How to Land Your First Ghostwriting Client in 2025

I built the first ghostwriting agency for founders and executives and have sold over $5 million worth of ghostwriting services. But if you're at the very beginning of your ghostwriting journey and want to know how to land your first ghostwriting client, how to find the most lucrative niche for you to ghostwrite in, and how to pitch your services when you have no credibility or experience, then pay attention, because I'm going to answer all of these questions here, okay? Deontay asks, how do you help someone afford your services when they can't, but you really want to work with them? Okay? So first of all, no matter how much you think that the person can't afford your services, you always pitch them full price on the phone or in DMs or email or wherever you're going back and forth. You never negotiate down in that moment. You have to let them sit with it. Because most of the time, and I ran into this hundreds of times, you say a price person shows a little bit of restraint. They're like, I don't know if I want to spend the money. And then you give them 72 hours, and then they come back and go, I thought about it. You know what? Let's work together, right? And the mistake, and I notice a lot of beginner writers do this, is they'll say something. They'll say a price on the phone, the person will have a little bit of sticker shock, and then the writer will immediately jump in and go, ah, but you know what? I'm happy to do it at a discount, right? And they're not letting the person sit with it. There's a great line in the Wolf of Wall street where he goes, whoever speaks first loses. And that is so true in sales, any sort of sales, is whenever you drop the price, you don't jump in. Doesn't matter how uncomfortable the silence is. Doesn't matter if the other person's got this look on their face where they go, I would never spend that amount of money. Whoever speaks first loses. And you have to let them sit with the price. And you never negotiate down in the moment. You always just go, that's what I charge. You let them walk away, and then you see what happens. You give them a couple days, see if they circle back around, I cannot tell you how many times, three, four, five days later, someone would come back around and go, you know what? I thought about it. This is a priority for us. Sure, we'd love to work with you. And then you always have the option of coming back to them and pitching Something different. So you never negotiate in that moment, but you always have some things in your back pocket where you can come back to them and give them a different offer. So if they don't close, there's four things you can do. The first one, which is the best option is, is you go back to them a week later and you say, look, I thought about it. I'd really love to find a way to work with you because I know I can help you. So I am willing to do this project for 50% of my normal rate in exchange for a testimonial or a referral. So in your back pocket, if you want to extract some cash out of the deal, you can always go back to them and say, hey, look, I'll do this at a discount, but I want something in exchange, right? I want a testimonial, assuming you're happy, or I want a referral. So you can always come down to this. But you don't want to do this in the moment. You don't want to just jump to a 50% discount on the call. You want them to sit with it. Because sometimes the person comes back around and goes, sure, I'm happy to pay full rate, right? So you always have this in your back pocket. The second option is you actually just circle back around a week later and you offer to do it for free. If you see a lot of value in doing it for free, maybe you say in exchange for a testimonial, assuming they're happy, maybe in exchange for three referrals, that's fine. Maybe you see other value in doing it for free. Maybe you just want this person in your network or you just want to learn from them, right? There's other ways to get paid besides just cash. So you always have the free option in your back pocket as well. The third option is you can negotiate some sort of pay later structure. So I did this with startups. When I was building my agency, we would get on the phone with a startup that was trying to raise a seed round, I don't know, quarter million dollars, half a million dollars, whatever. And they knew they needed our services, but they hadn't raised their round yet, so they couldn't pay for it yet. And so I would offer and say, look, I will do this work for you for free in the beginning, you know, for three months. And then after you raise your round, you will pay me, historically, on the work that we did together. And there's some risk to this, obviously. I mean, it's dependent on the person actually achieving that goal and doing that, we ran into situations where sometimes the startup didn't end up raising a first round and then we never got pa. So there's an element of risk, but it is an option and so you have that in your back pocket as well. And then the fourth option you have is to do some sort of rev share deal where you basically do the work upfront but then you collect some sort of backend dividend based on the sales that you help them generate. So if you're creating an educational email course, you're creating a sales sequence or you're creating a weekly newsletter, some sort of mechanism that's driving sales, you go, I, I'm happy to do the work for zero cash up front, but I want 20% of the upside or I want 15% of the upside or whatever it is. I will tell you though, I've done a lot of Rev Share deals over the years and I've learned this painful truth that the Rev Share deals you want because you know they're going to be lucrative people won't give you and the Rev Share deals you don't really want because the likelihood that they're going to make you meaningful money is low are the ones that people will offer you all day long. So most, most of the time Rev shares very rarely work out in your best interest anyway and I always find that they end up consuming way more bandwidth than you think or is really worth it to you. So if I were you, I would just go through these four options in this hierarchy and only do rev share deals with people that you really trust and you feel like there's some actual upside because otherwise you're just going to spend a bunch of time building something that doesn't actually make you money. Alright, Self Growth log asks want to know how to find clients and find the best ones for your niche. So here's a checklist of what you're looking for. The first is does this person have a business? If they don't have a business or don't have anything for sale, it really doesn't matter how many followers they have what a great presence they have on the Internet, right? They can't rationalize paying you because they don't have a cash generating machine. They need to have something for sale to to rationalize hiring you to help them with some sort of asset in their business. And I find a mistake most beginner writers ghostwriters make is they gravitate to people with huge followings or a really prominent presence, but then they pitch them and they go oh, the person doesn't have a budget for me. Well, that's because they don't have a business, right? And then they ignore the people who maybe have a much smaller following but do have a business, and they think, oh, this person isn't very prominent on the Internet. Well, it doesn't really matter. Do they have a business and is it making money? Then that's a great lead. That's a great person for you to help. The second thing is trying to look for signals that tell you, how long has this person been in business? And the longer the better. So not to say that you can't help new business owners, but whenever you see someone who's been in business for a while, that means they've been making some money for a while, right? Which means they can rationalize hiring you. Whereas someone who maybe has a ton of followers and a strong presence and they just launched a digital product or just launched a course or just launched an agency like two months ago.

