← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
These Writers broke their faulty beliefs & got RICH
00:17:23
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A
How much money you make Ghostwriting last month? 10k. How much money you make? 14k. How much money you make, 20k. How much money you make'? 27k. What about you? 40.5k. Okay. What about you? 45. What about you?
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47.
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What about you? 50k. These are eight of our most successful students from our premium ghostwriting academy. But guess where they all started? Zero. And today I'm going to tell you the eight faulty beliefs these writers had to break to go from broke to rich. So you can, too. Faulty belief number one. Nobody can afford my services. Okay, no, the two people you talked to this month can't afford your services. But I promise there are millions of people in the world who can. You're just taking a very small sample and extrapolating a sweeping conclusion that isn't reflective of reality. So you're wrong. And if you want to get real for a second, the reason you think nobody can afford your services and no one can afford what you're selling is because you think what you're selling is a lot of money. And I promise it's not. $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. This is not a lot of money, but it's a lot of money to you. So when someone says no or that's too expensive, you agree with them, which is fundamentally what's keeping you stuck. And so until you break this faulty belief in yourself, which, by the way, the only way to break it is to spend more time around people who don't think five grand is a lot of money, you're going to stay stuck in this vicious cycle. You're going to talk to three people. They're going to say, that's too expensive. You. You agree with them. And instead of recognizing your faulty belief and your skill deficiency, you decide, oh, I should change niches, I should change offers. This is too saturated. This isn't working. Then you talk to another three people and they say, that's too expensive. And the cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over again. Faulty belief number two. I need more clients. No, you need the same number of clients, or fewer clients even, to pay you more money. And I know this is true because I lived this mistake for years building my ghostwriting agency. Our original offer when I was first starting out was three 800 word articles per week, so 12 per month for $3,000. So quick math. That meant we were getting paid $250 per article. And it took us, like, two years to learn and realize not only was that way too much volume for clients, they couldn't even keep up with the ideas and the calls and the edits of all of those pieces, but they actually would have been happy to pay us more to publish less so that the service didn't require as much of their time. So, fast forward two years later, do you want to know what our offer changed to? It was two articles per month for $5,000. So a 10x increase in price for a 10th the amount of work. So, no, you don't need more clients. In fact, all getting more clients is going to do is compound the problems in your existing offer. And I promise, if you don't clean things up now, more clients just means more problems. So instead, and this is what I tell every single ghostwriter who starts making five grand a month and thinks they're ready to scale until you hit 10. Really? 15 grand per month? The game isn't to get as many clients as you can. It's to get the clients you have to pay you more money and for each new client you bring on to pay you more for the same or less work. Faulty Belief number three I'll charge more when I'm More Experienced okay, here's my favorite way to dismantle this faulty belief and prove how it has absolutely nothing to do with money. Whenever someone says this to me, I ask them, okay, can you please define what more experienced means? Is it when you've worked with three clients? Is it five clients? Is it 10 clients? Is it a hundred clients? Is it when you've made five grand? Is it ten grand? Is it fifty grand? Is it a hundred grand? What is the specific objective metric at which you will feel more experienced? And whenever I ask people this question, guess what? They can't define it. And all of a sudden they realize saying I'll charge more when I'm more experienced is really just a clever way of giving themselves permission to keep kicking the goalpost and avoiding answering the real question. And the real question is, why don't you think you deserve to charge more today? I have mentored thousands of writers at this point and without fail, 100% of the time. The root of the root issue here has nothing to do with experience level or how many clients they've worked with. What it has to do with is their relationship with money. They're intimidated by charging more because they've never done it before, or they tried once and a client pushed back and said, that's too expensive, or even deeper. They are still struggling financially themselves. So they can't fathom asking a client to pay several thousand dollars when they only have a couple hundred bucks in their checking account. I can relate. I remember those days. Or even deeper. They grew up in a family that lived in a constant state of financial scarcity. And so the thought of being paid thousands of dollars for a service is literally unfathomable. I'm not making any of this stuff up. I have had to work through all of these same issues myself, and I can't tell you how many writers I've coached out of these same faulty beliefs. And do you want to know what solves it besides having a mentor or joining a program or community that just desensitizes you to charging more? Here's what's going to happen. Eventually, you will get so frustrated at yourself for undercharging that the frustration of continuing to over deliver for clients for a fraction of what you should be making will become greater than the fear of charging more. And one day you'll just get fed up with it. And the next prospect you talk to, you're just going to throw out a higher number, you're going to raise your prices, and they won't even think twice about it. They'll just say, sure, that sounds good. And you're going to sit there and wish you had listened to me and just charged more. Six months earlier Faulty belief Number four. My niche got saturated. I think it's time to pivot. Okay, let me tell you another pattern I've observed a thousand times. A writer steps into a niche. They land a couple ghostwriting clients really quickly. They think they've struck gold. They think they're a genius. Then a month or two or three later, a