The 8 Most Lucrative Ghostwriting Services in 2025

When most people hear the term ghostwriting, they think about books or even music. The rapper Travis Scott started his career as a ghostwriter for other artists, and Mark Manson was the ghostwriter behind Will Smith's memoir, Will. But these aren't the types of ghostwriting I want to tell you about. Ghostwriting books or even songs might seem like a sexy career path, but even if you get paid half a million dollars, when you divide that by how many hours it takes to complete these projects, they don't end up being all that lucrative. Instead, these are the eight ghostwriting services that are way more efficient, profitable, and lucrative. The first is ghostwriting social media content for founders, CEOs, course creators, YouTubers, coaches, you name it. Way back in 2013, when I was working my first job out of college, I started to notice the Internet changing, and I came up with a new thesis. Nobody wants to hear from brands. People want to hear from people. I started writing on a website called Quora, and because I was writing under my own name, my content was getting hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. Meanwhile, the content I was writing for brands at this ad agency wasn't getting any traction at all. That's when I started to realize the most important social account a brand can build isn't their own. It's the social account of the founder, CEO, or even multiple executives. Which is why this is such a lucrative form of ghostwriting. Every single day, more and more business owners, startup founders, Internet entrepreneurs, and company executives are realizing they need to be the voice of their company. Just look at Elon Musk. He's a great example, even if you don't agree with him. Every founder wants what he has. They want an audience, they want free media. They want the news to come to them. How do you get these types of clients? Well, maybe don't go after someone like Elon Musk, but search for businesses in your niche. And DM or email the founder, the owner, the creator, or even someone who works for the company. Help them understand that their customers don't want to hear from the brand. What they want is they want to hear from you, the founder, the business owner. And you can make anywhere from 3,000 to upwards of $10,000 per month ghostwriting social media content for their personal brand. The second ghostwriting service that can have you flying first class is writing landing pages and sales scripts. These can be for Creat writers, coaches, YouTubers, startup founders, anyone with some sort of product or service for sale. Or you can ghostwrite these assets for their companies. This is an Important question. How is this different from copywriting? Well, most copywriters only think about writing through a sales lens, whereas ghostwriters are trained to write through an education lens. If you've ever heard the phrase, the best way to sell is the no sell, sell. That's why more and more people are hiring ghostwriters, not copywriters, to write landing pages, sales scripts, email marketing sequences, and so on. Because people don't want to be sold to. They want to be educated. I'll give you an easy example. This literally just happened in my life. I was recently thinking about buying a cold plunge for my house, but I went online and I found a company that makes these really cool, really affordable cold plunges. And when I was on their website, all the language was trying to do was sell me on it. Here's why our cold plunge is so great. Here's customer testimonials, here's a discount code. And none of those were the reason why I was hesitant to buy. The reason I didn't end up buying a cold plunge was because I didn't get educated. I had questions, right. How durable is this thing? Would it survive the Miami heat or a torrential storm? How often do I need to clean it? How much time should I expect to allocate each month to cleaning it? How long until I have to get a new one? Is this ice bath going to last me a year? 5 years? 15 years? So this is the single biggest shift happening in marketing today is people don't want to be sold to. They want and need to be educated. And ghostwriters do this in a way copywriters were never taught how to do. For context, when ghostwriting a landing page or sales script, you can easily charge a couple thousand dollars. And the top ghostwriters also negotiate getting a percentage of the sales generated on the back end. Okay. The third ghostwriting service that can have you buying a house in the Hamptons is creating startup pitches and pitch decks for founders. This one is more advanced, and you have to have experience in the startup world to do it well. But I know ghostwriters who make big money doing this, like 10,000, 20,000, even $50,000 per pitch deck. The reason, though, is because the value of that startup pitch deck is anchored to the outcome of successfully raising millions or tens of millions of dollars in funding. You aren't really getting paid to write. You're getting paid to help the founders tell a story that allows them to raise a ton of money. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail on this one, because the truth is it's pretty advanced and not where most ghostwriters start. But I wanted to put it on your radar for a few years down the road. The fourth ghostwriting service that can get you a table at Carbone on a Saturday night, which is very, very difficult to do, is writing thought leadership articles for industry leaders. This is what I did for years. This is how I built the first ghostwriting agency for founders and CEOs. We scaled that to millions of dollars in revenue back in 2016. My first ghostwriting client was the founder of a family owned plumbing supplies company. That company ended up getting sold for over a billion dollars. At the time, he was writing a book about his 20 year journey as an entrepreneur and wanted to write some articles on quora, Medium and LinkedIn to establish himself as a thought leader online and promote promote his book. He introduced me to another entrepreneur who became a client. Two clients turned into four, four turned into eight. And a year later one of my best friends and I had an agency with over 80 concurrent clients, 23 full time employees doing a couple million dollars of revenue, and all we did was one thing. We just ghost wrote 800 word thought leadership articles. Anyone who has written a book, you can help them turn that content into articles. Anyone who gives speeches, you can help them turn their speeches into articles. Anyone who has podcast a, you can help them turn their interviews into articles. And you can charge anywhere from $250, which is where we started, per article, all the way up to $2,000 per article. @ our height, I was charging anywhere from 3,000 to $5,000 for a single 800 word article. And more and more entrepreneurs need this service every single day. Okay. The fifth ghostwriting service that can have you renting villas in Mykonos is writing, building and launching five day educational email courses. If you don't know