Ghostwriting Jobs For Beginners: These 5 Pay The Most (In 2025)

My name is Nicholas Cole. I'm one of the highest paid ghostwriters in the world. And today we're going to talk about the best ghostwriting jobs for beginners. So if you have any interest in getting into ghostwriting, these are the services that I would recommend that you start with. Okay. Most people, when they hear ghostwriting, they think of ghostwriting books. I would encourage you to stay very far away from ghostwriting books. I've done this throughout my career. I've ghostwritten a handful of books. They were always my least profitable projects. They always took the longest. They were the most mentally taxing. So instead, these are the ghostwriting jobs that I encourage beginners to start with. All right, so the first one is ghostwriting educational email courses. Now, what is an educational email course? Well, I'll show you if you go to startwritingonline.com this is the educational email course that we have set up for our beginner writing program. Ship 30 for 30, for example. And we have these educational email courses as the opt ins for pretty much every one of our business verticals. Now why is an educational email course such a great service to offer? Well, first of all, it incorporates a ton of different skills. Okay. When you set up an opt in, you're not just getting paid to write, you're really getting paid to come up with what's the offer? How do I make it enticing for someone to type in their email? How do I actually assemble the information? How do I drip out value across three, four, five days throughout the email course? How do I subtly nudge people to maybe book a call or buy a product or buy a service? Right. Of other skills that are wrapped inside of building an educational email course for a company. And if you can build an educational email course, well, congratulations, because now you have 10 different skills that you can monetize for the rest of your life. Okay, so whenever beginners ask me, what should I offer? Where are their good ghostwriting gigs, good jobs, like what? What should I do? You actually want to think less about the job and you want to think more about what does the business need. And every single business wants more potential customers. And so if a customer goes to a company's website and they don't have an opt in, then the business never actually knows that that person was there. Right? Person goes to the website, they scroll around, they don't know, they click back, they go back to TikTok or whatever they were doing before. They don't type in their email. And now the business has no way of Reaching them. So one of the most valuable things that you could provide a business is creating some sort of valuable opt in. Now historically what people will do is they would either say subscribe to my newsletter. Which if you just say subscribe to my newsletter, that's basically like saying type in your email and I'm gonna hit you up whenever I want. No one's excited to do that. There's a reason why all those websites that just say subscribe to my newsletter, the opt in rates of those are 1% or less. It's very, very low. Okay. Another way that people typically get customers to opt in is they might put together some sort of PDF download, maybe like an industry white paper, or they put together a bunch of stats inside some sort of download around industry trends. It might be a cheat sheet, it might be a check, right? They assemble a bunch of things. But still a lot of the problem that happens is yeah, sure, they assemble a valuable download, but they don't do a good job framing the value, right? So it just says, you know, click here to download our checklist. But that's not really selling the potential customer on the value that they're going to get out of typing their email. So there's usually an offer problem. Why we love educational email courses is because a, it's actually a lot easier to create really valuable offers because when you frame something as here's a free course, right, it feels really tangible. People are excited to type in their email. Most people don't realize our opt in rate on this page is north of 50% depending on how warm the traffic is. If there, if there's a congruency between, you know, I write about digital writing on X or LinkedIn, for example. Someone sees that digital writing post, they go over here, they type in their email, it's congruent with that. The opt in rate here could be as high as 70% right? Now compare that to the 1% of subscribed to my newsletter. So you're capturing, you know, 50, 70 times more potential customers. Massive. And so educational email courses are extremely tangible. They're actually very easy to create offers around. And then the beauty is that as you share and deliver the information in the course, right, you're sharing it via email. And each email you're sending the person, you're basically training them to open your emails, right? So after someone goes through an educational email course, well, the second thing that you could help them do is start a newsletter. So this is the second job. This is a big opportunity that I point out for People all the time. So whether or not you have an opt in, the whole point, the whole game of running a business, and more and more businesses realize this every single day, the whole game is I want to know all the people that have their hand raised saying I might be interested. And that's what you should think of an email list as. Okay? An email list is really just a bunch of people with their hand raised saying, I might be interested, okay? And when you have a ton of people that are all saying, I might be interested in this thing, I might be interested in your product and your service, maybe even just your category or industry in general, right? When you have that list, what you want to do is you want to continue following up with them and giving them more and more value over time. So a lot of times when people