couple of those clients churn. And immediately the writer comes to the conclusion the gold has dried up, the niche is dead, the offer doesn't work anymore. It's time to pivot. And this isn't just ghostwriters, by the way. I can't tell you how many friends I have who run similar businesses. Coaches or consultants, therapists, any service provider. And they fall into the same thought pattern. One month they'll land three new clients and think they're a genius. And another month, two clients will churn and they'll think their business is going up in flames. Their niche is dead, their offers broken, and it's time to pivot. And neither of these extremes is correct. You aren't a genius just because you landed three clients back to back to back. And your business also isn't dead just because a couple clients churned. Which means the skill to build is you need to be better about Managing the highs and coaching yourself out of the lows. And when something is trending down, you have to be level headed enough to realize that it's temporary, it's fine. You know what levers to push and pull to land your next couple clients. And when you do, you're going to think the opposite all over again. That you're a genius and there was never anything to worry about. Faulty belief number five. I need to hire someone. This is a mistake I see so many ghostwriters make. As soon as they hit 10k per month they immediately think, oh, I'm swamped, I need to hire someone, that's the next stage. And as a result they try and jump too quickly to the next level. And all hiring someone does is compound all their existing problems. And I know because I made this mistake over and over and over again building my ghostwriting agency and I scaled it all the way up to $180,000 per month. So some golden rules to follow. If your business isn't profitable now, hiring someone isn't going to make it more profitable. If your business isn't enjoyable now, hiring someone isn't going to make it enjoyable. If your business is inefficient now, hiring someone isn't just going to magically make it efficient. One of the biggest faulty beliefs in business is thinking, once I hire someone, then once I hire someone, then it'll be easier. Once I hire someone, then I'll be less stressed. Once I hire someone, then the business economics will be better. And again, I made this mistake about 20 times from 10k per month all the way up to 180k per month. And every single time I hired another one or two or three people, I thought once we get these new people onboarded, then, and guess what? Then never came. The business just got more stressful, more complex and less profitable. So if you think you need to hire someone because some aspect of your business isn't working very well, stop. Hiring someone isn't what fixes the issue, it's just going to make it worse. Instead, you need to be the one to get your one person business working efficiently and profitably. You need to raise your prices, you need to dial in the offer. And then once things are running smoothly and you have plenty of margin to play with, then you can hire someone to take over a set of responsibilities in the business. But until you do these things, and until you're at least 15k a month, closer to 20k per month, you don't need to hire anyone. Faulty belief number six. If I Share too much with the client on the sales call, they won't need me anymore. If you have this faulty belief, don't worry, everyone has it, including some of the smartest CEOs. I know everyone thinks if I give too much away for free, then no one will want to buy from me. But I cannot tell you how opposite this really is. The more you give for free, the more people will trust you, the more they will buy from you. And a way I like framing this idea is the strategy is free, the execution is expensive. When you take a sales call with a prospect, tell them everything. Literally everything. Whatever their goal is, tell them, here's how you should go about it. Here's what you should do, here's how often you should do it. Here's when, here's where, here's why, here's how to do it. Here's some of the mistakes to avoid when doing it. Literally, tell them everything. And here's a little one liner. I really love whether or not we work together. I just want you to be successful. When you say this, boom. You just immediately disarmed them because now you're not pitching anything. You aren't selling them on working with you. You're just educating them like a friend would. And do you want to know what happens when you do that? They're going to say to you, wow, this is a lot of work. Can I just hire you to do all this for me? To which all you have to say is, yep, sure, can. This free consulting strategy is a huge skill that we train ghostwriters on in our premium ghostwriting academy. How to find things to point out in people's businesses as areas of improvement. How to spot problems or missed opportunities, how to point them out kindly but with authority. And how to just give, give, give, give, give until the person's practically throwing money at you. This is the single best way to land clients. Not scraping LinkedIn for leads or spam emailing anybody and everybody. It's taking this targeted free consulting approach and understanding the most simple rule in all of human civilization. The more you give, the more you get. Faulty belief number seven. I love this one. I need to build an audience. I need a podcast. I need a newsletter. I need to start making YouTube videos. No, you don't. You don't need to do any of those things. If you aren't making at least 20 grand per month as a ghostwriter, nothing is going to have a bigger impact on your earnings than getting better at cold outreach and free consulting. Nothing. Building an audience long term game Building a newsletter, long term game, having a podcast, even longer term game and making YouTube videos. I delay starting a YouTube channel for literally eight years. I wanted to start making videos way back in like 2015. And I didn't because it was never the priority. It didn't become a priority until like a year ago. You don't need a YouTube channel. You don't need any of these things. You need to pitch more people and you need to get better at free consulting. That is the beauty of services. You don't need a hundred clients, you don't need volume, you need two people to say yes. And you just doubled your monthly revenue. So ignore all the other shiny objects, they're distractions. And just get better at the one lever that's going to take you from 5k to 10k to 20k per month the fastest. And that's cold outreach and free consulting. And by the way, guess what? This pretty much stays true for every milestone thereafter. The difference between 20k per