Nicolas Cole explains how he signed 300 ghostwriting clients by mirroring what prospects actually wanted. Instead of turning away someone who asked for a book, he'd reframe his article-writing service as a faster path to build an audience first. About a third of his clients came in wanting a book but chose articles instead.
How do you anchor your service if you know the prospect is spending a bunch of money on ads? The, the whole secret to everything is the right answer is whatever the client cares about. The right answer is whatever the client cares about. If the client says we're spending too much money on ads, how do you frame the service? My service is an alternative to running ads. If a client says, we're running ads inefficiently, you say, my service helps benefit your ads so that they run more efficiently.
If the client says, we really care about organic traffic, you go, that's great.
My service helps you with organic traffic.
You go, we really care about converting people via email.
That's great. My service specializes in converting people via email. The right answer is whatever the client says they care about. Does that make everyone get that? And sometimes that means being a little creative.
Okay.
So, for example, the service that I, that I built my whole agency off of was writing 800-word thought leadership articles. Okay. And we would post those articles. This is back in 2016, but we post those articles on Quora and then Medium. And then around like 2019, as things started to change, we started posting them on LinkedIn. Okay. I can't tell you how many times I would have a conversation with the client and they would say, the thing I care about is I want to write a book.
Now drop in the chat.
Was I providing a book writing service? Yes or no? No, I was not. I was providing an article writing service. But does that mean if the client says I care about writing a book, What the novice does is the novice goes, "That's not the service I provide. Bye." That's what the novice does. That is not what I did. What I did is I said, "Exactly, Carolyn. You asked a clarifying question. Why do you want to write a book?" The client goes, "Oh, I really want to position myself as a thought leader in my industry." I go, "That's great. That's the thing you care about." What's the right answer? The right answer is whatever thing the client says they care about. So the client goes, "I want to be seen as a thought leader in my industry." And I go, "That's great. Why don't I educate you on the fact that, yeah, a book does that, but actually books are really— they take a long time. They're really hard, right? And by the time you have a book, wouldn't you want to have an audience? Wouldn't— aren't you going to need things to promote the book?" They go, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. You're right." Okay. So actually, my service gets you ready to write a book. And it helps you build an audience and it actually accomplishes the same goal. It positions you as a thought leader in your industry. And by the way, at the end, if we work together for 6 to 12 months, you will have a big bundle of articles that if you wanted to, you could work with an editor, smash it together, and self-publish a book. So I took my service, I asked, "What do you care about?" They told me the answer, and then I fit my service to what they care about. I'm not exaggerating. I think out of 300 clients, probably 100 of them, like a third of them, all got on sales calls saying, "I want to write a book," and all of them ended up going with articles instead. And then some of them later, you know, wrote books with other companies and stuff.
So this is the whole—
the whole game is like people make sales out to be like, I have this thing and I have to go convince other people to buy it. That is not what you're doing. What you're doing is you are asking questions, you're asking what does the client care about, and then you're finding a way to bridge what does the client care about and what do you provide.
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What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
