Boo! Five Ways to Ghostwrite Online
Happy Halloween! I don’t know about you, but this time of year really snuck up on me. Halloween always marks the beginning of the frantic holiday season full of family, food and lots of spending. Becoming a ghostwriter online, or expanding your existing ghostwriting business, can really help offset those holiday costs.
It’s every writer’s dream to see their name in print, or at least on the screen. But sometimes you’ve got to get “spooky” in order to pay the bills. Ghostwriting takes a lot of shapes and forms online, but here are five of the most successful ways I’ve found to work with clients as a ghostwriter.
1. Ghostwriting ebooks - Information products are here to stay, and every marketer wants a piece of the action. If Joe Marketer knows he needs an ebook on losing weight by eating chocolate (wouldn’t that be great!) but can’t string a sentence together to save his life, then you can be his life preserver.
Make sure to find out what style the marketer wants the ebook in and iron out all of the details on length and format before you start. The good thing about writing ebooks, from your perspective, is that you don’t have to research 20 different topics in order to make the same money.
2. Ghostwriting blog posts - Blogging is a great tool for getting to know a target market and branding yourself in a niche, but not all of my clients have time to do it. Providing short, informative and entertaining blog posts can help them stay in touch with their market.
Writing blog posts is easy if you do them in monthly groups. Instead of having to sit down each day, spend a few days ironing out the following month’s posts. Then the client can pre-load them into their blog for the following month.
3. Ghostwriting Autoresponder Sequences
If you don’t know what an autoresponder is, then sign up to receive my free Web Writing Report. I don’t have a long sequence in there, but you’ll get the idea. When you visit a website and sign up to receive a report, the site owner will generally have a sequence of five to seven messages that will continue the contact with the prospect.
In this sequence, they might offer additional information on the same topic, or point out helpful resources. They will also be pre-selling the audience on another product or service they might enjoy. Writing autoresponder sequences is part content writing and part copywriting. You’ll need to inform and also persuade the reader to take the next action.
4. Ghostwriting Reports
Reports are smaller ebooks of 5 to 15 pages that can be used for sale, or as a giveaway product. They help a marketer brand themselves for a specific niche, and increase their mailing list. They can also be used a pre-cursor to a larger product. It’s a great way for someone to test out the waters in a niche without commiting to writing, or rather having YOU write a long ebook.
5. Ghostwriting for Yourself
This may sound like my head is full of cobwebs at first, but hear me out. As you brand yourself online as a writer, you start treating the Internet as a virtual office. Knowing this, you may want to keep your writing career and your affiliate marketing seperate.
For example, you decide to try your hand at doing some article marketing for a health product. You write articles all about a health problem that you had, and how this product helped, etc, etc. Do you necessarily want your client to see that as the first thing that pops up on Google attached to your name?
I’m not saying you need to hide the other things that you are doing online. But it can help your organization and your branding to keep everything seperate and use a pen name for your other article marketing that’s not associated with your writing business. It’s free and it helps keep things simple.
Even if you decide to put it all under one name, take some time to make yourself your client. Ghostwriting is profitable, but you always want to be thinking about the next thing and affiliate marketing through writing articles is a natural next step.
Consider these spooky methods for making money as an online ghostwriter, and enjoy your Halloween. I’ll be carting around my fairy princesses and trying to avoid eating too much chocolate (where’s that client with that brilliant ebook idea when you need ‘em?)
Comments
4 Responses to “Boo! Five Ways to Ghostwrite Online”
Leave a Reply
Comments links could be nofollow free.
-
Sell Your Writing Online
-
SUBSCRIBE -
Awards
-
-
The Content Chef
Oh, I love how you have tied this “ghost-writing” in with Halloween…. Happy Halloween, Courtney!
Great information! What a fun way to present it.
Thanks you guys! Hope you had a great Halloween!
Courtney,
Great idea for a Halloween post–and great info, as well!
Cheers–or should I say, “Boo”!
Jeanne