sitting behind her.

In the remainder of this article, I’ll show you what drove it instead.

The client and where we started

Expertise certainly wasn’t a problem for this client.

She had spent more than a decade working in AI and had extensive experience shipping AI products at some of the biggest technology companies in the world.

She had also started mentoring and had several success stories from students who went on to achieve great things.

But during one of our initial calls, she admitted to me that writing wasn’t one of her strong points.

Despite knowing her subject area inside out, she didn’t feel confident taking what she knew and writing about it in a way that excited or interested people.

This is one of the main reasons she didn’t share content.

The other was that she lacked the time to get good.

She was already balancing a senior role, running her own business, and mentoring people on the side.

Could she have learned how to write compelling LinkedIn content herself?

Of course.

But becoming good at writing takes reps.

You have to:

• Write.

• Publish.

• See what resonates.

• Figure out what doesn’t.

• Learn how to structure ideas.

• Understand what makes somebody stop scrolling.

Then do it all over again.

She simply didn’t have the time or desire to go through that process.

And you could see this reflected in her LinkedIn activity.

Before we started working together, she posted sporadically.

Most of what she shared was announcements:

• A new role

• A presentation

• An event she was speaking at

• Something she or her company had launched

• A professional milestone

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of content…

But it meant very little of the expertise she’d accumulated over more than a decade was visible.

People could see where she worked.
They couldn’t necessarily see what she knew.

As I mentioned earlier, much of the attention she already had was tied to her corporate identity.

Her employer was effectively doing some of the branding for her.

And there’s nothing wrong with using that credibility to your advantage.

If you work at a highly respected company, you’d be stupid not to.

But it’s still borrowed credibility.

You don’t own the company you work for.
You don’t own your job title.
You don’t own the status other people attach to either.

So use it as an unfair advantage.

Just don’t let it become your identity.

Because once it’s gone, you may quickly find out how much of your audience was following you for the logo next to your name.

That being said, our job wasn’t simply to grow her from 8,000 followers to some arbitrary bigger number…

We needed to change the reason people followed her.

Instead of being known primarily for where she worked, we wanted her to become known for what she knew and how she could help people.

So we needed to take more than a decade of expertise sitting inside her head and package it into content people felt compelled to follow.

Here’s how we did it…

The strategy behind 16,000 new followers

Before I explain how we grew the account, there’s something important to understand:

Growing her following was never the primary goal.

My client had a business behind her personal brand.

She ran paid mentorship cohorts, and ultimately, we wanted LinkedIn to become an organic acquisition channel for those programs.

Followers were useful because they increased the number of relevant people we could reach repeatedly.

But I never wanted us optimizing purely for how to get more followers.

Here’s what we cared about:

“How do we attract the right people, build trust with them, and eventually direct some of that attention toward the business?”

The 16,000 additional followers were largely a by-product of doing that successfully.

Here’s how we approached it.

1/ We clarified the objective

It’s incredibly difficult to build a content strategy without a north star.

Because without one, you never know what’s working?

Just imagine a post generates 500 new followers but zero qualified leads.

Another generates 20 followers but three people interested in your offer.

Which one performed better?

The answer depends entirely on what you’re trying to achieve.

A clear objective gives you something to interpret feedback against and allows you to calibrate the strategy as you learn.

2/ We defined her content pillars

Once we knew what we were trying to achieve, we needed to decide what she should talk about.

This is where content pillars become useful.

Think of content pillars as the handful of subjects you want somebody to associate with you after repeatedly encountering your content.

You don’t want someone to read one post about AI product management, another about productivity, another about investing, another about leadership, and another about whatever happened to be trending that morning.

They might enjoy the individual posts.

But what are they supposed to remember you for?

We wanted someone to encounter my client three, four, or five times and gradually think:

“This is who I follow for AI product management.”

So we built recurring themes around her expertise, the problems her audience cared about, and the subjects that naturally connected to her mentorship.

This gave us boundaries without forcing us to write the same thing every week.

Note…

Repetition isn’t necessarily repetitive.

You can discuss the same subject through:

• Stories.

• Frameworks.

• Opinions.

• Mistakes.

• Tutorials.

• Observations.

• Case studies.

• News.

The subject remains consistent while the expression changes.

And that repetition gradually creates association.

3/ We updated her branding

Content could bring people to my client’s profile.

But once they arrived, the profile needed to finish the job.

Remember, she had already helped more than 1,000 students.

But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from looking at her LinkedIn profile.

Someone could enjoy a post, click her name, and still not immediately understand:

• Who she helps?

• What she helps them achieve?

• Why should I trust her?

• What should I do next?

So we cleaned everything up.

The new banner communicated who she helped and what she helped them with.

We updated the profile picture to fit the visual identity we were building around her brand.

The About section told her story, established her credibility, explained how she helped people, and gave interested prospects a next step.

The Featured section became valuable real estate for our CTAs and resources.

I wanted the profile to work almost like a landing page.

Content generated curiosity.

The profile converted some of that curiosity into follows, subscribers, and eventually potential customers.

Read more

I’ve been writing professionally for more than six years.

For the last two, I’ve made a living ghostwriting for other people.

During that time, I’ve watched AI go from something obscure, reserved for the most technical people in society, to a generalized tool accessible to anyone.

And it’s pretty damn good at generating content.

Initially, I thought this would be the end of my writing career.

But as time has gone on, more people have reached out to me for writing help.

My rates have increased.
The value of my client engagements has increased.

And ironically, I probably use AI more today than I ever have.

The last part might sound contradictory…

If AI is capable of doing more of the writing, why would somebody pay me to write for them?

Because I’ve gradually realized that physically writing the words was never the most valuable part of my job.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with letting AI help you write.

I do it.

But somebody still has to decide:

• What’s worth saying?

• What angle should we take?

• What belongs in the piece?

• What needs to be removed?

• How should the argument flow?

And once AI produces something, somebody still needs to format, refine, challenge, and reshape those words until they’re worth reading.

AI can do the writing.
But the writer still needs to provide the thinking and strategy.

So despite spending the last six years watching AI become exponentially better at writing, writers aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

Here are five reasons why:

Reason #1: AI doesn’t have lived experience

One of the biggest advantages you have over AI is pretty simple:

You’ve actually lived a life.

I’ve written about:

• Being made redundant

• Building a business

• Losing clients

• Making six figures

• Working 60+ hour weeks

• Burning myself out

• Making decisions that cost me money

• Making decisions that completely changed my life

AI can write about every single one of those things.

But it hasn’t experienced any of them.

It doesn’t know what it feels like to lose your income unexpectedly.

It doesn’t know the anxiety of wondering where your next client is coming from.

It doesn’t know what it feels like to achieve something you’ve spent years chasing, only to realize the reality looks nothing like what you imagined.

I do.

And those experiences influence how I write about them.

Now, there’s an obvious counterargument here:

“But I can just give AI my experiences as context.”

And you’re absolutely right.

In fact, this is exactly what I do when ghostwriting.

But I still have to spend time editing and revamping the content to fit the structure of the platform I’m writing on, which changes dynamically, and align it with the voice of the person I’m writing for.

This is partly why people still hire me to write for them.

AI might make the process faster, but doing it well still requires time and judgment.

Giving AI context doesn’t remove the need for a writer.

