How to Sign Your First Ghostwriting Client (Step-by-Step for Beginners)

there is an unfathomable amount of opportunity on planet Earth that most people just can't wrap their heads around. So what usually happens is someone goes, all right, I've decided I want to provide this skill. They go talk to one person. Yeah, that person says no. And then they'll come back and they'll go, I guess it just doesn't work for my niche. It's just too saturated. There's just no— there's no opportunity. Okay. First of all, you haven't deployed enough volume to know whether there's enough opportunity. Second, is there are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the internet. So we used to live in an analog world. Now we live in a digital world. I don't think that there's a business owner on earth who doesn't understand that their life would be better, easier, and probably more profitable if they had a growing audience, if they had an email list, if they had a way of educating customers on autopilot. So we all know that. And every single day that goes by, more and more founders, more entrepreneurs, more business owners, more creators, more podcasters, YouTubers, every single person goes, I should probably build myself more on the internet. Okay, so that mega trend increasing. So all you have to do is go, I'm going to go help the category of person who every single day that goes by that is growing. So going to any business owner. Any creator, anyone, anything that is tangentially related to your information advantage. And in my opinion, another mistake that gets made is people go, well, so what are all the most popular writing gigs?

Yeah.

So for a long time, the most popular ones have been SEO articles, blog posts, basic content marketing, stuff like that. Right. So part of the game is always going, well, Where is the growing audience? In this case, that would be the growing customer base. And what is the not popular yet, but the increasingly popular skill that they all want? And so for every business owner or creator or anyone, right, there's 3 things they all want. They all want help putting out more content. Yep.

Especially on LinkedIn, it seems.

Okay. So just, and we'll get more specific. They all want help creating text-based content usually first, and then it becomes video or audio, right? They all need help moving that rented audience to an owned platform, AKA email, right? But the best way to move them to an email list is not to say, come join my newsletter. The best way to move them is to give some sort of free value where they exchange their email address for something. So the best vehicle we found are educational email courses. Then once they're on your email list. Well, you don't just want them to go through the educational email course and then they're done and you never talk to them again, right? They need a weekly newsletter because that weekly newsletter nurtures them for a prolonged period of time and then they inevitably buy your product or service. Every single person needs those three things, which means all you have to do, you could just pick one of them and you go, I'm this person with an information advantage in this industry or this niche, and I specialize in one of those three services. And you need one person and they will pay you $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 per project per month. And congratulations, you either just replaced or at least hit like 50% of your full-time income. Hmm.

Okay. So I'm a junior doctor. I have an informational advantage in medicine. I know I like writing. I used to write essays in med school and I liked, you know, I had a personal blog back in the day and blah, blah, blah, you know, all that kind of stuff. Um, and so I'm thinking, okay. Who could possibly want to pay me $5,000 a month to help grow their LinkedIn presence? And yeah, it would probably be a big pharma executive, maybe the CEO, maybe someone in the C-suite, maybe someone who's the VP level or director level or whatever.

Let's go simpler than that. The family friend of yours who's a doctor. Oh, yeah. And they have a small business.

They have a private practice.

And they have a private practice.

And they want to create content on LinkedIn to help promote the fact that they're like a shoulder and blah, blah, blah surgeon or whatever, dermatology, that kind of thing.

My dad's a spine surgeon. Okay, so how does my dad get more people to know that he's a great spine surgeon? You either put your name up on Google and hope. Yeah, that's one strategy, which is what most of them do. Or you go, I'm going to start taking this into my own hands. I'm going to start educating people. Right. What are the— what are the reasons people have back pain? What are the ways to get rid of back, back pain without surgery? If you have surgery, how do you recover faster? What foods should you eat? What exercises should you do? Right. So it doesn't take very long. You start thinking through it and you're like, okay, well, that's pretty easy. And I bet your information advantage would allow you to do that. And how many doctors are there in the world?

Let's—

like, a lot, right? So you don't need all the doctors. You need one doctor.