start a newsletter, you know, or they say, should I start a newsletter or I'm going to start a newsletter, they don't even know what the purpose of the newsletter is. And let me tell you the purpose. The purpose is that the more times that you not just follow up with someone, not just stay top of mind, but the more that you deliver something valuable to them, the more likely they are to become a customer. Now, the problem is that the vast majority of businesses and creators actually don't understand this concept. So most people think, no, if I share too many things for free, they're not going to buy my product or service. And I have generated over $20 million in sales across my various writing businesses over the past however many years. Five, six, seven, eight years. That is wrong. I'm telling you that it's wrong. The more that you give away for free, the more that people associate that value with you, the more likely they are to become a customer. So what a newsletter really is, is it's not just you staying top of mind, it's you continuing to educate the prospect on. Here's another thing that you didn't know. Here's another question that you might be asking yourself. Here's another outcome that I know is valuable to you and you don't know how to unlock it. Here's a checklist on how to do that. Here's a framework, here's a step by step guide. The more things that you give that potential customer, the more likely they are to then become a customer later on. Okay? And so every business, not only do they need help attracting potential customers, but then once they have their email, well, you don't just never want to talk to them again, then they need to follow up with them. And the follow up isn't just, hey, by the way, we're still here. Buy my product, buy my service. The follow up is, here's another thing that I can help you with. Here's another thing that you didn't know how to to do. Here's another problem that you weren't even aware of, that now I've educated you on that is the purpose of a newsletter. So you want to think of an educational email course. This is really about attracting potential leads and then starting a newsletter is really about retaining and educating them, right? And the beauty, beauty is that email newsletters and just having an email list in general are vehicles that compound. So every year the email list grows, the list of potential customers grows, which increases the likelihood that you will convert a subset of those customers that that next year. Right? So it's a vehicle that grows over time. Now, both of these things are really crucial and I think these are two of the most in demand jobs for ghostwriters and today. And you do not have to be an expert. Like, these are very basic skills that anyone can learn, okay? And to be perfectly honest, ChatGPT and Claude and AI can help you a lot with the execution. Now, a question that I get asked all the time, isn't AI just going to kill these jobs? AI is just going to take over and it shows a misunderstanding, okay? Because all of these different things that you're writing, you really aren't just getting paid to write, you're getting paid to go through a bunch of different things, right? If someone who doesn't understand any of these frameworks goes to ChatGPT and just says, I want to start a newsletter, ChatGPT is like, great, but there are so many other steps that it needs to be part of, right? You need to come up with the name of it, you need to come up with the framing. What industry are you in? Who's the target reader? What problems do they have? What benefits are you going to help them unlock? How do you make this more tangible? How often are you going to send the email? When are you going to send the email? How are you going to a B test the subject lines? There are so many skills involved in this. And I don't want to say, you know, AI is never going to touch them. AI is probably going to touch every facet. But you are the conductor, you are the editor in chief. You still need someone to orchestrate all of these things. And that's my big point of view for writers is that AI isn't going to just take these Jobs away. AI is going to become your best friend because all of these things still need to be built. You don't want to just get paid to write. You want to get paid to write and construct the offer and come up with the strategy and write it and test it and iterate on it. Right? That's how you make the most money as a writer and especially as a ghostwriter. But then there's a third service. And the third service, if we just walk through the logic here, a company needs to attract leads, right? So they need some sort of opt in. Once those leads are on an email list, they want to nurture those leads, which is a newsletter. But then becomes a question, well, what about the number of leads that are going through that system? Because now we need traffic, right? So you have social media ghostwriter. And this is where a ghostwriter gets hired to create content. Now there is a lot of misunderstanding about what this service is, what it entails, how it works. Okay? And I can tell you, I've done, I can't tell you how many different projects of social media ghostwriting for people. I've charged upwards of 10, 20 grand a month to go straight. Social content for CEOs and founders. I built my entire agency. I generated millions of dollars. Creating this was like before X and LinkedIn became the hot platforms. We were using Quora and Medium and LinkedIn, back when it had articles, we would just write 800 word articles and thought leadership articles. Now can you still do that? Yeah, sure. I think that would be a fourth service. That's great. Thought leadership articles, there's certainly still demand for that. But I think the social media aspect, especially on platforms like X and LinkedIn, is where you have the most opportunity. Right now those are the two highest performing platforms, they're the largest, they give the best distribution. Other