It changes what the writer is responsible for…

Instead of spending time physically putting words on a page, you can spend more time deciding:

• What parts of the experience are interesting?

• What details make the story believable?

• What should we leave out?

• What lesson should the reader take from it?

• How should we tell the story so it sounds like the person who experienced it?

AI can help you turn the raw material into words.
But the raw material still has to come from somewhere.

And the more AI-generated content floods the internet, the more valuable the raw material that isn’t perceived as AI-generated becomes.

So yes, you can absolutely give AI your lived experiences and let it help you write about them.

Matter of fact… You should!

But that doesn’t make the writer irrelevant.

If anything, it shifts the writer’s value away from generating words and toward:

• Extracting

• Interpreting

• Shaping

… experiences into something other people want to read.

AI can help write the story.

But somebody still has to live it, understand it, and know how to tell it.

Reason #2: Great writing requires taste

AI has made generating options ridiculously easy.

You can give it an idea and ask for:

• 20 different hooks

• 10 ways to structure an argument

• 5 analogies

• 10 different CTAs

• 3 completely different versions of the same post

And it’ll give you a response in seconds.

But this creates a new problem…

“Which one is good?”

This is where taste comes in.

After writing professionally for more than six years, I’ve written thousands of pieces of content.

Some performed incredibly well.
Others completely flopped.

I’ve written for myself.
I’ve written for clients.
I’ve written articles, social posts, emails, and plenty of things I’d probably be embarrassed to read today.

And all of those reps have gradually developed my ability to look at something and think:

“Nah, this isn’t it.”

Sometimes I can immediately explain why.

• “The hook gives away too much.”

• “The story takes too long to get to the point.”

• “The example doesn’t support the argument.”

• “The sentence sounds clever but adds absolutely nothing.”

Other times, something simply feels off.

That instinct is taste.

And the best way I know to develop it is through doing the reps.

You have to write things that flop.
You have to publish things you thought were incredible, only for nobody to care.
You have to look back at something you wrote two years ago and wonder, “What the hell was I thinking?”

You have to spend enough time writing, editing, and publishing to start recognizing the difference between something that technically works and something that’s actually good.

AI can certainly help you develop that taste.

But ultimately, somebody still has to make the final decision.

The easier it becomes to generate content, the more valuable it becomes to know what’s worth publishing.

Reason #3: AI doesn’t have a voice of its own

AI can get pretty damn close to sounding like you.

Give AI enough examples of someone’s:

• Previous writing

• Interview transcripts

• Opinions

• Stories

• Favorite phrases

• Writing preferences

…and it can produce something remarkably good.

I know because this is how I write most of the content for my clients.

But there’s an important distinction between replicating a voice and actually having one…

Your voice isn’t simply:

• Short sentences.

• Using certain words.

• Writing in a particular rhythm.

Those are expressions of your voice.

Your actual voice comes from things like:

• Your experiences.

• Your beliefs.

• Your opinions.

• Your values.

• Your personality.

• Your worldview.

Two people can experience exactly the same event and walk away with completely different interpretations of what happened.

This difference influences what they choose to say about it.

So when I start working with someone, I’m not only trying to understand how they write…

I’m trying to understand how they think.

• What do they believe that other people in their industry disagree with?

• What annoys them?

• What are they unwilling to compromise on?

• What experiences changed the way they see the world?

• What would they never say publicly?

Once I understand those things, recreating their voice is far easier.

And yes, I can give all of that context to AI.

In fact, I do.

But once again, AI is working with a voice that already exists.

It didn’t form the opinions.
It didn’t develop the beliefs.
It didn’t have the experiences that shaped the worldview.

It’s only helping me express them.

You still have to give it a voice worth replicating.

Reason #4: Even AI companies are hiring writers

If AI were about to make professional writers completely redundant, you’d expect the companies building the most advanced AI models to know before the rest of us.

Yet…

They’re still hiring humans to work on content.

In 2025, OpenAI advertised for a content strategist to help shape the voice and content strategy for ChatGPT.com.

The reported salary?

$310,000 to $393,000.

Think about the irony for a second…

The company behind ChatGPT, a product capable of generating more content in a day than I could write in several lifetimes, was willing to pay a human hundreds of thousands of dollars to help shape its content.

Why?

Obviously, it’s not because OpenAI doesn’t have access to AI.

And it’s probably not because nobody at the company knows how to prompt ChatGPT to write an article.

The value sits somewhere else.

Companies still need people who can decide:

• What should we talk about?

• Who are we talking to?

• What position should we take?

• How should the company sound?

• What stories are worth telling?

• What should never be published?

• How does all of this support the broader business?

Those are much bigger decisions than physically writing the words.

Anthropic’s hiring guidance gives us another clue…

When applying to the company, Anthropic tells candidates to create their first draft themselves and then use Claude to refine it.

The human provides the experience and thinking.
AI can help improve how it’s communicated.

That’s pretty damn close to the argument I’ve been making throughout this article.

Let AI help with the writing.
But give it something human worth writing about.

I don’t think any of this proves that every writing job is safe.

Far from it.

But if the companies building some of the most capable writing technology in the world still see enough value in human content professionals to hire them, it’s hard to argue that the profession simply disappears.

The job is changing.

The valuable part of being a writer isn’t how quickly you can put words on a page.

It’s everything you bring to the process before and after AI generates a piece of content.

Reason #5: You’re not being paid to write

This might sound strange coming from someone who makes a living writing for other people…

But clients don’t pay me to write.

They pay me because they want something to happen as a result of the writing.

They might want:

• More authority

• More visibility

• More leads

• More customers

• A stronger personal brand

• More time back

Writing is simply the mechanism I use to help them get there.

It took me years to understand this.

Before becoming a ghostwriter, companies would hire me because they needed an article.

I wrote the article.
They published it.
I got paid.

The article itself was the product.

And for that reason, I was constantly compared against other people who could produce the same thing.

AI has made that problem even worse.

Because it can produce content remarkably well, significantly faster, and for a fraction of what a professional writer would charge.

So don’t waste your energy trying to prove you can write better than AI.

Focus more on what the person on the receiving end gets from hiring you to write for them.

Because the more commoditized writing becomes, the more important the outcome becomes.

AI WILL replace this…

Now, I don’t want this article to give you the wrong idea.

I’m not saying AI won’t replace any writing work.

Because it already has.

And it will continue to put pressure on writers whose work is:

• Generic

• Formulaic

• Easily replicated

• Primarily informational

• Produced without much original thinking

AI has made producing that kind of content significantly cheaper and faster.

And I don’t think pretending otherwise helps writers.

The writers most vulnerable to AI aren’t necessarily bad writers.

They’re writers whose primary value is producing something AI can now produce faster and cheaper.

How writers should adapt

Don’t try to compete with AI.

Use it.

Let it help you research.
Let it generate drafts.
Let it give you options.
Let it restructure your ideas.
Let it make you faster.

But as AI takes over more of the execution, you must become more valuable elsewhere.

This means moving up the value chain.

From writing → thinking

Don’t just turn somebody’s idea into words…

Help them figure out what’s worth saying.

From information → experience

Anyone can generate information.

Bring stories, observations, lessons, and experiences that aren’t sitting inside a generic prompt.

From execution → judgment

AI can give you endless options.

Develop the taste to know which ones are worth using.

From generic content → distinctive ideas

Don’t compete on who can produce another perfectly acceptable article.

