I’ve been a broke writer, struggling to make ends meet.
To the point where I had to move my entire life from London, UK, to my parents’ retirement home in Accra, Ghana, to give my writing business a chance of survival.
And I’ve been (and currently am) a high-earning ghostwriter.
Having experienced both sides, I can confidently tell you (with my chest puffed out) that the biggest difference comes down to one thing...
Understanding what makes a writer money.
The broke writer thinks she needs to be a better writer.
The high-earning writer knows she needs to be a decent writer. But she also knows she needs to stack other skills to make serious money from her writing.
This is what took me from struggling, living in my parents’ retirement home, to my new apartment in the Dubai skyline.
As I write this, I’m soaking up some Dubai sun next to the Jacuzzi on my balcony, shisha in hand.
But let’s not get carried away...
The point I’m making is that being a good writer is not enough to make you a highly profitable ghostwriter.
If you want to make a lot of money ghostwriting, you’re going to have to learn 7 other skills and stack them on top of your existing writing skills.
Here are those skills:
1/ High-ticket offer creation
The sooner you understand this, the sooner you’ll start making serious money as a ghostwriter.
You’ve got to become a pro at creating offers that people want.
What is an offer? A proposal to exchange value.
For the first 3 or so years of my business, my offer was simply to give the buyer my writing skills in exchange for their coin.
But this had natural limits on it for two main reasons:
A lot of people can write, so supply is high. And when buyers see writers as interchangeable, they tend to compete on price, which drives prices down.
When you’re selling writing as a deliverable, rather than a solution to a significant problem, it’s harder for buyers to understand why they should pay you more.
To break through these limitations, make a better offer to buyers.
How so?
You’ve got to deeply understand what they want and then give it to them.
“Sell what people want to buy,” as Gary Halbert would put it. No wonder he was one of the highest-earning copywriters ever.
Now, you might be thinking, “But they bought your writing, which means they obviously wanted it,” and you’re not wrong.
But remember...
When you’re selling writing as the product, you’re often forced to compete on price.
And the lower your prices, the more clients or deliverables you need to take on to make a decent living.
That’s fine if you’ve got the systems and resources to handle high volume.
But as an independent/solo ghostwriter, you probably don’t want to spend every waking hour glued to your laptop or notebook just to pay the bills.
That’s why I believe learning to create high-ticket offers is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.
The key is learning how to connect your writing to a problem someone is already willing to pay good money to solve.
That is what lets you command premium fees.
You’ve got to stop thinking exclusively about what you can write and start thinking about what your writing can help people achieve.
I’ve written an article to help you out with that...
2/ Free consulting
To be a high-earning ghostwriter, you’ve got to learn how to strategically give away information... for FREE.
This is one of the easiest ways to get a stranger to trust you enough to pay you thousands of dollars.
You help them solve a problem with no strings attached; they entrust you to solve more.
Now it finally makes sense why we had to sing, “Give, and it will come back to you, pressed down, shaken together, and running over,“ during collection time at church.
Anyway...
I call this skill free consulting.
It's the art of helping someone solve a problem for free, with the hope that they'll eventually pay you to solve more.
In Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, he calls this the rule of reciprocation.
It states that humans are deeply wired with an internal obligation to repay what another person has provided.
But let’s take it one step further...
Gestures that are tailored specifically to the person and delivered unexpectedly carry a much stronger psychological weight than generic or transactional help.
So if you want to be more convincing with your free consulting, you’re better off personalizing it to the person you’re helping.
Study their profile.
Read their content.
Understand what they’re trying to achieve with their business.
Then identify something you could help them improve.
Whatever it is, give them something useful they can apply.
You want to give them a taste of your expertise.
This doesn’t mean you should spend three days building an entire content strategy for someone who hasn’t paid you.
Give them enough value to demonstrate that you understand their problem and can help them solve it.
Then let them decide whether they want you to solve it for them.