platforms like Quora and Medium have really fizzled out. Back in its heyday, Quora and Medium had crazy distribution. Now It's X and LinkedIn. And you know, five years from now it might be a different platform. The platforms always change, but the rules of the game don't. And when you get into social media ghostwriting, there's a lot of different ways of thinking about it. But the simplest way to think about it is that you are trying to scale someone else's insights. Okay, so you're usually working with a founder, a business owner, maybe even an investor. When I was building my agency, we worked with angel investors, we worked with venture capitalists, we even worked with Grammy winning musicians and Olympic athletes. We worked with everybody and what you want to. The way to think about this is you're working with someone smart, you're working with someone that has a bunch of expertise in an industry and all you're doing is you are extracting their insights and breaking them apart into lots of different text based content. Okay? And there's a bunch of different ways that you can get there. If someone already has content created, maybe they've written a book, maybe they've written a bunch of books, maybe they have a podcast, maybe they're a speaker and they have a bunch of keynote recordings, right? In some way, they've already created a lot of the things thinking a really underrated one is maybe they've created a bunch of materials inside their company that they don't publicize, they don't share publicly, but they've created a bunch of training materials inside their company that actually crystallizes all their insights really, really well. All of these are different ways of taking thinking that has already been done. And then you, as the ghostwriter would go, I'm going to go through your book, I'm going to go through your podcast, I'm going to go through your keynote speeches and I'm going to start breaking it apart. You could break it into individual tweets, you could break it into LinkedIn carousels, you could break it into 800 word thought leadership article. Right? Another way is if someone doesn't have content created, which was the vast majority of clients that I worked with, I'd say it was probably 30% had stuff I could already pull from, 70% was, I have nothing. But I want to build my personal brand. I want to build myself into a thought leader. In that case, what you're doing is you're doing recorded interviews. And so once a week, once every other week, you might get 30 minutes with the founder, the investor, the business owner, whoever the client is, you jump on the phone, you'd ask them a series of questions and they would answer. You're recording the call the whole time, by the way, when I did this, I generated millions of dollars doing these calls basically manually. Okay? We would record the call and then we would have to ship the transcription off to an overseas company and they would send us back the transcription in text form. So we had to pay other people to do it. Now you can just download Fathom and have all of it immediately after the call. It's so much more efficient, right? AI is your friend, AI is not your enemy. And so you talk with the founder, whoever the client is, you ask Them questions you're basically trying to come up with, what are the different long form posts that I want to get out of this call? So you're asking very targeted questions so that you extract the content that you need, you record it, because they're going to say a bunch of smart stuff that you're not going to have time to take notes on. So you want to have the recording going. And then afterwards. I actually like thinking of ghostwriting not as writing, but as editing and whittling down. Because what happens is you would take the transcript and then you're basically first removing all the tangents, removing all the, I don't know, like all the random things that they say and then you zero in on. Okay, right here is where they share this framework. I'm going to take this framework out, I'm going to. I'm going to expand it by formatting it based on whatever thing you're writing. If you're writing a Twitter thread, for example, that has different formatting than a LinkedIn carousel, which has different formatting than an 800 word thought leadership article, right? So depending on the thing that you want to assemble, you're sort of expanding it into that format and then you're looking for the pockets. And wherever there's missing content, you either go back and ask them, hey, you know, I would love to slot a story in here about the first time that you did this. Do you have a quick story you could share with me? They could send you a voice note, you could hop on another call, they could send you an email and just summarize it. Or if you see a pocket, you might be able to fill it in yourself. You're like, oh, this section would be a lot more supportive if I could add in a stat. So I'm going to go find a stat from Harvard Business Review or the New York Times, and I'm going to slot that in here to back up the argument that the client is making. Right? So I actually think of it less like writing and more like editing and assembling. And this is such a valuable skill set. And I cannot emphasize enough how much demand there is for these three ghostwriting jobs. I mean, these four thought leadership articles, if I was to add a fifth, I would probably do like company website writing. This is where the company might need help, you know, with the copy on their homepage, their about page, all sorts of other just sort of boilerplate pages on a company website. That's usually another thing that people ask for help. But here's the insight that I Think a lot of people misunderstand about ghostwriting and why it is such an amazing vehicle for monetizing your talents as a writer. Because you're basically getting paid to practice. You're getting paid to learn how to write in different voices. You're getting paid