The Real Reason Your Ghostwriting Clients Don't Stick Around

When you buy a service or you buy a product, you are typically not looking to sign yourself up to pay for that thing for the rest of your life, right? You buy it because you want the product or service to solve something for you over a period of time. And then you kind of assume, okay, once this thing is done, or once I solve this problem, or once I unlock this outcome, then I move on. This is like capitalism 101, alright? And I find that a lot of times writers will use as the example, but this is really true for any freelancer, solopreneur, a business owner, anyone. A lot of times when you hear the objection, the client says, "Well, I'll just do this internally." or I'll just have an employee do this, or I only want to do this for a little bit of time. The writer takes that as this massive negative and they see it as a huge problem. They're like, oh my gosh, they don't want me to do this, they want someone internally to do this. But you have to pull back for a second and ask the question, okay, is it reasonable for me to think or assume that the moment the client starts paying me, I expect that they're going to pay me forever. Like, Arne, if they hire you, right, and they're like, I'll pay you $3,000 a month to help me write a newsletter, is your expectation that this client will be paying you $3,000 a month until you're 95 years old? No, it's not. Of course. Right. Of course. And so My point here is that instead of viewing this as a negative, everyone here, you should actually view this as one of the easiest benefits and value propositions you can speak to. So instead of defending and going, "Let me explain to you why you shouldn't have this employee do this," that's what most people do. They defend. Andrew, can we make sure that the Zoom settings that everybody's muted? So instead of when someone says that and you start defending, notice how easily the conversation moves forward if we flip it and instead we say, "Absolutely. Actually, after we work together for 3 months, I can prep all of the documentation and I can train your team member or your employee. They can actually take it over from there." That's good. So instead, you know what I mean? Instead of viewing it like, now I have to defend myself, you flip it to a positive and you say, actually, this is a big benefit of my service, is we do it together first, 'cause I know how to do it the right way, and then along the way, I will train your team member on how to do it, and then, and you pick a finite endpoint. You're like, and after 3 months, We're done and I hand it off. I did this with hundreds of clients because they all said, well, I'll just write articles internally. I'll just have my, you know, my personal assistant help me write articles, right? I got that objection constantly. And all I did was just say, that's actually part of our service. We work together for 6 months. So I pick a finite time and then I go, and at the end, If you wanna take this internally, you can. What does that do? That does two really important things. One, it overcomes their objection and gets them bought into the process 'cause they can see the end. They can see the light at the end of the tunnel, right? And then second, the ironic thing, just for everyone here, the ironic thing is that by the time the milestone rolls around where you pass it off to their employee or their client, they end up coming to the conclusion that they'd actually just prefer working with you. Or they try it for a month and then a month later they come back to you and they're like, "It didn't work. Let's go back to working together." So it's a funny thing where it's like by telling the client, "That's actually a great idea. Let's do that," they end up dismantling their own argument and then they see you as the person they actually want to work with. Does that make sense? Yeah. And, and yeah, Steph in the chat, that, that's a— that was my— where I was going to go with this next, which is this is even more true in the age of AI, right? People are like, oh, I'll just have AI do it. Okay, instead of defending and going, no, no, I'm better than AI, notice how much easier it is if you just go, yeah, that's actually part of the process. So we work together for 6 months We build this library. This library becomes your training materials for AI. And then when, when we're done with the 6-month project, I'll offboard you and I'll actually document everything that we've done. I'll put it into a Notion doc for you. And if you want to bring it internally and you want to use AI moving forward, you can. What does that do? It dismantles the client's objection completely, right? And if they, if they still go, no, I'll just do AI now, well, then you have to educate them and go, well, you need training data, you need material, you need examples, you need prompts, you need rules. Who's going to go build all those? That's what I was going to build with you. So it's a very easy objection to overcome. And then second, the irony is by the time the 6 months are up, the client's going to try to do it themselves. And then they're going to come to 2 conclusions. They're going to go either, A, this is harder than I thought. "Let's still work together," or B, they're gonna go, "This is amazing. This is really efficient, and because it's efficient, I have a list of other things that I wanna do, and you were so great, could you help me with the next project and the next project and the next project?" None of these are actually problems. They're all just, you just have to speak to it the right way, and all of a sudden, a problem becomes a benefit. Part of your skill development and part of the skill that you are building here inside PGA is when a client presents you with a problem or a client presents you with an objection, the skill you are building is not seeing it as a problem or an objection. You see it as an opportunity to turn it into a benefit. That is like ninja skill level. And it's really not difficult. It just— you just have to sort of, you know, familiarize yourself with a couple patterns. It's like client says this, I I say this in response. Client has this objection, I turn it into a benefit. It's very simple. Everyone see the example we used here is case in point. You should always be asking yourself, instead of defending my position, how do I turn the thing that they're saying is a problem into a benefit for them? Because if you can do that, Immediately their argument gets dismantled, their wall comes down, and then they feel like they can trust you. A really, um, just to like put a final point on this, a really interesting insight that I got from one of Hormozy's recent Q&A videos, I don't know, one of his pieces of content, a really great insight is he was talking about how they were improving retention at Skool, Skool being their software or the software platform that he's a major owner in. And he said one of the most effective things that they have done is they have, you know, they have different tiers. And when someone is on the primo tier and they know, they notice in the data because they have all the tracking data from all the users, when they notice that someone on the top tier isn't using the product that much, but they're still paying for the top tier, one of the most effective retention mechanisms is going to them and saying, "Hey, this is in your best interest. We noticed that you're paying for this top tier and you're not really using it. Would you like us to downgrade you?" Now, why is that so effective? Most people would think, "Well, that's stupid. Why would you go to someone paying you, you know, $99 a month and tell them you should be paying me $9 a month?" Right? Why would you do that? And what they found in the data is that by proactively doing something that was in the user's best interest, yes, they brought the faster revenue down, but then the user stayed longer. Does that make sense? And so you want— the same idea applies to anything, and this is a great example, is like by proactively telling the client, "Hey, I actually agree with you. I'm not gonna defend, like, you wanna do this internally with AI? I'm not gonna defend myself. I agree with you. Now let me just tell you how to do that. Let me proactively tell you how to do, let me tell you how to replace me." That immediately makes the client go, "Oh, I have, Like, all my defenses come down. I have no need to convince you of anything. You're like, we, we both agree, so let's go do that. And all of a sudden, the client's your best friend. But notice how if you, if you don't do that and you start defending and you're like, no, no, I'm better than AI and we're going to work together forever. And like, of course, then the client is going to be more defensive and more skeptical. And you know what I mean? 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. 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. 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