I’ve used this approach to help turn strangers into paying ghostwriting clients.
And I’ve written an entire article explaining how I do it here...
3/ Sales
I relied on inbound leads and referrals for the first 4 years of my business because I was terrified of the idea of sales.
But I hated how dependent it made me on other people...
Don’t get me wrong, there were moments when it was cool.
Like when a friend from San Francisco reached out saying NVIDIA wanted to work with someone like me.
We ended up working together for around 10 months.
But there were also times when it sucked.
Like when one of my other clients changed their pay model from per word to per project, and it slashed my earnings in half overnight.
By the way, both of these pricing models were terrible.
But my point is I didn’t know how to get new business when that happened because I didn’t know sales.
And this brings me to my core argument...
You can be the best ghostwriter in the world, but if you can’t convince someone to part ways with their hard-earned cash, you’re going to struggle to make money.
If you’re running a ghostwriting business, you’re in the business of sales.
That’s why you’ve got to learn how to sell (even if you don’t look at yourself as the sales type).
Now, here’s something I wish someone had told me earlier...
Sales isn’t about manipulating people into buying things they don’t need.
It’s about understanding someone’s problem, educating them on what’s preventing them from getting what they want, and recommending a solution.
Or in short... helping people to help themselves.
That’s it.
Once I started looking at sales this way, it became a lot less intimidating because I genuinely got a good kick out of helping others reach their goals.
I just had to become better at understanding people’s problems.
A bit like a doctor...
You know... when you visit a doctor, they don’t immediately start prescribing medication before understanding what’s wrong with you.
They ask questions.
They investigate your symptoms.
They try to understand the root cause of your problem.
And only then do they recommend a treatment.
This is the same way you’ve got to approach selling your ghostwriting services.
The more you understand their situation, the easier it becomes to connect your offer to something they want.
Some will have objections.
That’s part of sales.
So you’ve got to learn how to understand what’s behind those objections and address them without getting defensive or desperate.
Here’s a simple structure you can follow on your next sales call:
Understand their current situation. Find out what they’re doing now and why they’re considering hiring a ghostwriter.
Identify their problem. Understand what’s not working and what it’s costing them to leave the problem unsolved.
Clarify their desired outcome. Find out what they actually want to achieve and why it matters to them.
Recommend your solution. Explain how your ghostwriting offer could help them get from where they are to where they want to be.
Ask for the next step. Address their concerns, explain what working together looks like, and ask whether they’re ready to proceed.
Of course, there’s a lot more to sales than these five steps.
But if you can master the art of asking good questions, listening carefully, communicating value, and confidently asking for someone’s business, you’ll already be ahead of many writers.
And perhaps more importantly...
You’ll no longer have to sit around waiting for someone to give you an opportunity to make money.
You can go out and create those opportunities yourself.
4/ Delivery & client management
I've bundled these two together because, in my experience, you can't consistently deliver a great service without managing the client relationship properly.
Anyway, getting clients makes you money.
Keeping them is what helps you build a sustainable ghostwriting business.
And one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a ghostwriter is thinking that writing great content is enough to keep clients happy.
I learned this the hard way with one of my earliest ghostwriting clients.
When we started working together, I was so focused on keeping them happy that I pretty much agreed to everything they asked for.
I thought I was being a great service provider.
But what I was doing was teaching my client that my time had no boundaries.
And before I knew it, I was doing work that wasn’t part of our original agreement.
There’s a name for this...
Scope creep.
It’s when the amount of work you’re expected to deliver gradually increases without a corresponding increase in what you’re being paid.
And it’s one of the easiest ways to turn a seemingly profitable ghostwriting client into an unprofitable one.
Being a great ghostwriter doesn’t mean you must say “yes” to everything.
It means delivering what you promised so exceptionally well that your clients feel they're getting more than they paid for.
And to do that consistently, you need systems.
I’m talking about a repeatable process for delivering your services.