Develop opinions, perspectives, and ideas people associate with you.

From selling words → selling outcomes

Stop thinking purely about how many articles, emails, or posts you can produce.

Think about what those things help the person paying you achieve.

AI is going to keep getting better.

There’s no point wasting your energy fighting that.

Let AI make the writing easier.

Then become exceptionally good at everything surrounding it.

Final thoughts

AI is going to get better at writing.

There’s not much point pretending otherwise.

The models I use today are significantly more capable than the ones I was experimenting with a few years ago.

And I fully expect the models I use a few years from now to make today’s versions look primitive.

But this doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it used to…

Because the better AI gets at producing words, the more I realize that physically writing them was only one part of what made a writer valuable in the first place.

You still need:

• Experiences worth sharing

• Taste to recognize what’s good

• A voice worth listening to

• An understanding of what people care about

• A reason for the writing to exist in the first place

AI can help with all of those things.

And I think writers should let it.

I certainly will.

But I don’t think the future belongs to writers who refuse to use AI and insist on doing everything manually.

Nor do I think it belongs to people who outsource the entire process to AI and publish whatever comes back.

It belongs to the people who learn where AI is better than them and where they still need to add value.

So am I worried AI will change writing?

Absolutely.

It already has.

But am I worried that nobody will need writers anymore?

Not particularly.

Because generating words is becoming incredibly easy.

Being worth reading is still hard.

Thanks for reading!

Before becoming a ghostwriter, I’d written 600+ articles.

Some generated hundreds of thousands of views.
Some helped me build an audience of tens of thousands of people.

And some helped me land opportunities to write for companies like NVIDIA, DataCamp, and Neptune.ai.

By most measures, I knew how to create content that people wanted to read.

But I never knew how to connect the content I created directly to sales.

For most of my writing career, that wasn’t my responsibility.

A company hired me to write an article.
I wrote the article.
They published it.
I got paid.

What happened after that wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about.

So when my third ghostwriting client reached out to me in late May 2025, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I could help them achieve their goal.

But I took on the challenge anyway.

I began experimenting with ways to do more than simply get people to consume what we published.

I wanted to turn that attention into action.

By the time we looked at the numbers, the sales opportunities generated through our work had created a pipeline worth $1,161,250.

This experience changed the way I thought about ghostwriting.

Because I finally understood how valuable writing could become when it wasn’t treated as the end product.

It could become the starting point for generating business.

And in this article, I’m going to show you exactly how we did it.

The client and where we started

My client already had plenty of expertise.

She’d spent more than a decade working at Fortune 500 companies and had extensive experience leading AI initiatives and delivering AI products to a mass audience.

Eventually, she decided to turn that experience into a business.

She started a company teaching other people how to lead, build, and deliver AI products.

And the business was already making money.

At the time we started working together, it was generating around $20,000 per month.

There was just one problem...

Around $12,000 of that was going straight back into paid ads.

Paid acquisition was essentially keeping the customer pipeline alive.

There wasn’t much of an organic presence to pick up the slack.

And this created another problem…

Despite having more than a decade of legitimate experience, she didn’t have much of a presence online to prove it.

Potential customers couldn’t spend an afternoon reading her ideas.

They couldn’t scroll through months of content and get a sense of how she thought.

They hadn’t built the familiarity that comes from repeatedly seeing someone demonstrate their expertise.

So when it came time to buy, some people simply weren’t sure whether they could trust her.

She told me she frequently found herself giving discounts to get people over the line.

That was what she wanted LinkedIn to change.

She wanted to build a personal brand that gave her more credibility online and allowed potential customers to develop a relationship with her before reaching out.

So from the beginning, our objective was bigger than “grow my LinkedIn,” even though we achieved that too.

We wanted to use content to build enough familiarity and trust that LinkedIn could start generating leads for the business organically.

The long-term goal was even more ambitious:

This was where we started.

An experienced AI professional.
A business already generating revenue.
A customer acquisition system that worked.

But far too much dependence on paid traffic.

My job was to help build the organic alternative.

How we turned LinkedIn content into a $1,161,250 sales pipeline

Before I explain the strategy, let me clarify what I mean by sales pipeline.

For this case study, I calculated pipeline by taking:

The number of leads we generated × the price of my client’s offer

So $1,161,250 does NOT mean we generated $1,161,250 in revenue.

It represents the potential value of the leads we brought into her business.

And specifically, I wanted to generate warm leads.

People who:

• Already knew who she was

• Had consumed some of her expertise

• Had demonstrated enough interest to give us their contact information

There was just one problem...

LinkedIn is rented land.

You can build a huge audience there, but you don’t own the relationship with those people.

And LinkedIn controls the distribution.

One post might reach thousands of people.
The next might reach a fraction of them.

If somebody stops seeing your content, nurturing that relationship becomes difficult.

So I proposed that we build something we owned:

An email list.

Once somebody joined, we could communicate with them directly and nurture that relationship at our own discretion.

But obviously, we needed to give people a reason to hand over their email address.

So I suggested we create an email course.

I wanted the asset to be something valuable enough that giving us an email address felt like a no-brainer.

I like to think of this exchange as a “purchase of $0.”

They weren’t giving us money.

But they were giving us something valuable in return: their contact information.

And importantly…

Since the goal was to convert these leads into paying customers, the email course couldn’t be some random freebie designed purely to collect emails.

It had to act as a precursor to my client’s paid offer.

So here’s how we built it…

Read more

For four long years, I thought the reason I wasn’t making much money as a writer was simple:

I needed to become a better writer.

So I focused on:

• Telling better stories.

• Writing better hooks.

• Explaining complicated ideas simply.

• Writing daily to get the reps in.

And eventually, I became pretty damn good.

Good enough to write for companies like NVIDIA, DataCamp, and Neptune.ai.
Good enough to build an audience of 40,000+ across platforms around my writing.
Good enough to become one of the highest-earning writers on Medium.

But I still wasn’t making much money from clients.

At one point, I was working 60+ hours per week and making around $2,000 per month from client work.

Meanwhile, I’d see writers online who, in my opinion, weren’t significantly better than me making considerably more.

This confused the hell out of me.

How could I have all this experience and still be earning so little?

Eventually, I realized I’d been trying to solve the wrong problem.

I didn’t need to become a better writer.
I needed a better offer.

At the time, clients essentially paid me to produce things.

An article.
An ebook.
A whitepaper.

If I wanted to make more money, I needed to produce more stuff.

And since there are only so many hours in a day, there was always going to be a ceiling on how much I could earn.

So in 2024, I became obsessed with finding a way to make more money using the writing skills I already had.

That search eventually led me to executive ghostwriting.

But simply becoming a ghostwriter wasn’t what changed everything…

Building a better offer did.

Instead of selling writing, I learned how to package my skills around an outcome executives cared about.

I changed:

• Who I sold to.

• What I sold.

• How I packaged it.

• What I was willing to charge for it.

The following year, I made $100,000+ in 8 months with just 3 clients.

Same fundamental skill.
Completely different economics.

So in this article, I’m going to break down the executive ghostwriting offer that made that possible.

The goal is to help you understand the principles behind it and use them to build an offer people are willing to pay a premium for.

What is a ghostwriting offer?

Before I show you how I built my offer, we need to establish what an offer is.