Right?

It just might be too early. They might not be able to rationalize hiring you yet. So you want to look for signals of how long has this person been in business? The third thing you're looking for is on a rough scale of 1 to 10, how digital is their business already. And again, another mistake that a lot of ghostwriters make is they try and go after these people who are already doing so many of the digital things, right? They'll go, oh, I want to go pitch Ali Abdaal and tell him why his funnel isn't working properly. People do this all the time to me too. I get cold outreach after cold outreach every single day. And someone's like, hey, I could improve writing your emails. I write our emails. And the likelihood that you're going to write them better than me is very, very, very, very low.

Right.

And so you don't actually want to pitch people who are already doing the vast majority of the digital things correctly. What you're looking for are all the people who have almost none of the digital things working or none of them even created.

Right?

It is so much easier to take someone from 0 to 1 rather than try and take Ali Abdaal from 9 to 10.

Right?

And it's such a higher priority if someone doesn't have a newsletter. They go, I need a newsletter. Very easy problem to solve. Much harder to go, hey, this person's had a newsletter for five years. I can help you improve it, maybe, but that's a harder sell. And so I always find that beginners gravitate to, like, all the people that are already doing the things right, when really the much bigger opportunity, the much bigger market is all the people who haven't started playing the digital game yet, or they've started, but it's very clear they're still stuck at level one and they're not doing it very well. And then the last thing I want to leave you with here is a lot of ghostwriters ask me, what's the best niche? Where will I make the most money? And the honest truth is that they all work. And a helpful reframe is that if that industry wasn't making money, it wouldn't be an industry. The mere fact that the industry exists means money is floating around in there. So if it's an industry that you know a lot about, why can't you be the go to ghostwriter for that industry?

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You can. You just have to allow yourself to see the opportunity instead of constantly looking over the fence at whatever your neighbor's got going on, thinking, for some reason the grass is greener over there, right? It's not. Every single industry and every single niche has its own set of challenges and has its own upside. And you only recognize it once you see someone else commit to a certain industry. So all you have to do, and this is a big thing that we stress in our premium ghost trading academy, is ask yourself, where do I have an information advantage? What is an industry that you already know some things about? Chances are you're going to be able to make that lucrative way more than picking something that's more popular but you know nothing about. All right, Louis asks, what's the best type of content to increase inbounds? So I love this question because everyone thinks they need some big fancy content strategy to attract clients, and you don't. You also don't need to go viral. You don't need a million followers. You don't need any of those shiny objects. Okay, here's your strategy. What is every single question a potential client might ask you on the phone? Let's just think about it for a second.

