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!