Because your ghostwriting service and your ghostwriting offer are NOT the same thing.

Your service is what you do.

For example:

“I write LinkedIn content for executives.”

Your offer is how you package that service to make somebody want to buy it.

This includes things like:

• Who you help

• The problem you solve

• The outcome you help them achieve

• How you help them achieve it

• What they receive

• How much they pay

• Why they should choose you

Think about it like this...

Two ghostwriters could have exactly the same writing ability.

Ghostwriter A says:

“I’ll write 12 LinkedIn posts for you every month.”

Ghostwriter B says:

“I’ll help you turn your expertise into a LinkedIn presence that positions you as one of the go-to experts in your industry, without you spending hours creating content yourself.”

They could both end up writing the exact same 12 posts.

But they’re not selling the same thing.

The first is selling content.
The second is selling a desirable outcome and using content to produce it.

That distinction completely changed the way I thought about making money as a writer.

For years, I thought the value was in the thing I created.

So naturally, I priced based on how much I had to write or how much work the project required.

But with ghostwriting, I started thinking about:

”What is this writing worth to the person buying it?”

Because an executive doesn’t necessarily want LinkedIn posts.

They want what having a strong LinkedIn presence could potentially give them:

• More authority.

• More visibility.

• More opportunities.

• More customers.

• More influence.

And they probably want all of this without spending hours every week creating content themselves.

That’s what your offer needs to package.

So the simplest way I think about a ghostwriting offer is:

Ghostwriting offer = Who + Outcome + Mechanism + Deliverables + Price

The writing is still important.

But writing is simply the vehicle you’re using to help somebody get somewhere they already want to go.

The offer I was selling before ghostwriting

Here’s the funny thing...

Before ghostwriting, I didn’t really have an offer.

I just made it known that I wrote articles about AI.

That was basically my entire business development strategy.

People would discover my work, reach out, and say something along the lines of:

“Hey, we need someone to write articles about [INSERT TOPIC IN AI]. How much do you charge?”

I had a price.

They either accepted it or they didn’t.

And for a while, this was okay.

I was getting paid to write.
I was working with reputable companies.
And I was building a solid portfolio.

But eventually, I ran into a problem when I wanted to take my business to the next level…

There was a ceiling on what people were willing to pay me.

Why?

Because what I was selling had become commoditized.

From the client’s perspective, they needed articles.

I happened to be someone capable of writing them.

But there were thousands of other writers who could also produce articles about AI.

So whenever somebody thought my price was too high, they had a very simple alternative:

Find another writer who would do it cheaper.

And they often could.

This meant I was constantly being compared to other writers on things like:

• Price per article

• Price per word

• Number of articles

• Turnaround time

Notice what’s missing?

The outcome.

Nobody was buying a specific business result from me.

They were just buying an article.

When the thing you’re selling looks similar to what hundreds of other people are selling, price becomes one of the easiest ways for buyers to compare you.

This put me in a race to the bottom.

Because there’s almost always someone willing to write more for less.

I could become a better writer.
I could build a stronger portfolio.
I could work with bigger companies.

In fact, that’s what I did…

And all of those things helped me charge more.

But eventually, I hit another ceiling because the fundamental thing I was selling hadn’t changed.

I was still selling writing.

This was one of the biggest realizations I had when I started studying ghostwriting.

If I wanted to dramatically increase what clients were willing to pay me, I couldn’t just change the price.

I had to change what they believed they were paying for.

How I built my executive ghostwriting offer

Once I realized I needed to change what clients believed they were paying for, I started rebuilding my offer from the ground up.

I focused on four things:

1. Choosing the right people to sell to

The first thing I changed was who I was selling to.

Previously, I was selling articles to companies.
With ghostwriting, I started selling directly to executives.

This matters more than you might think.

Because the exact same service can be worth completely different amounts to different people.

Think about it...

A junior employee probably isn’t going to pay thousands of dollars every month to build their personal brand.

Why would they?

The potential return simply isn’t high enough.

But for a:

• Founder

• CEO

• Consultant

• Investor

• Senior executive

...their reputation can directly affect their career or business.

A stronger personal brand could potentially help them:

• Generate leads

• Attract employees

• Build industry authority

• Get speaking opportunities

• Grow their company

• Build relationships with influential people

Suddenly, content becomes much more valuable.

This is why choosing your customer is such an important part of building your offer.

You want to solve a problem for somebody who has both the desire and financial incentive to solve it.

For me, there was another advantage.

I already had years of experience in AI.

I’d written hundreds of articles about the space and worked with companies like NVIDIA, DataCamp, and Neptune.ai.

So rather than starting from scratch, I focused on executives in a world I already understood.

This meant I could speak their language.

I understood their audience.

And I had years of work proving I wasn’t some random writer who decided yesterday that AI was a lucrative niche.

I matched an expensive problem with people who had a reason to pay to solve it.

That was the first piece.

2. Selling the outcome

The second change was probably the most important.

I stopped selling content.

Remember my old offer?

People came to me because they needed an article.

So that’s what they paid for.

With executive ghostwriting, I started thinking about what executives actually wanted from content.

Nobody wakes up excited about having another LinkedIn post.
They want what the post could potentially do for them.

For the people I wanted to work with, that meant things like:

• Authority.

• Visibility.

• Trust.

• Leads.

• Opportunities.

And they wanted those things without spending hours every week staring at a blank Google Doc.

So that became the offer.

The writing was simply how I helped them get there.

In other words, the writing became a deliverable that supported the outcome rather than the reason someone should buy.

This made price comparisons harder.

If I sold 10 LinkedIn posts, a prospect could easily compare my price against someone else selling 10 LinkedIn posts.

But since I was selling an outcome, the conversation became more about, “How much is this outcome worth to me?”

And this gave me room to build a significantly more valuable offer.

3. Making it hard for prospects to say “No”

Now I had the right customer and a valuable outcome.

The next problem I had to solve was:

“How do I make achieving that outcome feel as easy as possible?”

This is where I had to start thinking beyond writing…

Executives are busy.

The last thing they want is to hire me and discover I’d simply given them another job to manage.

So I tried to remove as much friction as possible.

Instead of expecting clients to constantly send me fully formed ideas, write briefs, figure out strategy, or tell me exactly what to post...

I took responsibility for as much of the process as I reasonably could.

The exact deliverables changed as I improved the offer.

But the principle remained the same:

Make getting the outcome through you easier than getting it without you.

I also started thinking about objections.

If someone thought:

“I don’t have time.”

How could the offer require less of their time?

If they thought:

“It won’t sound like me.”

How could I build voice capture into the process?

If they thought:

“I don’t know what to talk about.”

How could I take responsibility for finding and developing ideas?

Every objection was an opportunity to improve the offer.

Essentially, a strong offer should:

• Solve a problem your target prospect actually cares about

• Help them reach a valuable outcome

• Require as little effort from them as reasonably possible

The clearer you make each of these, the harder it becomes to say “No” to your offer.

4. Charging what the offer was worth

This was probably the hardest part for me psychologically.

Because I’d spent years thinking like a freelance writer.

• How many words?

• How many articles?

• How long will this take me?

Then I’d calculate a price based on the answers.

But I figured that logic doesn’t make sense if I’m selling the outcome, instead of what the prospect thinks will get them a desired outcome.

