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!