month and 40k per month is still cold outreach and free consulting. And even 40k per month to 80k per month. For context, I scaled my Ghostwriting agency from 0 to $180,000 per month exclusively using cold outreach and free consulting. No ads, no email list, no podcast, no YouTube channel. We just got really, really good at cold outreach and free consulting. So much so that for every 10 sales calls we booked on the calendar, we would close five of them. We literally had a 50% call to client conversion rate for years. So that's the level you need to get to before you start worrying about all the other stuff. Faulty belief number eight. I can just figure this out on my own. Do you want to know what the eight students you saw at the beginning of this video all share in common? Instead of trying to figure it out on their own, they decided to just pay for the answer. And fundamentally, that's what education is supposed to be. Because sure, technically you can figure all of these things out on your own. It's just going to take you a really long time and it's going to be really frustrating and it's going to be painful and you're going to have to learn by making all the same mistakes I did, maybe even more mistakes than I did. Or you can shorten that entire journey and just skip to the end and look ready for the one liner. I'm going to use the one liner right here. Whether or not you ever join us in pga, I just want you to be successful. And I mean that. I'm telling you no Matter what it is you want to do in life, it always costs twice as much and takes twice as long to figure it out on your own. So, yes. Can you figure many of these things out by yourself? Of course you can. You're smart, you're capable. It's just going to take a long time and it's going to be hard. And you run the risk of throwing in the towel and giving up simply because you don't know. What you don't know, or a different path, is you can pay for someone else's pain. And I want to be really clear about something. I'm speaking as someone who has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars investing in my own education in the online space over the past few years. In 2023, my co founder, Dickie and I joined this mastermind called Eight Figure Boardroom for $68,000. And we paid for it in 2024, and we're about to pay for a third year, so another $68,000 in 2025. But it's been completely worth it because this investment has helped us build PGA into a $5 million a year business. So this isn't some shill, I'm telling you. This is how we make decisions, too. And the thing is, with education of any kind, you aren't really paying for the information. Everyone thinks, oh, it's just information. I can figure that out on my own. Okay. That's not the primary value. The primary value is that you're going to struggle to put the information into practice. You're going to have questions, you're going to run into situations you won't know how to handle. You're going to ride an emotional rollercoaster of not knowing how to make decisions in moments of stress. You're going to get down on yourself. You're going to make really expensive mistakes. But most of all, you're going to think you're making good decisions when you're not. And you're not going to have anyone to bounce those decisions off of. You're going to be alone. And as someone who built an agency without any outside resources or help, let me tell you, it was very, very painful and it was very lonely. I wish someone could have looked at what we had and just told me, don't do that, do that. Instead, I would have made so much more money. It doesn't matter how much it cost. I would have made so much more money and I would have saved myself a lot of stressful nights. Which, by the way, is the whole reason why I decided to start PGA in the first place, but here to end the video. Don't even take my word for it. Here's one of our most successful students, Matthew Brown, talking about his experience investing in his own education as a ghostwriter. And quick context. Today his ghostwriting agency does around 50 grand per month. He's smart. He probably could have figured a lot of this out on his own, but he decided to just skip to the end and pay for the answers and be able to use us as a resource. And guess what? Every time he reached a new plateau, he would just ask me, cole, where do I go from here? And I've probably helped him avoid 10 really expensive mistakes. But every single time he would listen, he would just do what I said and his business would double, then double again, then double again. Anyway, let you hear it from him. What's your name and what got you into ghost writing?
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Matthew Brown. So I started a mortgage company when I was in college and I ran that for two and a half, three years, and the interest rates just shot up and I was looking for a way out. I also just hated doing what I was doing, loved writing, and I'd seen people blowing up on Twitter and decided, you know what, I'm pretty good writer. Like, I want to test my hand at this. So I actually started writing for a different ghost writing agency. First just freelancing, and then two months after that took my first client. So I'd followed you and Dickie for quite some time, and I actually never joined your first program because I was already riding online. And when you guys put out an email saying that you were going to release something ghost riding related, there's nothing out there in the space. And I was clueless as to what it could look like, what the mistakes are, and thought this would be a no brainer to download the lessons that you've learned building a ghostwriting agency in the past.
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What's the biggest thing you've learned since joining pga?
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You can just avoid so many mistakes. I've. I've made some of these mistakes, but I've avoided so many more because I've had access to somebody who's built a ghostwriting agency. Your whole curriculum kind of lays out what some of those mistakes can be. And so I've just gotten to where I am without a lot of the same pain that you had to go through, which I'm very thankful.
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Before, how much revenue were you doing in the beginning and how much are you doing now?
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Back when I started 2,505 grand, 6 grand. Right now, the last four months, I've averaged $40,000. I'd attribute a large portion of it to PGA.
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And if you want to become a ghostwriter, too, click the link below. We'll teach you everything you need to know.