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They'd probably ask you things like, how do you think about generating leads for our type of business? Or what sort of opt in would you recommend we have on our site? Or how often should we be publishing a weekly newsletter? How often should we be talking about our products or services without coming across as salesy? Okay, so you start here. You make a list of every question a potential client might ask you or should ask you, and then you go create content that answers all of those questions. In public, at scale. That's the strategy. It's not to go viral. It's not to rack up views for the sake of racking up views. It's to build a library that literally speaks to your target client on autopilot at scale. Alright, Tomas asks, how do you effectively pitch yourself to potential ghostwriting clients when you have no prior experience in the field? Alright, so first of all, your first niche, not your forever niche, your first niche and where you should start as a ghostwriter should be in an industry where you have some sort of information advantage. You're going to hear me talk about this over and over and over again, which fundamentally means you do have experience and credibility in that field, right? It could be. I've worked in pharma for five years. Great. That's more than enough credibility and experience to ghostwrite in the pharma space. Or. Or something even less formal. You know, I was obsessed with trading cards as a kid. Great. That's more than enough credibility and experience to ghostwrite in the trading card and gaming space. All right, so, for example, something I used to say on calls all the time whenever I was pitching someone even remotely related to medicine or biotech was, I would say, oh, yeah, my dad is a spine surgeon, so I have an innate interest in medicine. I grew up with that in my household. And every time I would say that, the person's eyes would light up and they'd go, oh, that's amazing, because a, you probably know more than the average person, and B, that shows excitement, that shows an inherent interest in what we would be working on together. Second, even if you truly have zero experience and credibility, and again, you do, you just might not realize, doesn't really matter. Ghostwriting clients don't care about how many years of experience you have or what badges of credibility you've collected. The only thing they care about is, is whether you understand their business. You can articulate a problem they're experiencing, and you can articulate a unique way to solve it. That's it. So if the client doesn't trust you, that just means you haven't articulated the problem well enough. And an example I always love sharing here is imagine that you are walking down the street one day and you come across a house in your neighborhood and the entire front yard is flooded, and you go, oh, man, that's a huge problem. But I know how to solve it. I just solved this in my house because my yard was just flooding. So you walk up to the door, knock, knock, knock. Person answers. You go, hey, I don't know if you noticed, but your yard is completely flooded. You have a leak somewhere. The person goes, oh, my gosh. I know, it's terrible. I've been thinking about this. I don't know where it's coming from. It's driving me nuts. And you go, well, I actually just ran into the same thing in my house. I think it's coming from. Do you have a guest bathroom here? Yeah, it's probably. Probably there. Can I come in? I'll show you where the problem's coming from, because I just solved this in my house. They go, oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. You walk in, you point it out, you go, yeah, that's where it is. And I spent five hours on it, and I figured out, yeah, that's why the problem's happening, and that's how to solve it. And they go, oh, my gosh. Well, thank you so much. Do you know anyone that can help me solve this now? Because now they're aware of the problem, and they're aware of how the problem came to be. And you go, well, I'm no plumber, but actually, as a side hustle, you know, I tinker around and I fix this in my house. Do you want me to fix it in yours? The person's gonna say yes. They're not gonna sit there and go, well, you're not a certified plumber, so I don't know if I trust you in that moment. They're gonna be like, I just want my yard to stop flooding. So, yes, I would absolutely love your help. Thank you.

Right.

