This Daily Routine Made Me RICH ($20,000/mo Writing Online)

When I was 26 years old, I started making $20,000 per month as a ghostwriter following a very specific daily routine. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through it. How I structured my days from the moment I woke up to when I went to bed, how I batched different tasks together. So batching my writing, batching sales calls, emails, and admin work. And how I built this daily schedule to maximize revenue without working myself to death. I'm sharing this with you so you can copy what I did, which is how I went from being a complete beginner and underpaid freelance writer to becoming an incredibly effic efficient Premium Ghostwriter, making 10,000 and eventually upwards of $20,000 per month. So let's get into it. First, to make sense of this daily schedule, you need to understand this meta concept called batching. So batching is where you start by making a long to do list, and then you group similar activities together. So let's say your to do list has these four items on it. Talk to client number one, ghostwrite client number one's content, an hour of cold outreach, and two sales calls. Now, the mistake most writers make when working for themselves is they look at their to do list like this and just start working their way. Their to do list essentially becomes their agenda for the day or for the week. But from an efficiency perspective, this is the worst thing you can do because each one of these tasks uses a very different part of your brain. For example, ghostwriting client number one's content is a quiet activity, right? It requires deep work. It requires you to sit and think, whereas a sales call is the complete opposite. Sales call requires you to be extroverted. It's the opposite of deep work. So when you do two opposing tasks like this, back to back, guess what? You just used up a ton of your mental bandwidth because it takes so much energy to switch between these two states. So what's the solution? Batching. Batching is when you look at your to do list and you group similar activities together. For example, talking to a client and taking a sales call is actually pretty similar. Both of these activities require you to be energetic and extroverted. So it would be a lot more efficient for you to schedule these back to back. That way you can stay in the same state. And then since you're already in a sales state of mind, it would make sense to do your hour of cold outreach right after your sales call. That way you can stay in that state. And then because ghostwriting requires such a different state of mind, after that, it would probably be a good idea to just take a break, maybe make some lunch. And then in your next time block, get the ghostwriting done. See how this works. Okay, so now that you understand how batching works, here are the six different types of time blocks you're going to need to build and protect in your schedule as a ghostwriter. Time block number one, lead gen. So constantly sourcing new potential clients. Keeping your lead gen engine humming. Time block number two, ghostwriting slash fulfillment. So doing the actual work for your clients. Time block number three, account management. Talking to clients, interviewing them as needed. Communicating project milestones, reviewing edits. Right, anything that has to do with communicating with the client. Time block number four, sales calls. So getting leads on the phone, moving them further along in your sales process. Time block number five, content marketing. So having time in your schedule when you create your own content for yourself, keep building your personal brand. And then time block number six, HR slash ops. So anything that has to do with the admin of running your one person business, like responding to random emails, reviewing bank statements, organizing expenses, all that stuff. And again, the mistake writers make is they just sort of do all these things haphazardly. Which is why so many freelance writers complain about being overworked and underpaid because they are unable to get more done in less time and create efficiencies that allow them to either take on more clients or have the time to reinvest in improving their processes or creating new offers, increasing their rates, building their personal brand, et cetera. So how do you build a schedule where you get these six different departments of tasks done efficiently? Well, just copy what I did. So after I quit my 9 to 5 job as an entry level copywriter and I started ghostwriting, here is exactly how I structured my days. Monday through Sunday. First, every single morning, usually around 7 or 8am Monday through Friday, I would spend an hour doing cold outreach. I would Open up Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Medium, even websites like Crunchbase. And I'd look for my target client founders and executives of startups that had just raised their Series A or B because I knew they had just raised a ton of money and that their founders probably wanted to start publishing content and positioning themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Then I'd do a little homework and figure out what sort of content they would probably want to publish. And I'd come up with a few ideas that I thought would be compelling and then I'd send them an email or DM and just give them those ideas for free. Just to spark up a conversation. And then after I reached out to them, I'd add their name to a list on my phone of people I had reached out to who I could follow up with and try to get on a sales call later. And I did this every single morning because I knew reaching out to new clients and sparking up more conversations was how I would keep the leads coming in and my business healthy over the long term. So make this the priority Cold outreach. One hour every single morning. And after a few weeks you'll realize that your time spent here won't be about reaching out to as many new people, but actually just spending that hour following up with people you've already reached out to. It's the relentless follow up everybody forgets or thinks isn't important, but I promise that's actually the secret second 9am to noon Monday through Friday were my deep work slash writing blocks. If you're more productive in the afternoon or evenings, you can switch this to 1 to 4pm or 6 to 9pm I'm most productive in the mornings, so I always wanted to keep my mornings free and protect that time for deep work. No calls, no meetings, no emails, no scrolling on social media. 9am to noon devices are off and the writing gets done. And if I was all caught up on client work, then the next thing I would do is my own personal writing and my own personal content marketing in this same time block. So I might do client work from 9am to noon Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. But then if I was ahead, I'd do my own personal writing 9am to noon Thursday and Friday. The truth is, if you want to really make money as a ghostwriter, your personal writing is always going to be second priority. It's still worth doing because in the long run having an audience of your your own and building your personal brand will only help you attract more high quality clients. But when push comes to shove, or if you have a particularly busy week, existing client work is always going to take priority. And that's okay. So 9am to noon. Deep work slash writing time, clients first, yourself second. Then I'd break for lunch around noon. This is when I would allow my brain to rest. Sometimes I'd read while I ate lunch, sometimes I'd just scroll on social media for short periods of time. This is fine, you just need to have a clear end. And for me this meant I had to get back to work promptly at 1pm Then 1pm to 4pm Sometimes 5pm is when I would go do everything account management and sales related because talking to existing clients and potential clients is a similar sort of task. And I found it was so much more productive to batch these together rather than trying to bounce between writing and client calls, writing and sales calls all day long. And little pro tip here. Whenever I was structuring my afternoons, I would really try to batch talking to existing clients back to back and then talking to new potential clients back to back again. I wanted to minimize the switching cost between each type of call and then around 5pm I'd be done for the day. I'd go to the gym, I'd come home, relax, maybe watch a movie. I'd spend time with my girlfriend who is now my wife. And then on the weekends, usually Sunday mornings, is when I would get all my admin stuff done. So all the boring things required to run your one person business, finances, taxes, stuff like that. Which is actually pretty similar to how I run our portfolio of writing businesses today that does over $5 million in annual revenue. I use a very similar schedule where I do all my deep work in the mornings, calls in the afternoons, and admin tasks on Sunday mornings. And this schedule was what I found to be the most effective when I was first starting out and is what allowed me to really ramp my efficiencies and scale my ghostwriting income to upwards of $20,000 per month. So if you've been struggling to find a schedule that works for you, especially if you've been feeling burned out, overworked, underpaid, then give this a try. Because a lot of these problems go away when you get clear on these six different parts of your one person ghostwriting business and you start to build batch similar tasks together. And if you have any questions on how this works or how to batch tasks correctly, drop a comment here and I'm happy to share what worked for me.