to build your network. You're getting paid to ask really smart people any question you want and then send them an invoice after it is an incredible career path. Okay, but the real. Aha. The real insight is that if you start by doing any of these right, the moment that you get your foot in the door and you start working with the business owner, the founder, the investor, whoever, and you show them that you know how to run that specific project and they can rely on you. They can rely on you to ask the right questions, they can rely on you to extract the content that you need. They can rely on you to create compelling first drafts. They can rely on you to build the whole thing. Right? What do you think they're going to do from there? They're literally going to go down the list and go, by the way, I would also love a newsletter. Could you help me with that? By the way, I've been meaning to ramp up my LinkedIn content. Can you also help me with that? By the way, our company would really love to put out thought leadership articles on the future of our space. Can you help with that? By the way, we're doing a whole website redesign. We would love your help creating the copy. This is what people don't understand is that one of the biggest benefits of being a ghostwriter is that you tend to work directly with someone very high up in the company, usually the CEO or someone in the C suite, which basically means you become friends with the most powerful decision maker in that business. And so whenever they need something else that's writing related, who do you think they're going to ask first? They're going to ask you. So the whole name of the game is. And I wouldn't encourage you to go, okay, I'm going to tackle all of these at once. The whole name of the game is you get really good at one first. You master that. I would really encourage you to learn how to build an educational email course because that teaches you all of the skills. If you know how to build an educational email course, you can go straight. Anything. Okay, you start with that, you get your foot in the door, you learn how to provide that service really, really well. And then how you start to scale yourself and how you turn some of these smaller. I like to call them minnow clients into whale clients is then you start upselling them on other services. And this is where all of a sudden a three or four or $5,000 client can become a $15,000 client or a $20,000 client. And this is why whenever I see writers and they're like, is it really possible to make ten grand a month? It is so possible that you can't even wrap your head around it. They're like, is AI going to ruin my career? Is AI going to kill all writing jobs? There is so much demand that you literally can't even fathom it. All you have to do is just everywhere you go on the Internet, just click around. Does that company have a newsletter? No, they need your help. Does that company have an opt in? No, they need your help. Is that founder writing on LinkedIn actively? No, they need your help. There is so much opportunity that it's like whenever people say that to me now or ask me that question, I can't even respond because I'm like, you just open your eyes. It's literally everywhere. And AI is not going to remove these opportunities. AI is going to accelerate it. And so what's going to happen is that if historically me as a ghostwriter, if I could only handle maybe three or four clients at a time because of my efficiencies, things like this, I started ghostwriting in 2016, right? Very different tools available today than 2016. So in 2016, maybe I could only work with three or four clients at a time because I had to manage things manually. Today with AI, I could probably manage 8 clients or 10 clients or 12 clients at a time. So what does that really mean? It means I got more productive and it also means I actually got three times more profitable because I can take on three times as many clients. So again, AI is not the enemy. AI is your friend. So if you're a beginner, you're looking for a place to start, I would really encourage you to A explore ghostwriting, but B, explore especially these first three services, ghostwriting, educational email courses, a newsletter and social media content. And then from there I think the next opportunities are also thought leadership articles, especially for companies in forward leaning spaces. If a company's in AI, if a company's in crypto, if a company's in biotech, right? Those are companies that are always wanting to put out pieces that signal that they are at the forefront of their industry. And then on occasion, especially when you get into a bit into working with a business, they will probably ask for your help with assembling something. Okay, now the last thing I want to touch on is, well, what about all the other things? What about, you know, landing pages? What about sales copy? What about anything related to copywriting? All of those opportunities are great, but again, if you get in with the founder, CEO, business owner, they're going to ask you for those things. Okay. And second is that these are the primary bottleneck, right? You can't really go build a sales sequence for someone who doesn't have an opt in. You can't really go build a good sales sequence for someone who doesn't have a weekly newsletter. So all of these things need to come first and everyone always wants to jump to the more, you know, it's like I just want to sell. You're missing the point. Something I say all the time is, you know, the prospect can't care about the solution, AKA the thing that the client wants to sell until they first care about the problem. So how do you educate people on the problem? Well, you need some sort of valuable opt in. You want to keep educating them on the problem with a newsletter and you want to educate them on the problem and high level top of funnel with social content. So that is why I would recommend that you start with these ghostwriting jobs.