what an educational email course is, let me tell you because this is the most exciting marketing vehicle I've seen in the past 10 years. You know when you go on someone's website in the first five seconds, what's the first thing that pops up? It's always one of two things. It's either a pop up asking you to subscribe to their newsletter, which doesn't tell you, the reader and potential customer, what you're going to get in exchange or what you can expect to learn, right? Or it's a discount code, or it's a free T shirt or it's $20 off your first order. And neither of those things is what you the customer needs. What the customer needs, going back to what we were talking about earlier, is to be educated. They have questions and they need to know what problem are you helping me solve? How are you helping me solve it? What's your approach for solving it and what are you going to help me do that I haven't already done myself? And usually the founder or creator or business owner or salesperson is out in the world answering these questions manually. They're having individual conversation after individual conversation when instead you can create a five day educational email course that educates the potential customer on autopilot, answers all their questions preemptively, speaks to any of their objections, builds trust, primes them to see you as the authority and solution to their problem. I've been building educational email courses since 2014, but we did this recently for our cohort based writing course ship 30 for 30. We created start Writing Online which was an educational email course and overnight we saw our opt in rate quadruple and the revenue of our business double. We wrote this asset two years ago. Almost 100,000 people have gone through it at this point and we haven't changed it once. This was such a powerful marketing vehicle for our business that it's now the core skill we train ghostwriters on in our Premium Ghostwriting Academy. We train you on how to write educational email course opt ins. We train you on how to create high converting landing pages, we train you on headlines and hooks to increase the opt in rate. We train you on ConvertKit Email automation sequences and we even train you on cold DM and email scripts. You can go out and sell these educational email course opt ins to founders, Internet entrepreneurs, creators and business owners for anywhere from five grand to ten grand a pop. If you want to know which of the eight ghostwriting services can make you the most money the fastest, this one is literally a license to print money. The sixth ghostwriting service that can have you strutting up to the Ferrari dealership is writing speeches for industry leaders. Now I'm not a big fan of this service because it's so inefficient, but it is one of the top eight so I wanted to mention it. A few years ago I got connected to a guy who's a speechwriter for the White House. He's written speeches for congressmen and women, for senators, even for two United States presidents. At the time I was thinking about getting into speechwriting and he said he got paid $20,000 per speech and he could write a speech in about a week. That's not bad. Money. The problem with this career path, though, is the highest paid speechwriters almost always come out of a career in politics. For example, before he was a speechwriter, he used to work in the White House on the communications team. So if you're interested in politics, this might be a good career path to explore. But for the average ghostwriter, this isn't really a viable option. Which leads us to the seventh ghostwriting service. And this is the one everyone thinks gets you front row seats at a Taylor Swift concert. And in reality, it sends you up the nosebleeds. Okay, and that's ghostwriting books and ebooks. Now, do ghostwriters do it all the time? But do these projects pay very well? Usually not. The only ghostwriters who make good money writing books are ones like JR Moehringer, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the one who got hired by Prince Harry to write his memoir. Okay, for everyone else, it's hard to find people willing to pay more than 30,000 or even $50,000 for you to ghostwrite a book for them. And you might be thinking, Cole, okay, $50,000 to ghostwrite a book is a lot of money. But considering you can only ghostwrite one, maybe two books at a time, and the average book takes at least six months, usually closer to 12, that's really no different than getting paid $50,000 per year. You're just getting the whole payment all at once. Which, relative to some of these other ghostwriting services, isn't very much. And that, ghostwriters and ghostwriterettes, leads us to the last service, when done correctly, can put you on the path of financial independence. And that is ghostwriting video scripts like the one I'm reading right here. See, most people don't realize their favorite creators, YouTubers and video makers aren't speaking off the cuff. They script their videos and then they use a teleprompter to read their script. Now, I'm reading a script I wrote because I'm a writer, but most people aren't writers. And if you think about it, YouTube isn't really a game of video quality. It's all about the content of the video, which means it's really a game of writing quality. If you know how to write concise, educational, entertaining video scripts, you can easily make six figures as a ghostwriter. And if you want to make a fortune, let's tie some of these services together. First, you can ghostwrite social content for a founder, executive, Internet entrepreneur, YouTuber or creator. Second, as you help them build their social audience, they will at some point wanna scale into video so you can help them GhostWrite video scripts. Third then as their social audience starts to grow, what do they need to do? They need to move that rented audience over to an owned platform so you can go straight a 5 day educational email course for them to start building their email list. Fourth Then as their email list starts to grow, they aren't going to want to just stop talking to those subscribers, which means they're going to need a weekly newsletter. Then fifth, as more and more people take their educational email course, join their email list, get value from their weekly newsletter. You can help them by ghostwriting their first first digital product or paid course, which we'll talk about in another video. Ghostwriting is the single fastest way to power level your skills as a writer, but also to get paid to practice, build your network and even scale to 10 or $20,000 per month in revenue. Ghostwriting changed my life. It's how I was able to move out of my dumpy studio apartment in Chicago. And I'm confident it can change yours too. So let me know what questions you have about this career path for writers in the comments and I'll go down the list. Making more videos exactly like this, showing you how to do it. And if you're already bought in and you want me to be your mentor, which I would love to do, come apply to our premium Ghostwriting Academy. We'd love to have you.