So I had to start asking a different question:

“How much was someone I serve willing to pay to get the results I deliver?”

When I first started ghostwriting, asking somebody for thousands of dollars every month felt like a lot of money.

So naturally, I wanted to price lower.

But my discomfort had nothing to do with the value of the offer.

It was simply the largest amount I was accustomed to asking for.

As I got results, accumulated case studies, improved the offer, and understood the value I was creating, I became more comfortable charging accordingly.

My prices have increased 150% since I started.

And it’s not because I became 150% better at putting words together.

The offer became better.
The proof became stronger.

And I’m far more confident in the value of the problem I’m solving.

This was the final piece that changed the economics of my writing business.

I wasn’t trying to squeeze more money out of the same commoditized service anymore…

I had changed:

• Who I served

• What they were buying

• How easy I made it to get the result

• What I charged for solving the problem.

And once those four pieces came together...

I no longer needed dozens of clients to build a six-figure business.

Why I stopped at 3 clients

I’d spent years working 60+ hour weeks as a writer.

The whole reason I wanted to make more money was so I could enjoy more of my life.

What would be the point of building a six-figure business if I had no time to enjoy the money I was making?

So here are 3 reasons I cap my client load at 3 at a time:

I decided 3 clients was enough

Could I physically work with more than three clients?

Absolutely.

But there’s a difference between your maximum capacity and your ideal capacity.

I wanted time to:

• Travel

• See my friends & family

• Work on my own content

• Build other parts of my business

• Do absolutely nothing sometimes

Every new client would slowly eat away at those things.

Three gave me the balance I wanted.

I could give each client enough attention to produce great work without feeling like my entire life revolved around deadlines, calls, and revisions.

I focused on making each client more valuable

Capping my capacity at 3 clients at a time forced me to think differently about growth.

If I wanted to make more money, each client had to become more valuable.

Part of that meant improving my offer.

As I became better at understanding what clients wanted, I could:

• Remove unnecessary work

• Improve the parts that contributed most to the outcome

• Charge more for the value I provided.

The other part was using scarcity to create exclusivity.

Since I only have 3 spots available at any given time, when one opens up, availability is genuinely limited.

Once that spot is gone, it’s gone.

And since I’m not spreading myself across 10+ clients, each person knows they’re going to get a significant amount of my attention.

So limiting my capacity doesn’t just protect my time…

It also increases the perceived value of my service.

I optimized for retention

Making each client more valuable doesn’t mean much if they’re constantly leaving.

If I had to replace one of my three clients every couple of months, I’d still spend a ridiculous amount of time selling.

So I became increasingly focused on retention.

This meant doing the obvious things well:

• Delivering consistently.

• Understanding what each client cared about.

• Making their life easier.

• Improving the service based on their feedback.

And most importantly…

Continuing to give them a reason to stay.

At the time of writing, my most recent client was onboarded 14 months ago.

What I’d do differently if I started again

Building this offer completely changed my writing business.

But I definitely didn’t get everything right.

Looking back, there are three things I’d change if I had to build the offer again from scratch:

Establish strict boundaries early

When I landed my first few ghostwriting clients, I was terrified of losing them.

I’d finally found a way to make significantly more money from my writing skills, and I didn’t want to screw it up.

So whenever a client asked for something, I said “Yes.”

None of these requests seemed like a big deal.
But they accumulated.

Slowly, more and more of my time started disappearing into things I’d never agreed to do when the engagement started.

And eventually, I started resenting my clients.

It took a lot of soul-searching for me to realize the clients weren’t really the problem.

I was.

I’d trained them to believe that anything they asked for was included because I never told them otherwise.

So if I started again, I’d establish strict boundaries from day one.

Always write a contract, and in it, define:

• What’s included

• What’s not included

• How revisions work

• How and when we communicate

• What happens when something falls outside the scope

Being a great service provider doesn’t mean saying yes to everything.

You need boundaries to protect your time.

Charge more sooner

My current prices are 150% higher than when I started.

At the time, the lower price made sense to me…

I was new to ghostwriting.
I didn’t have much proof.

And asking someone for thousands of dollars every month felt uncomfortable.

But once I started getting results, I probably waited too long to adjust my prices.

Because people were willing to pay for the results I delivered.

So if I started again, I’d still begin at a price I felt a little uncomfortable selling.

And once I had evidence the offer worked, I’d raise it.

I’d make my offer simpler from day one

This is probably one of the easiest mistakes to make when building a service offer…

I assumed:

More stuff = More value.

So I kept adding things.

But a lot of those additions barely moved the needle for my clients.

They didn’t meaningfully improve their results.
They didn’t contribute much to their bottom line.
And in most cases, clients barely cared about them.

But guess who still had to deliver everything?

Me.

I created more work without adding much value.

So if I were to start again, I would include the smallest number of things required to produce the desired outcome exceptionally well.

Nothing more.

Final thoughts

For years, I thought the path to making more money as a writer was becoming a better writer.

And yes...

You need to be good at what you do.

But there comes a point where improving your writing by another 10% isn’t going to double your income.

Changing your offer might.

That’s what happened to me.

I stopped selling something that was easy to compare and started thinking more deeply about:

• Who I wanted to serve

• What outcome they wanted

• How I could make achieving it easier

• What solving that problem was worth

And the economics of my writing business completely changed.

I went from working 60+ hours per week for roughly $2,000 per month in client work...

To making $100,000+ in 8 months with just 3 clients.

But perhaps the biggest lesson wasn’t the money…

It was realizing that more revenue doesn’t have to mean more work.

You don’t necessarily need:

More clients.
More deliverables.
More hours.

Sometimes you need to make what you already do more valuable.

So if you’re a writer struggling to increase your income, don’t automatically assume you need to become better at writing.

Take a look at what you’re selling.

You might just have an offer problem.

Thanks for reading!

I started writing online in 2020.

At the time, I wasn’t trying to build a business…
I was simply sharing what I was learning about AI.

But as my audience grew, something unexpected happened...

An AI startup in San Francisco reached out and asked me to write for them just two days after being made redundant.

This was the moment I realized I could earn a living writing online.

So I went all in.

Over the next 4 years, I wrote for companies like:

• NVIDIA

• DataCamp

• Neptune.ai (which was later acquired by OpenAI in a deal reportedly valued under $400M)

On paper, things were going great.

But financially? Not so much.

I was working 60+ hours per week and making around $2,000 per month from client work, plus another $1,000 or so from the Medium Partner Program.

Meanwhile, I kept seeing writers online making significantly more money while seemingly working far less.

It pissed me off.

Clearly, writing wasn’t the problem…

How I was monetizing my writing was.

So in 2024, I became obsessed with answering one question:

How can I make more money while working fewer hours using the writing skills I already have?

That’s when I discovered ghostwriting.

I spent the year learning everything I could about the business.

How ghostwriters positioned themselves.
What they sold.
Who they sold it to.
How they priced their services.

And eventually, I completely changed my offer.

The following year, I made $100,000 in 8 months.

Same fundamental skill.
Completely different business model.

And that’s why I’m writing this article…

Because if you’re already a decent writer, you probably don’t need to spend another 5 years getting better at writing before you can make good money.

You need to learn how to package that skill into something valuable to people who can afford to pay for it.

So in this article, I’m going to show you exactly how I’d become an executive ghostwriter today...

Even if I’d never ghostwritten before.