And you have to sort of think metaphorically in that way and realize that any sort of client is the exact same scenario. They trust you when you can articulate a problem in their business and you can articulate why they're experiencing it. And then the natural conclusion is they go, well, now that I'm aware of the problem, I need someone to help me solve it. And then you go, that's great. That's what I do. And then there you go. You have a client. All right, Simon asks, where is the best place to find the first customer I can write to with a DM if I don't have an email list? So this is probably one of the biggest things that we talk about in pga, which is everyone thinks that whenever they want us to get into something, they need to start with cold outreach. They need to go contact some ethereal client that lives off somewhere else in the world that they've never talked to before, ever. And they're like, how Do I go find this person? And the reality is that in the very beginning, the best place to start is with your network. That's why in PGA we say in the beginning your niche isn't really a niche out in the world, your niche is your network. Because chances are there are 10 plus people in your life that either A, need your help or B, know someone who needs your help. And I always find that beginners gravitate to, let me go talk to all the people that I've never talked to ever before in my entire life, rather than starting with all the people that they already know and already have relationships with and go, well, why don't I just start here? And I think there's so many faulty beliefs that go into this and it's sort of like, I don't want to pitch people. I know, I'm afraid, what if they think I'm weird for pitching something that's business related. Whatever. All of those things are wrong. Because if you can truly help someone, no one's going to sit there and be frustrated that you're offering to help them with something that they either know is a problem or now know is a problem because you've educated them, right? So you don't need to go looking elsewhere. In the beginning, your niche is your network. All right. Mario asks, how long should you offer free services to build authority until you can position yourself as a premium paid service? So the answer to this question is very subjective and requires context. For example, a lot of beginners in our premium ghostwriting academy start and pitch premium pricing out the gate. They charge $5,000 for their very first client ever. And we've seen it happen over and over and over again. And there's no reason why you can't. Others start for free. Some do one client for free, some do two, some do five. It really depends on where you are on the journey because some people just want to get a couple free reps in just to build their confidence, just to get some experience right? And they just don't feel comfortable jumping straight to charging or charging that much. Especially if you've never done something like this before. It can help psychologically a lot of to get a rep or two under your belt doing it for free. That said, you don't have to if you feel comfortable or, you know, especially someone going through pga, if you feel empowered with all of the things that we give you and we give you everything that you need, there's no reason why you can't charge $5,000 out the gate, right? Because we show you how. It's also worth noting that this free work strategy never really goes away. There's always a time and place to do free work, and it's not really based on experience level or like you need to do a certain number for free to build your quote unquote portfolio and then you can become paid. Like all of these rules aren't real. It completely depends on the person and what they feel comfortable doing. But free work as a strategy, for example, is something that I continue to do even now, when the right opportunity presents itself, I will offer to do something for free because maybe I want something else. Maybe I don't want cash. Maybe I want to get to know the person. I want the person in my network. Maybe I want access to that person's network. Maybe I want some sort of mentorship. Maybe there's some sort of trade that we work out. Maybe I just want to be able to cash in a favor with this person sometime down the road. I don't even know what I want out of it yet.

Right.

So there's always a time and place for free work. And you know, I know I'm worth the money. They know I'm worth the money. They know I know I'm worth the money. But I still choose to do certain things for free because I see some sort of other benefit from it and you should too. So I always like just adopting this strategy as something that you have in your back pocket and you can always use it, you know, based on the situation and what it is that you're looking for. But otherwise there's really no cut and dry rule for you have to start for free and then you have to achieve X amount of things and then you can start charging premium pricing again. We've seen it happen over and over and over again in pga. People come in total beginner, never done this before. They internalize everything. They feel comfortable. They pitch it for five grand. Their first client is premium priced, so there's no reason why you can't do that too. Okay. Christian asks what metrics should be used to show that the ghostwriting services provided value to the client. This is something a lot of ghostwriters get wrong. Beginners, people who have been working, you know, freelance writer, ghostwriter, copywriter, whatever, they've been doing it for five years, 10 years, I still see them make this mistake. You don't want to get into the business of promising specific numbers or outcomes. And the only time that you do is when you have full control over all of the variables. So for Example, if you're ghostwriting social content for someone, you don't want to promise, I'll get you 3,000 followers in the next 30 days, right? Because you don't have control over all of those variables. Or if you're ghostwriting an educational email course, you don't want to promise this opt in will lead to $20,000 in sales, right? Because you don't have control over all of those variables. You might write the educational email course, but you don't have control over the offer. You don't have control over the framing of the offer. You don't have control over the sales cycle, especially if you're, if you're promoting a service where the customer gets on the phone, you don't have control over the sales call, you don't have control over the sales script, right? So there's all these other variables that you don't have control over, which means you don't want to make promises that are tied to the full chain of events. And instead, and I'm speaking from years and years and years of experience here, because this was exactly what we ran into with the offer that we pitched when I was building my ghost trading agency. You want to frame the value of what you're doing as you didn't have this thing, now you have this thing. Or you weren't creating content online. Now you're creating content online. Or you didn't have a weekly newsletter. Now you have a weekly newsletter. You didn't have an opt in. Now you have an opt in, right? So your value is that they weren't doing it before, now they're doing it. They weren't playing the game, now they're playing the game, or they weren't playing the game very well, now they're doing it the way that they should. And so, so much of the value is really in taking someone from 0 to 1. It's not the incremental of like, well, you know, is the percentage of my follower growth going to go up month after month? It doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter. The value of you creating content online is not. Well, did my follower growth go up 20% this month or 30%? It doesn't matter. The value was you weren't playing the. Now you're playing the game. Because if you pull back for a second, everyone understands. Do you think more good things will happen in your business when you create content online? Yes, more good things will happen. Do you think more good things will happen if you had a weekly newsletter nurturing all of the people that came to your site? Yeah. More good things would happen. Do you think you would make more money if you captured more emails into the front end of your funnel? Yes, you'd probably make more money. So you don't actually need to get down into the nitty gritty and you don't need to promise specific numbers because it's also too hard. And again, there's too many variables you don't have control over. You just need to help the person understand that the majority of the value was they weren't doing it. Now they're doing it. And then George asks, what if I want to sell digital products instead? As a writer, how do I generate sustainable traffic to make an income? So the short answer here is, unless you already have a high paying job and you're set and you're comfortable financially, I would not recommend starting with digital products. It is just too difficult to maintain a consistent and meaningful run rate. You just need too much traffic. And instead, this is why I'm such a big believer in having writers start with ghostwriting, because you will always make more money faster providing a premium service to a small number of people rather than trying to sell some low ticket product to high volume of people.

