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As a writer, what's your fastest path to making $3,755,972? Well, I can tell you, because this is how much revenue I generated as a ghostwriter before the age of 30. If someone had told me this in the beginning, I would have made so much more money. If you're a freelance writer churning out blog posts for minimum wage, this is for you. I'm going to give you five upgrades that you should make today to immediately start making more money. There are three reasons ghostwriting is your fastest path to making serious money as a WR differentiated positioning, direct relationships with decision makers, and perceived value. Let's start with differentiated positioning. What you call yourself matters, and I can prove it with a simple example. So, according to Upwork, over 53 million Americans now freelance, either full time or as a side hustle. So if you call yourself a freelancer, you are essentially categorized the same way as 53 million other people. Not very differentiated. Now, on UPWORK alone, there are 1.5 million freelance writers. So adding this clarification niches you down a level, which is better but still not great, right? If you call yourself a freelance writer, you are lumped into the same category as 1.5 million other writers. And that's just on Upwork. So what do most writers do? They specialize. This is where you might decide to pick something like copywriting, for example. And according to Career Explorer, there is an estimated 151,200 200 copywriters in the United States. Now, I think it's probably higher than that, but still, it proves the point, right? Copywriting is more specific than freelance writing, which is more specific than freelancing in general, but still. Right? Lots of people call themselves copywriters, which means if you call yourself a copywriter, too, you immediately get compared to hundreds of thousands of other writers by the same name. As Shakespeare said, right? What's in a name? And so how do you immediately differentiate yourself from being compared to other freelance writers or copywriters? You call yourself something different. I cannot tell you how many writers inside our premium ghostwriting academy have seen an increase in sales calls, DM and email responses, and new clients just by changing what they call themselves and calling themselves a ghostwriter. Same reason why I decided to call myself a ghostwriter. Right. Differentiated positioning. Okay, so that's the first reason. The second reason why ghostwriting is your fastest path to making serious money as a writer is because it allows you to build direct relationships with the most important decision makers in the business, like the Business owner, the founder, the executive team, or even the investors. The most common ghostwriting job isn't ghostwriting books. How I made millions of dollars as a GhostWriter. And the three services that I train other ghostwriters to provide today are ghostwriting educational email courses and other free opt ins to capture emails, ghostwriting social content to help business leaders build their personal brands, and ghostwriting weekly newsletters either on ConvertKit or Substack. And you can charge thousands of dollars for all three of these services because every founder and every business owner and every executive and every investor today wants an audience and understands the value of building a personal brand. And they don't have the time, which means they need to hire a ghostwriter. And so, as someone who has personally Ghostwritten for over 300 different founders and executives and investors, you name it. Let me tell you what happens. The moment you show someone like this that you know how to write about their industry, they are going to ask for your help writing all sorts of other things. They're going to come to you and ask, can you write my landing pages? Can you rewrite my website copy? Can you write my sales sequences? Can you write thought leadership articles for our company? Right. You name it. And you don't have to say yes to every one of these requests. But this is how a minnow client can turn into a whale client, because you now have a relationship with the CEO. So that's the second reason ghostwriting is your fastest path to making serious money as a writer. Because once you get in with a CEO, not only do they give you more opportunities inside their business, but Most founders and CEOs are friends with other founders and CEOs, which leads to referrals, which leads to more projects, which leads to more money. But it's this third reason that is arguably the most important. Perceived value. Words don't just carry meaning. Words also carry implied meaning, AKA association. So for example, what's the difference between a cashier and a concierge? In many ways, they both perform the same tasks, right? The cashier at the ice cream store takes your credit card and charges it, and the concierge at the Four Seasons takes your credit card and charges it. But the associations we have with each word are completely different. And I would bet if you had to tell everyone at Thanksgiving dinner about your new job, you'd way rather call yourself a concierge than a cashier. And so the same is true for every role or job in every industry. And when you call yourself a freelance writer, for example, those words carry associations and the association that comes to mind for most people when they hear the term freelance writer is they imagine a 20 something year old sitting at a cafe churning out blog post after blog post about something like liposuction or hair removal, earning minimum wage. Whereas when you call yourself a ghostwriter, even if the work you're doing is identical to what you were doing as a freelance writer, that the association changes. When founders or executives hear the word ghostwriter, they think of a specialist. So someone who works exclusively with their echelon of person, which is why ghostwriters have a much easier time charging a premium. So those are the three reasons why ghostwriting is your fastest path to making serious money as a writer. And now I'm going to give you the five upgrades that you should make today to immediately start making more money. Upgrade number one, change your bio. You would be shocked how many writers don't just say what they do or who they do it for right away in their bio. So here's a very simple template that you can use. I ghostwrite specific asset for ideal client. So this is literally