Okay. And so what am I pitching then? Let's say I've come up with a list of 3 family friends who are all doing private practice in— one's a spinal surgeon, one's a radiologist, and one's a dermatologist. And I'm like, you know, sweating, thinking of sending these emails. What am I saying?

Okay, so this is awesome. So irresistible offer script. We'll just do it like word for word. Okay, so I'm going to stick with the spine example because I, because I'm familiar with it. Okay, so First thing is you have to do your homework and understand, well, what is— what does this person do and what do they specialize in and what's their problem? So another big mistake, most people will go apply for a job on Upwork or Fiverr, right? When you do that, what you're effectively doing is raising your hand going, I have no control, I have no pricing power, I have no leverage. I am applying for the job. You tell me what you need and I will do whatever it is that you ask. Okay. As a result, that is why you have no pricing power. Because the power dynamic is wrong, right? They are the boss. You are the employee. In order to charge more, you have to flip the power dynamic. You have to go to them and you have to educate them on a problem they didn't know they had or a problem that they know they have. They just haven't gotten around to fixing. Right. So you go to the doctor, you go, problem. You want higher quality customers. You have a private practice. You want more people who are interested in back surgery, but like a specific type of back surgery. So for example, my dad specializes in minimally invasive spine surgery. Okay. So it's like, that's the type of person you want to attract, right? The, the, the problem though is that you don't know how to find them. They don't know whether they can trust you or not, et cetera. Right. The reason that problem is happening is because you have a website that isn't optimized for anything, and it would be really easy to find those people on LinkedIn. You just need to start creating content, right? And the ultimate negative consequence of that problem is that until you start educating people, you are going to be— your business strategy is you're just going to sit there and you're going to hope that customers walk through the door. Okay. So if you start with that like little mini problem script, it's impossible for the other person to sit there and go, I'm not listening, right? Of course they're listening because you just educated them on the whole problem of their business, which is not hard. Okay, then once you've educated them on the problem, because they can't care about the solution until they care about the problem. So you first anchor them in the problem, then you go, the solution to this would be if we started educating people on minimally invasive spine surgery on LinkedIn. Be really easy. Here's some sample topics, right? The benefits of doing this is that we would be able to start reaching people that would either be interested in this or would maybe know someone who's interested in this. And then ultimately, We could move that social audience over to our email list, and we could even run like localized ads if we wanted to against that email list. We could do retargeting. And the ultimate positive outcome of that is if we do that, you will have significantly more control over lead flow for your business. Problem script, solution script, and then they go, okay, that all makes sense. So how much? So you have to go through all of that before you go, oh, no problem. So we can create social content for you. Every month it's $3,000 a month. I take care of the ideas, the writing. All I need is about 30 minutes of your time. Once a month even, we do a quick recap call, go through all the content that we've created, look at the analytics. You've already written a book, so I can pull a lot of the content from that book. And that's it. Happy to help.

And is this all in a single email? Like how— what does the process of setting this up look like?

So that would be the call. So to get them on the call, right, is you start— we have a phrase we talk about all the time, which is in the beginning, your niche is your network. So you have an information advantage. Your niche is the fact that you have a family friend who's a doctor. Yeah. Okay, great. That's the first person you should go pitch because they are most likely to answer your text or answer your email or answer your call. Right. So the first thing is you open with problem. Hey, I know it's been a long time since we chatted, Uncle. Yeah, you know, Uncle Whoever. Yeah. Quick question. I was thinking about your business. You know, how do you typically get customers? You know, is that something that you've been thinking about? You know, are you struggling to get leads in your area? Tell me about what's been going on. Okay. That could be a text message. That could be an email. That's it.

And then Uncle Johnny might reply to that.

Yeah.

Saying, oh yeah, it's actually been kind of hard. We advertise on Google, but nothing happens.

Exactly.

That sort of thing.