Right.

Digital products are also a much longer time horizon game. Okay. So it just depends on what your goal is. You know, if you're like, I want to increase my income today or if you're going, I'm working this really exhausting full time job and I'm working, you know, 8, 10, 12 hours a day and I'm making decent money, but I'm not making as much as I want to. I have poor work life balance. Right. You have a lot of things that you're trying to solve for. It will always be easier to solve for that with a service rather than trying to sell a digital product. It just will. And so if you want to get there faster and you want to make more and work less faster, you want to start with ghostwriting. Then again, it's not an either or, it's just, it's a question of the order in which you do these things. Then once you've solved for are you comfortable financially, are you not working as much? Maybe it's allowed you to quit your previous job and now you have more time to spend working on your, your own writing, working on building digital products. Right. As you sort of fix the foundation, then you can start playing the digital product game. And the other thing that, and I'll leave you with this, is that it's worth noting that in the beginning, your biggest bottleneck to creating digital products isn't actually traffic. Like, yes, on the surface, that's what makes it hard. You're selling a low ticket digital product, so you need a lot of traffic in order to sustain five grand a month, ten grand a month. But the real bottleneck is that at the beginning of the journey, you don't have specialized knowledge. You don't have knowledge, you don't have something to package up. So you see other people packaging things up, but chances are what they're packaging up is the thing that they had been doing for a couple years before that.

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So you literally don't have the ability to create a digital product yet. Because fundamentally, digital products typically are education, which means you need to know how to do something well in order to package it up and sell it.

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Which is why I go back to the first step should be provide some sort of service. It's going to allow you to fix your income problem and your work life balance problem. It's going to allow you to learn, it's going to allow you to develop your own frameworks and your way of doing things. You're going to get paid to practice, you're going to get paid to build your skills, and then you can package everything up that you've learned, package up all your expertise later and sell it as a digital product. Which is exactly what I did, by the way. The reason our premium ghostwriting academy has grown so quickly isn't because it's like, oh, that was a great idea. The reason it grows so quickly is because I spent five years ghostwriting for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And I scaled my agency and I learned a lot of hard lessons and I went through all of these different milestones. So by the time we went and started pga, it was literally like, you just can skip to the end. Because I know everything to package up, because I went and lived it and I lived every possible scenario. There isn't a single question that someone asks me in PGA that I don't know the answer to. And it's not because I'm smart, it's because I lived the journey.

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So that's the true bottleneck. In the beginning, you need to go learn things and build skills and acquire experiences that then later you can package up and sell in the form of a digital product. Experiences that then later you can package up and sell in the form of a digital production.