the first thing we walk people through how to do inside our premium ghostwriting academy. And the reason that we start with this is because it works. So here are a couple examples of what this might look like for you. I ghostwrite social content for fintech founders. I ghostwrite weekly newsletters for YouTubers. I ghostwrite educational email courses for personal trainers. Put this one sentence in all of your social bios on X, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, whichever platform you use the most, put it in your email signature. Put it on your website. Repeat this one liner to as many people in your life as possible. Because the more people who know what you ghostwrite and who your ideal client is, the more of those ideal clients you're going to attract. It's time for an objection. But Cole, if I say I only ghostwrite one type of thing for one specific type of person, that's gonna cut out so many potential clients? Yes, it is and no it isn't. Okay, so let me explain. The reason freelance writers struggle so much to increase their rates is because they say they can write anything for anyone in any industry. So as a result, they don't specialize. And specialists always make more than generalists. So by getting more specific, yes, you cut out a lot of potential clients, but that's what makes you a specialist, which is what allows you to charge a premium and then create efficiencies for yourself so you can take on more clients and get more done in Less time simultaneously. And this is the thing a lot of people don't understand. Getting more specific doesn't actually mean less opportunity. This is actually the big idea that Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote about in their book Positioning. Okay, so to differentiate yourself, customers and clients need a clear and specific entry point into who you are and what you do. So when you say I write anything, clients don't know where to put you in their brain. But when you say I ghostwrite educational email courses for personal trainers, this makes it very easy for them to organize you somewhere in their head. But here's what happens when you get that specific. And again, this is the part that everybody misunderstands. These clients almost always end up asking for your help with other things too. So when I was building my agency, Digital Press, all we did was specialize in 800 word thought leadership articles. But 100% of of our clients asked us for help writing other things too. They asked if we could help write landing pages. They asked if we could help write website copy. They asked if we could help write their emails. They asked if we could help write their social content. Now, the reason that we turned it down was because our thought leadership article writing business was already growing faster than we could keep up with. So we didn't need to say yes to more work. Right? But this taught me a really important lesson, which is that differentiation comes from specialization and specialization builds trust, and trust is what leads to more opportunities. So this is what your bio should look like. I ghostwrite specific asset for ideal client. And when you do this, you actually created more opportunity for yourself because you made it easier for the person to understand what you did and made it easier to start building the relationship with them faster. Upgrade number two, be your own case study. If you ghostwrite social content, you should actively be writing your own social content. If you ghostwrite newsletters, you should have a newsletter. If you ghostwrite educational email courses, you should have an educational email course pinned at the top of all your social profiles, right? This is the secret to landing high quality, high paying clients. It's not testimonials. It's not having some big fancy personal brand. It's not even having hundreds of thousands of followers. And I know because that $3,755,972 I generated as a ghostwriter happened back before I had any of these things. Okay, but do you want to know what I did have? I had hours and hours of practice. I practiced on myself. So being your own case study does three very important things first, you can make mistakes on yourself with zero downside. Okay? Practicing on yourself means you can try things without worrying about losing the client, for example, which makes you better, which makes the service you provide more valuable, and so on. Right? It creates a flywheel. Second, it puts your finger on the pulse of what actually works and what doesn't. Anyone can sell a service, but the people who are constantly iterating and keeping up with social platforms and marketing trends are the ones who ultimately end up making the most money. And third, and this is the biggest benefit is that all your practice is public proof. Right? The more you practice in public, the less cold outreach you have to do. Because clients will be able to see your quality of work as you publish it in public. So this is actually how I landed my first ghost trading client back in 2016. He was a 70 year old entrepreneur who had just sold his company for a billion dollars. And he found my writing on Quora back when I had like 3,000 followers. And he sent me an email and said, I really enjoy reading your writing. Would you be able to help me write on the Internet too? But Cole, I don't want to build my personal brand. I don't want to create social content, I hate social media, right? Blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine. That just means you're going to have to get really good at cold outreach. Because there's really only two ways to attract high profile, high paying clients. You create content that acts as public proof. Right? You practice on yourself, you build yourself, or you do cold outreach. Can you still land ghost trading clients? Of course you can. This is how I ended up building my entire agency. The vast majority of our hundreds and hundreds of clients all came from cold outreach, either through DMs or emails. But I promise everything is easier when you are your own case study and when you practice on yourself. Upgrade number three, Master the art of free consulting. Why do so many cold DMs suck? Because they try to sell you. They don't try to help you. There's a huge difference. Okay? Clients don't want to buy your service. No business owner wakes up in the morning excited to give someone else their hard earned money. Right? What clients want is to solve a problem in their