For example, in my ghostwriting business, I’ve developed systems that allow us to produce 50+ pieces of content per week without having to figure everything out from scratch every Monday.
We have processes for:
Gathering information
Developing content
Managing revisions
Keeping work moving.
We also seek to underpromise so we can find plenty of opportunities to delight our customers.
A great client experience is about making the entire process as easy and predictable as possible.
Your clients shouldn’t have to chase you to find out what’s happening.
This means communication, reliability, and expectation management are just as important as the writing you provide.
To add to that, the more you can anticipate what your clients need, the less time you’ll spend reacting to problems.
If you’re just getting started, here are five things I’d recommend having in place:
Onboarding: Have a defined process for understanding your client’s goals, audience, brand voice, offers, and expectations before you start writing.
Deliverables: Clearly document what you’re responsible for producing, how much you’ll produce, and what’s outside the agreed scope.
Communication: Agree on how you’ll communicate, how often you’ll provide updates, and when clients can expect responses.
Approvals: Establish a process for submitting drafts, collecting feedback, handling revisions, and getting content approved before publication.
Reporting: Regularly show clients what you’ve delivered, what’s working, what isn’t, and what you recommend improving.
None of this is particularly complicated.
But you’d be surprised how many ghostwriters overlook it.
The better you get at this, the easier it becomes to retain clients, earn referrals, and build a business that doesn’t constantly depend on finding someone new to pay you.
5/ Pricing models
How you charge for your writing can be just as important as how much you charge.
My first ever client paid me $0.10 per word.
So to make $10,000 per month, I would need to write 100,000 words.
Obviously, I wasn’t thinking about making $10,000 a month when I accepted because I had just been made redundant.
But I quickly realized this was a terrible trade-off.
So with my next client, I negotiated to be paid per hour.
This was also a bad trade because as I learned their platform more and more, I got faster at writing their content.
Basically, I was being punished for being better.
The next pricing model was per project.
I thought this would’ve been good, but my client took weeks to approve my work, and they would sometimes ask for the most ridiculous revisions after I submitted.
I eventually settled on a pricing model that accounted for EVERYTHING that went into delivering my service, rather than just the time I spent writing.
You can learn more about it in the article below.
Nowadays, I do more value-based pricing with my clients, where I charge a low fixed fee plus royalties for sales I help to make.
That way, my earnings aren’t exclusively tied to how much content I produce or how many hours I work.
They’re also tied to the commercial value my work helps create.
Now, there’s another skill closely related to pricing that I think every ghostwriter should understand...
Business model creation.
Your business model determines how you make money in the first place.
And once you’ve built a profitable ghostwriting service, you can explore other ways to monetize your expertise.
For example:
A service-based business: Earn money by providing ghostwriting, content strategy, and other done-for-you services to clients.
A product-based business: Package your expertise into digital products, templates, courses, or educational resources you can sell repeatedly.
A performance-based business: Earn royalties, commissions, or revenue shares based on the commercial results your work helps generate.
The more you understand these models, the more options you’ll have for generating revenue without relying exclusively on writing content.
6/ Upselling & downselling
I constantly go on about making $100,000+ from just 3 clients.
This has only been possible because I’ve upsold these customers numerous times.
For example, I had a client I was doing LinkedIn ghostwriting for.
Eventually, I sold her on the idea of creating a free lead magnet so she could own her audience.
This was the first upsell.
The second upsell was ghostwriting emails to move her prospects closer to a sale.
A similar thing has happened with my other ghostwriting clients.
Upselling and downselling are paramount to scaling as a ghostwriter because it’s easier to get someone who’s already paid you to give you money again.
Why?
Because you’ve already established trust.
Since they already know what it’s like to work with you and have experienced your expertise, they’re more likely to trust you with solving another problem, given you delivered on your past promises.
But there’s an art to upselling.
You’ve got to become good at identifying additional problems your existing customers have and offering them solutions they’re willing to pay for.