What is executive ghostwriting?

Before we get into how to become an executive ghostwriter, let’s clarify what you’re getting paid to do…

Executive ghostwriting is NOT simply:

“Writing content for someone who doesn’t have time to write.”

That’s part of the job.
But it goes much deeper.

An executive ghostwriter helps someone with valuable expertise communicate their ideas under their own name.

Think:

• Founders

• CEOs

• Investors

• Consultants

• Senior executives

• Industry experts

These people usually have years of knowledge, stories, opinions, and experience sitting inside their heads.

The problem is they either:

• Don’t have time to turn those ideas into content

• Don’t know how to communicate them effectively

• Don’t understand how different content platforms work

• Or simply don’t enjoy writing

That’s where you come in.

Your job is to extract what they know and package it into content that sounds like them.

For example, an executive might tell you a 15-minute story about how they nearly destroyed their company by hiring too quickly.

You:

• Identify the lesson.

• Extract the strongest details.

• Understand their perspective.

Then turn the conversation into a LinkedIn post, newsletter, article, or whatever format you’ve agreed to produce.

They publish it under their name.
You get paid for creating it.

Hence the term ghostwriter.

The content is published under somebody else's name, while your involvement typically remains behind the scenes.

But here’s the important distinction...

You’re not being paid because you can type words onto a page.

You’re being paid because you can take someone’s messy thoughts and turn them into clear ideas worth paying attention to.

The executive brings the expertise.
You make that expertise consumable.

And the better you become at:

Extracting ideas → understanding their voice → packaging their expertise → creating compelling content

...the more valuable you become as an executive ghostwriter.

The different types of ghostwriting

Now that you know what executive ghostwriting is, there’s something else you need to understand:

Not all ghostwriters do the same thing.

The fundamental job remains the same.

You extract somebody else’s expertise and communicate it in their voice.

But what you create with that expertise can look completely different depending on the type of ghostwriting you specialize in.

For example, you could become a:

Social media ghostwriter

You create short-form content for platforms such as:

• LinkedIn

• X

• Instagram

• Threads

This is where I’d recommend most beginners start.

The content is relatively short, you can practice publicly by writing for yourself, and you don’t need a client to start building proof that you understand the platform.

Newsletter ghostwriter

You write emails that executives send directly to their audience.

These could include:

• Educational newsletters

• Personal essays

• Industry commentary

• Company updates

Newsletter ghostwriting usually requires stronger long-form writing skills because you have more space to develop an argument, tell stories, and explore ideas.

Article ghostwriter

You write long-form articles published under the executive’s name.

These might appear on:

• Their personal blog

• Their company website

• Publications

• Platforms like Medium or Substack

This is actually how I developed many of the skills I use as a ghostwriter today, even though I wasn’t technically ghostwriting.

If you Google my name alongside some of the companies I’ve worked with, you’ll find articles I wrote for them.

The process was similar…

I’d take someone else’s expertise, research, and ideas and turn them into compelling long-form content.

The difference was that my name was attached to the work.

Speech ghostwriter

You help executives communicate their ideas verbally.

Think:

• Keynotes

• Conference talks

• Company presentations

• Award speeches

• Internal communications

The writing has to sound natural when spoken rather than read, which makes this a slightly different skill from writing social content or articles.

Book ghostwriter

This is probably the form of ghostwriting most people traditionally associate with the profession.

An executive has the expertise, experiences, or story.

You help turn it into a book published under their name.

These projects are significantly larger and can take months to complete, so I wouldn’t recommend starting here unless you already have strong long-form writing experience.

But here’s the important part...

You don’t need to do all of these.

In fact, I’d recommend the opposite.

Choose one.
Get ridiculously good at it.

Then expand later if your clients need you to.

For me, that eventually became social media ghostwriting, particularly LinkedIn.

And that’s the approach I’m going to focus on throughout the rest of this article because it’s one of the easiest ways to start building your skills, getting proof, and finding executive clients.

Step 1: Write for yourself

Before you write for somebody else, write for yourself.

This is probably the single most important thing I did before becoming a ghostwriter.

Remember, I started writing online in 2020.

I published around 500+ articles under my own name before anybody ever paid me to ghostwrite for them.

And although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was building the skills I’d eventually sell.

Every time I published something, I learned a little more about:

• What makes people click

• What keeps people reading

• How to explain complicated ideas simply

• How to tell better stories

• What makes an idea resonate

• How to develop my own writing style

More importantly, I got feedback.

Sometimes that feedback was good.

Other times, I’d spend hours writing something I thought was incredible...

And nobody gave a shit.

But that’s how you learn.

You need somewhere to make mistakes before somebody is paying you not to.
And your own content is the cheapest place to make them.

This is also why I don’t think you need ghostwriting clients before calling yourself a ghostwriter.

You need proof you can write content people want to consume.

When I eventually started selling ghostwriting, I wasn’t approaching people as somebody who had decided three weeks ago that writing sounded like a good way to make money.

I’d already:

• Spent years writing online.

• Built an audience.

• Written hundreds of articles.

• Worked with reputable brands.

My own body of work made trusting me significantly easier.

Of course, you don’t need to spend 4 years doing this before getting your first client.

That’s overkill.

But if you’ve never written online before, I’d strongly recommend becoming your own first client.

Choose the platform you eventually want people to pay you to write on.

Then start publishing.

Don’t wait until you feel qualified.

Your first 10 posts might suck.
Your first 50 might suck.

That’s fine.

You’re collecting reps.

Because there’s another benefit to writing for yourself that most aspiring ghostwriters overlook...

You experience the platform as a creator.

You learn what it’s like to stare at a blank page.
You learn what happens when a post flops.
You learn what gets people talking.
You learn which ideas look good in your head but die when they reach the feed.

And eventually, you develop the instincts that no course can give you.

This matters when an executive starts paying you.

Because they’re no longer hiring someone who has merely studied content.

They’re hiring someone who has created it, published it, failed with it, succeeded with it, and learned from the feedback.

So before you worry about finding clients...

Become your first one.

Write for yourself.

Step 2: Learn the fundamentals of the platform you write on

Being a good writer doesn’t automatically make you good at writing for a specific platform.

Let me explain…

When I first started writing online, Medium was my main platform.

I’d publish long-form articles there and share them on LinkedIn.

This worked pretty well.

My audience on both platforms grew quickly, and eventually, people started reaching out to work with me.

But there was something I didn’t realize at the time…

I wasn’t actually good at LinkedIn.

Most people who followed me there had discovered my writing somewhere else first.

They’d read one of my Medium articles.
Or they’d seen something I’d written for a client.

LinkedIn was essentially the place they came to find me afterward.

So when client work started piling up in 2022, I ditched it since it wasn’t producing much for me directly.

Fast-forward to 2024...

I started learning about ghostwriting and realized LinkedIn was probably the easiest place for me to break into the industry.

There was only one problem:

I hadn’t mastered the platform.

So instead of immediately trying to convince executives to pay me to write their LinkedIn content...

I came back and spent roughly 3 months writing for myself.

I studied things like:

• What makes somebody stop scrolling

• How LinkedIn posts are structured

• Which topics generate conversations

• How formatting affects readability

• What types of stories perform well

• How people use comments to distribute their content

• What separates a good LinkedIn post from the rest

Please don’t skip this step.

Every platform has its own “language.”