And then you go, cool, I've got a couple of interesting ideas. Why don't we hop on a call together and I'll walk you through how this works? I found something that I think would be really beneficial for your business. Uncle Johnny goes, all right, cool, I got 30 minutes on Thursday. And then you go through problem script solution. Here's what I would do for you. So that is significantly easier than going, how do I build an audience of 100,000 people and sell 200 courses a month, every month forever, right?

What if Uncle Johnny doesn't reply to my text?

Then you just chalk it up, you give up, there's no hope for you, and you should just never try and say that's it. Your niche, there's no opportunity. Right? But obviously, that's not the takeaway. The takeaway is go talk to more people.

How many more people? Like, what's your sense of how many emails, like, assuming I was going to go cold, like I'm reaching out to local doctors in my area who I only have a tangential connection to, i.e., the fact they live in my area. How many emails does it take to get a response to get someone on a call? Do you have a sense of what these numbers are?

I would say, so even still, I would not recommend even opening the door of cold leads until you have fully exhausted warm leads. And the way I think about leads in general is I put them into two different categories. I call them leaks and faucets. So a leak is someone who goes, you know, my, my sink is leaking, help me. Right? So a leak is someone who has the problem that you can help. A faucet is someone who goes, my faucet's running fine. I don't need your help, but I know lots of other people who do. So they become a conduit to other people. And so one of the biggest missed opportunities is people go, well, I'm going to go pitch, you know, all these cold leads. No, you should start with all the people that you know and then go to each of them and go, do you have a problem? If yes, I can help you. Or, hey, I'm trying to grow my ghostwriting business. Do you know anyone who needs help creating content on LinkedIn or anyone who is creating on LinkedIn but needs help moving that audience over to an email list? Right.

That's interesting. Like, I remember coming across that line somewhere. It might have been in one of your books and often messaging someone or emailing them saying, hey, do you know someone who's looking for this sort of thing?

Yeah, nobody does it. It's the easiest thing.

Either they know someone or chance they'll be like, oh, actually, I could kind of use some help with that myself. Yeah, but it feels like a more gentle pitch than can I help you grow your content on LinkedIn or whatever?

Yes.

It's like, do you know anyone who might be looking for this?

You are. Yeah. I had a mentor in Chicago who used to say you are never selling anything to anyone. You are giving them an opportunity. And so when you think about outreach, whether it's to your network or cold leads, you don't want to approach it through this lens of like, like pitching, because that's not— everyone knows when they're getting pitched, right? So the whole methodology that I'm a firm believer in is you want it to all sound like free consulting. Everything that you do, every text message, every email, every phone call, every Zoom call, it should all feel like, hey, I see what you're doing. I just— I can't help myself. Like, you're making a mistake. I just wanted to point it out and help you. Do with it what you will. I just wanted you to know. Right? And when you do that, the other person can't help but go, well, ah, you just educated me on a problem and now I know I have this problem. And then inevitably they go to you and say, so is that what you do? And then you go, oh yeah, no, that is what I do. I specialize in that. And then they go, can you help me? And you go, sure, I'd be happy to help. Right? So you're almost, you're not pitching them and going buy from me. You're educating and like guiding them until they're forced to go, I need someone to help me. Is this what you do? Hey, by the way, if you're brand new to the world of ghostwriting, maybe you've heard the term but aren't really sure what it is or how it's different from copywriting or content writing. Check out premiumghostwritingblueprint.com. It's in the description below. Okay, this is a free masterclass that I've put together for writers who want to monetize their skills and love for writing with ghostwriting. This is what I did, and ghostwriting completely changed my life. It's how I quit my job. It's how I quadrupled the amount of money I was making. It's how I've gotten to work with so many smart, amazing people, but also have time for my own writing, like writing this book, The Art and Business of Ghostwriting. Anyways, check it out. If you're at all interested in making money from your writing, I would really encourage you to get into ghostwriting, and this free premium ghostwriting blueprint in the description below is the best place to start.