business. Which means the way you land these clients isn't to spam, DM or spam email as many prospects as possible with your elevator sales pitch. The way you land clients is by doing what I like to call free consulting. So here's what that is. There are six components to the perfect free consulting script. First, is the problem. So what is the problem this target client currently has? Because they can't care about the solution until they first care about the problem. Second is the cause of the problem. So tell them what's causing it. Are they doing something wrong? Do they not even have the solution built yet? Right? What's the reason this problem exists? People only want to solve problems that they know are a problem or have been educated on why it's a problem. Third, what is the negative consequence of not fixing this problem? Right? If they don't fix it, what bad things are going to happen? How much time or money are they going to leave on the table? Are they going to waste? Fourth is the solution. So then, once you've educated them on the problem, how would you recommend they solve it? Which leads to the fifth. What are the benefits of solving this problem? Right? When this problem gets solved, what good things happen? What could things happen in their life? What could things happen in their business? And then finally, the sixth component is the ultimate positive outcomes of fixing the problem, right? How is their life different after this problem gets fixed? What new opportunities does this unlock? Where can they go from here? This free consulting approach is how I've generated millions of dollars as a ghostwriter. And it is not hard to learn. In fact, you probably already do this with the clients you currently have. But the secret is to provide this same level of value to people who aren't your client yet. Yet you want to give the same amount of value you would give a paying client upfront for free. And when you do that, watch how fast clients throw money at you. Upgrade number four, packaging. Notice the difference between how these two writers package and present their services. Writer A says, hey, I'm a good writer. I charge $50 an hour. Do you want to hire me? This is what most writers do. In fact, if you're watching this right now, there is a good chance you're currently making some version of this mistake with your packaging. Which is okay, right? That's why you're here, to learn. And I'm going to show you how to fix it. Now, compare writer A to writer B. Okay. Writer B says, hey, I specialize in writing newsletters for fintech founders. I do this to build your email list and retain readers. I recommend publishing one time per week. So four times per month. I can handle all the idea generation, the writing, the subject line, a, B, testing, monthly analytics, reviews, everything. All I need is 30 minutes of your time every other week to give edits or final approvals. And for this, I charge $3,000 per month and I do unlimited revisions. So my metric for success isn't word count, but it's value per word. Now, which writer do you want to hire? Writer A, who just gave you a job called I have to figure out what to have this writer go and do, or writer B who can run the show, and all you have to do is approve the final result. I promise you, Writer B is going to get the job every single time. And the reason is because they aren't selling their skills as a writer. What they're selling is a package service. And it makes it very easy for the target client to just say yes and then get going. So here's my little five step checklist for turning any writing task into a repeatable packaged service. First, you have to specialize. Okay, you can't create a package service by providing every service to any client in any industry. You have to pick one service and own it. You say all I do is ghostwrite Instagram reel scripts, or all I do is ghostwrite newsletters for crypto founders. The more specific the better. Second, you consult the client, so you don't say, I'll do whatever you need. That's not helpful. You say, I recommend so you be more than a writer. Be their personal consultant and tell them what you think their cadence or volume of output should be. Third, you list tangible deliverables. This is just a fancy way of saying, here are all the things I'm going to take off your plate. And again, get specific. Don't just say, I'll manage your email list. Say I'll sweep your list of cold subscribers every 90 days to keep unsubscribe rates low and the quality of your email list healthy. The more specific you are, the more it shows them that you know what you're doing. Fourth, you try and reduce the client's time involvement to near zero. So what's the least amount of effort that you need from the client in order to be successful? And how can you build your entire package service around that tiny time investment? And fifth, how much? Don't make the client do math. Just tell them how much it costs, either per project or per month as a flat rate. If you're selling a service without these five components, yeah, no wonder you can't increase your rates because you're making it hard for the client to say yes. Upgrade number five, pricing. This is the last big upgrade. Charge more. Just charge more. Seriously? That's it. Just charge more. And I promise, whatever reason you're telling yourself why you can't is wrong. I don't have enough credibility. I can't charge more in my niche. I've tried and nobody said yes. No one will be able to afford my services if I up my pricing. All of these are wrong. And I know they're wrong because I've mentored over 10,000 writers and ghostwriters at this point. And I have heard these objections and these faulty beliefs over and over and over again. And guess what? The people who take my advice and charge more make more money. And the people who don't, don't. You don't know where the pricing ceiling is yet on the service that you provide. I promise you don't know where the ceiling is. And even if one person or two people or three people say they can't afford that higher price, who cares? There are 8 billion people in the world. Go find someone who can because I promise you they exist. High paying clients exist. They're everywhere. So those are the five big upgrades that you should make today to make more money as a writer. Change your bio. So I ghostwrite specific asset for ideal client. Be your own case study. Study master the art of free consulting. Sell a package service and finally just charge more.