A great Medium article probably won’t work if you copy and paste it onto LinkedIn.
A great LinkedIn post won’t necessarily work on X.
And a great X thread won’t automatically make a great newsletter.

The fundamentals of writing remain largely the same.

But the packaging and consumption behavior change.

This is why you must learn the “language” of whichever platform you plan to sell as a service.

Study the people who consistently perform well there.
Pay attention to what they repeatedly do.
Publish your own content.
Look at the feedback.
Form hypotheses.
Test them.
Repeat.

This is exactly what I did when I returned to LinkedIn.

And after roughly 3 months of learning the platform by using it... I landed my first ghostwriting client.

The point I want you to understand is this:

Don’t charge someone to be your experiment.

Learn the fundamentals with your own content first.

Because when an executive pays you to write for them, they’re not just paying for your ability to write.

They’re paying for your understanding of how to make writing work on the platform where their reputation is being built.

They want results!

And if you haven't figured out how to get results for yourself, you're going to have a much harder time getting them for somebody else.

Step 3: Choose the type of executives you want to work with

Once you understand the platform, you need to decide who you want to write for.

This is where your existing experience becomes incredibly valuable.

When I started ghostwriting, I didn’t randomly decide to write for executives in AI.

I’d already spent years writing about:

• Artificial intelligence

• Machine learning

• Data science

• Technical concepts

I’d also written for companies like NVIDIA, DataCamp, and Neptune.ai.

So AI was the obvious choice.

I understood the industry
I understood the terminology.
I understood the types of conversations happening within it.

And most importantly...

I had proof.

If an AI founder was considering hiring me, they didn’t have to take my word for it when I said I understood their world.

They could look at hundreds of articles I’d already written.

My content became evidence of my expertise.

This gave me a massive advantage over approaching an executive in an industry I knew absolutely nothing about.

Imagine two ghostwriters approach an AI founder.

The first says:

“I’m a ghostwriter and I’d love to help you create content.”

The second has spent three years working in and writing about AI, built an audience around the subject, and produced work for recognizable companies in the industry.

Assuming their writing ability is similar...

Who feels like the safer choice?

Exactly.

This is why I recommend starting with what you already know.

Look at your:

• Subjects you’ve spent years learning

• Professional experience

• Existing network

• Education

• Hobbies

• Skills

Then ask yourself:

“Which type of executive would value what I already know?”

Maybe you spent 10 years working in finance.
Write for finance executives.

Maybe you’ve spent your career in SaaS.
Write for SaaS founders.

Maybe you’re a personal trainer who happens to love writing.
Write for fitness entrepreneurs.

Your existing knowledge reduces the amount you need to learn before you can understand your clients and their audience.

But what if you don’t want to write about anything you already know?

There’s another option...

Choose something you’re genuinely eager to learn about.

You don’t need decades of experience in an industry before you’re allowed to write about it.

But you do need enough curiosity to immerse yourself in that world.

Read the books.
Follow the industry.
Study the terminology.
Consume the podcasts.
Talk to people working in it.
Write about what you’re learning.

Because you’re going to spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about whatever industry you choose.

You might as well find it interesting.

This makes extracting their ideas easier because you’ll be able to ask intelligent questions.

And better questions lead to better insights.
Better insights lead to better content.

That’s the advantage of understanding your client’s world…

You don’t have to be the expert.

But you need to know enough to have an intelligent conversation with one.

Step 4: Package your ghostwriting offer

Now you know:

• What platform you’re writing on

• How that platform works

• Who you want to write for

The next step is figuring out what you’re going to sell them.

This is where I went wrong for years…

When I was making around $2,000 per month from client work, I essentially sold my ability to write.

A client needed an article? I wrote it.
They needed an ebook? I wrote that too.

The more money I wanted to make, the more writing I had to do.

And this is how I ended up working 60+ hours per week.

When I discovered ghostwriting, I realized the writers earning significantly more than me weren’t necessarily better writers.

They were better at packaging their writing skills into an offer people were willing to pay more for.

This is an important distinction.

Executives don’t wake up thinking:

“I really need someone to write 12 LinkedIn posts for me this month.”

They think about what those posts could help them achieve.

Maybe they want to:

• Generate inbound leads

• Get invited onto podcasts

• Attract talented employees

• Become known in their industry

• Build trust with potential customers

• Create opportunities for their company

The content is the deliverable.
The outcome is what makes the deliverable valuable.

So instead of selling:

“I’ll write 12 LinkedIn posts per month.”

You could package an offer around helping an AI founder become recognized as an authority in their industry using LinkedIn.

The posts are simply the mechanism you use to help them get there.

Once I understood this, my earnings skyrocketed.

Because I stopped selling writing as the end product and started packaging it around a result my clients cared about.

At minimum, you must define:

1/ Who you help

Be specific about the type of executive you work with.

2/ What outcome you help them pursue

What does having a stronger presence do for them?

3/ How you help them achieve it

This is your service.

It could include:

• Strategy

• Idea extraction calls

• Content creation

• Editing

• Publishing

• Engagement

• Analytics

4/ How the engagement works

Decide:

• How often you’ll speak

• How much content you’ll produce

• How revisions work

• What you need from them.

Then package everything together into one clear offer.

And please don’t make the mistake of stuffing 25 deliverables into it because you think more stuff makes your offer more valuable.

It usually creates more work for you.

I know because I’ve done it.

The goal is to create the smallest collection of services required to produce the outcome you’re promising.

Remember:

You’re trying to escape the trap of getting paid based purely on how many words you can produce.

So don’t build yourself another job where earning more automatically requires working more.

Package your writing around a valuable problem.

Once somebody sees you as the person who can help them achieve an outcome rather than simply the person who writes their posts...

Your writing becomes significantly more valuable.

Step 5: Tell your friends/acquaintances first

Now you’ve got an offer.

You need someone to buy it.

And when you’re starting out, I wouldn’t waste months building complicated funnels or sending hundreds of cold DMs.

Start with people who already know you.

That’s exactly how I landed my first two ghostwriting clients.

My first client was someone I’d known for around 2-3 years.

One day, I published a post about using content in a way that was directly relevant to what he was trying to achieve.

He reached out.

We started talking about the post, and during the conversation, I mentioned that I could help him create his content.

He agreed.

Just like that...

I had my first ghostwriting client.

No cold outreach.
No fancy sales funnel.
No elaborate proposal.

The second client happened slightly differently.

Again, this was someone I’d known for a few years.
We’d even met in person after connecting through LinkedIn.

I sent him a DM explaining that I’d started ghostwriting for people in his space.

The pitch was simple:

I could take content creation off their plate so they could spend more time focusing on the things only they could do.

But I didn’t ask him to become a client…
I just asked whether he knew anybody who might need my help.

His response?

“Yeah, me.”

And that’s how I landed client number two.

There’s an important lesson here.

When you’re new to ghostwriting, your existing relationships are an unfair advantage.

A stranger has to answer several questions before hiring you:

• Can this person actually write?

• Can I trust them with my ideas?

• Do they understand my industry?

• Will they deliver what they promised?

• Are they going to disappear after I pay them?

Someone who has known you for years already has answers to many of those questions.

You’ve built trust before you ever tried selling them anything.
You don’t have to manufacture credibility from scratch.

So make a list of everyone you know who could either:

A) Benefit from your ghostwriting service.