If I’d initially tried to sell a lead magnet to a client with no internet presence, she probably would’ve said no.
But I upsold her in a way where each additional service helped support the original objective.
Now, let’s talk about downselling.
This is when someone is interested in working with you but isn’t willing or able to pay for your main offer.
Instead of losing the opportunity altogether, you offer them a smaller solution at a lower price.
For example...
Let’s say your main offer is a $5,000 LinkedIn ghostwriting package.
A prospect loves what you’re offering but doesn’t have the budget.
You could offer them a one-off content strategy instead.
Basically, you’re reducing the scope to match what they’re paying.
Here’s a simple exercise I’d recommend...
Take your main ghostwriting offer and identify:
One core offer: The main service you want to become known for.
One upsell: An additional problem you could solve for someone who buys your core offer.
One downsell: A smaller problem you could solve for someone who isn’t ready to buy your core offer.
And as you work with more clients, pay attention to the problems they keep bringing up.
Those problems could become your next offers.
But remember what I said earlier about learning how to create offers...
You’ve got to learn how to sell people what they want.
The more problems you can solve for the right people, the more opportunities you’ll have to make money without constantly chasing new clients.
7/ Personal branding
Before I became a ghostwriter, I’d written over 600 articles.
Some generated hundreds of thousands of views.
Others helped me build an audience of tens of thousands of people.
And a few helped me land writing opportunities with companies like NVIDIA, DataCamp, and Neptune.ai.
So by most measures, I was doing pretty well as a writer.
But I still struggled to get people to pay me well for it.
And that’s because they didn’t associate my writing skills with solving a specific problem.
In other words, personal branding is about becoming known for solving a specific problem for a specific group of people.
Many people confuse this with getting as many people as possible to follow them (as I did), so they end up creating a ton of content about anything and everything that might get attention.
Speaking as someone who's made this mistake before, I can hands down tell you that being known by a lot of people isn’t the same as being known for something valuable.
You could have 100,000 followers and struggle to land a single ghostwriting client.
Meanwhile, someone with 2,000 followers could be making $10,000+ per month.
Not because they’re necessarily a better writer.
But because the right people understand exactly what they can help them achieve.
That’s the difference between building an audience and building commercial authority.
And if your goal is to make serious money ghostwriting, I’d encourage you to focus on the latter.
This means you have to become intentional about what you want people to associate you with.
The content you create
Who you collaborate with
The conversations you participate in
... must tie back to the problem you solve for others.
This way, by the time someone reaches out, they already have a clear understanding of what you do, how you think, and how you can help them.
Which makes selling your services a heck of a lot easier.
So to clarify...
You don’t need to become the most popular ghostwriter on the internet.
But you do need to become the obvious choice for the people you want to work with.
Final thoughts
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this article, it’s this...
Your ability to write well is only one part of what determines how much money you can make as a ghostwriter.
I spent years thinking that becoming a better writer was the answer to my financial problems.
And don’t get me wrong...
You should absolutely work on improving your writing.
But at some point, you’ve got to realize that you’re not just a writer.
You’re running a business that happens to sell writing services.
And that means you’ve got to become good at all the other things that make a business profitable.
Creating offers people want.
Finding and converting customers.
Delivering an exceptional service.
Pricing your work profitably.
... And becoming known for solving problems people are willing to pay you good money to solve.
Now, I’m not suggesting you try to master all seven skills overnight.
Heck, I’m still improving at them myself.
But I’d encourage you to identify the one skill that’s currently holding you back the most.
And make it your priority to improve.
Because sometimes... the difference between a struggling writer and a highly profitable ghostwriter isn’t the quality of their writing.
It’s everything they’ve learned to do with that writing.
If you’re serious about building a highly profitable ghostwriting business...
I write about everything I’m learning from building mine, including the strategies that worked, the mistakes that cost me money, and the lessons I wish I’d learned sooner.
Subscribe to Stackedwize and I’ll see you in the next one.
Thanks for reading!