Or:

B) Know someone who could.

Friends.
Old clients.
Former colleagues.
People in your industry.
People you’ve met online.
People you’ve built relationships with over the years.

Then tell them what you’re doing.

You don’t need some elaborate pitch.

Something as simple as:

“Hey, I’ve started helping AI founders turn their expertise into LinkedIn content so they can build their reputation without spending hours writing every week. Do you know anyone who might find that useful?”

That’s enough to start conversations.

Notice you’re not begging them to hire you.

You’re simply making sure people know:

What you do.
Who you do it for.
What problem you solve.

Nobody can hire or refer you for something they don’t know you do.

You might already have your first ghostwriting client sitting somewhere in your network.

They just don’t know you’re a ghostwriter yet.

Step 6: Turn results into case studies

Once you’ve started getting results, document them.

And they don’t necessarily have to be client results.

Your own results count too.

If you’ve:

• Grown an audience

• Generated inbound leads

• Built a newsletter

• Created a viral post

• Turned content into business opportunities

…that’s proof you understand what you’re selling.

In fact, using your own results is probably the easiest place to start.

But I had a slight problem here.

When I returned to LinkedIn, I already had an audience from my years writing about AI.

But now I was talking about completely different things:

• Content strategy

• Personal branding

• Thought leadership

• Growing a business through content

A large percentage of my existing audience simply wasn’t interested.

So my posts weren’t generating ridiculous numbers of likes or impressions.

And I couldn’t exactly approach a potential client saying:

“Look at how many impressions my LinkedIn posts get!”

Fortunately, I had something much more valuable...

Client results.

As I started getting results for the people I worked with, I documented everything.

The before and after.
The analytics.
The growth.
The inbound opportunities.
The posts that performed particularly well.
The business outcomes the content contributed to.

Then I turned those results into case studies.

Essentially, my first few clients gave me the opportunity to create proof.
This proof made landing future clients significantly easier.

Because instead of saying:

“I can help executives build their authority on LinkedIn.”

I could say:

“Here’s exactly what happened when I did it for someone like you.”

Huge difference.

One is a promise.
The other is evidence.

This is also why you shouldn’t obsess over follower counts when you’re trying to become a ghostwriter.

Yes, having a large audience can help.

But your audience is only one form of credibility.

Maybe your proof is your own content.
Maybe it’s your audience growth.
Maybe it’s the opportunities your content generated.
Maybe it’s what you’ve achieved for clients.

Use whatever legitimate evidence you have.

Then, as you get better results, replace weaker proof with stronger proof.

This creates a simple cycle:

Get a result → Document it → Turn it into a case study → Use it to win better clients → Get better results → Repeat.

This is how you gradually reduce the uncertainty of hiring you.

The more results you get, the less time you need to spend convincing prospects to hire you.

Your results do the convincing for you.

Step 7: Raise your prices

Once you have proof you can deliver results, start raising your prices.

But I wouldn’t obsess over finding the “perfect” price when you’re starting out.

I certainly didn’t.

When I landed my first ghostwriting client, my biggest problem wasn’t figuring out what the market would pay.

It was having the confidence to ask somebody for a significant amount of money.

I’d never sold ghostwriting before.

So asking someone to hand me thousands of dollars every month for it felt uncomfortable.

Instead of pretending otherwise, I started at a price I felt confident asking for.

Since then, I’ve increased my price by 150%.

Not because I suddenly became 150% better at writing…

I became more experienced.
I accumulated more proof.
I understood my clients better.

And most importantly…

I became more confident in the value I was providing.

That’s why I wouldn’t tell you to immediately copy what established ghostwriters charge.

Start with a number you can confidently say without feeling like a fraud.

But there’s an important caveat...

It still needs to be worth your while.

Don’t charge $500 per month simply because you’re scared nobody will pay you more.

Remember what executive ghostwriting involves.

You’re:

• Learning how somebody thinks

• Extracting their expertise

• Capturing their voice

• Developing ideas

• Writing and editing content

• Helping build their reputation

That takes time.

And if you massively undercharge, you’ll need more clients to earn a decent living.

More clients means more calls.
More revisions.
More deadlines.
More context switching.
More work.

Before you know it, you’ve recreated the exact problem ghostwriting was supposed to help you escape.

So start with a price that makes the work worthwhile and that you feel comfortable asking for.

Then earn your way up.

Get results.
Build case studies.
Improve your process.
Become better at solving your clients’ problems.

And as your confidence and proof increase...

Raise your prices.

You don’t need to become the most expensive ghostwriter in your industry overnight.

You just need to make sure your price grows alongside the value you can prove you provide.

Final thoughts

Ghostwriting completely changed the economics of writing for me.

Before I discovered it, I already knew how to write.

I’d spent years publishing online.
Built an audience.
Written hundreds of articles.
Worked with reputable companies.

But I was still working 60+ hours per week and wondering why other writers seemed to be earning significantly more while working less.

The problem wasn’t my writing ability.

I simply hadn’t learned how to package that ability into something more valuable.

Executive ghostwriting gave me a way to do that.

And if I had to start again today, I wouldn’t overcomplicate it.

I’d:

1. Write for myself.

2. Master the platform I want to write on.

3. Choose executives in a space I understand.

4. Package my skills into a valuable offer.

5. Tell people who already know and trust me.

6. Turn every result into proof.

7. Raise my prices as my confidence and credibility grow.

That’s it.

You don’t need years of ghostwriting experience before somebody will pay you.

I didn’t have any when I started.

What you need is the ability to write, enough understanding of your client’s world to communicate their ideas properly, and proof that you can create something worth paying for.

The rest comes from doing the work.

Your first client gives you experience.
Experience gives you results.
Results give you proof.
Proof gives you confidence.

And confidence allows you to charge more.

That’s how I went from discovering ghostwriting in 2024 to making $100,000 in 8 months the following year.

So if you’re already a good writer wondering how to make more from your skills...

You might not need to become a better writer.
You might just need a better way to sell what you already know.

Thanks for reading!

I almost never wrote the post that made my ghostwriting client $14,452 in 24 hours.

We had already published 3 posts about the new workshop my client was promoting, and they all flopped.

With only 5 days until the workshop, we’d sold just 3 seats.

But all of them were alumni from my client's cohort course, so we had effectively sold none.

I was genuinely worried my client would pull the plug on our partnership.

This was my highest-paying client, so it would’ve been a massive hit to the bank balance.

I called an emergency meeting to prevent this from happening…

During the call, my client told me she had spoken to someone earlier that day, and they didn’t even know a workshop was happening.

I was confused.

How the hell did they not know?

We’d posted about the workshop THREE times already.

So I went back and reviewed the posts.

That’s when it all made sense…

There were 4 major problems.

1. The visuals had nothing to do with the workshop.

2. The hooks didn’t indicate the workshop at all.

3. The content created zero intrigue around it.

4. And I’d buried the workshop in a P.S. at the bottom.

So I scrapped everything I had queued.

My goal was to write a post that made it impossible to miss that we’re running a workshop.

I wrote the first post.
Got it approved.
Published it.

And 24 hours later…

12 more seats were sold.

By the end of the week, the workshop was sold out.

I went back through the post afterward to understand what made the difference.

It came down to 5 things.

That’s what I’m going to break down in this article.

Read more