Many people see ghostwriting as a mysterious and sexy career path.

They think of high-profile ghostwriters like Mark Manson, the writer behind Will Smith’s memoir Will. The harsh truth is that these types of ghostwriting services aren’t particularly profitable, even if you get paid $500,000 for a book. Divide that by how many hours it takes to write a book, and you start to see how unprofitable these services are.

So, today we want to give you the 5 most lucrative ghostwriting services you can start selling today to earn a real living as a writer.

(Prefer watching to reading? Check out a version of this blog post on YouTube):

Let’s dive in!

Anyone who “knows something” needs a ghostwriter.

All business owners or experts in a field, who have information which would be useful to other people, need a ghostwriter.

A ghostwriter’s job isn’t to think for them. A ghostwriter’s job is to help them clarify their “thinking” and amplify and share that “thinking” in the most scalable way possible. And, even if they don’t need a ghostwriter right now, they will as soon as they begin to scale.

Here are just a few examples of people who need ghostwriters:

• CEOs
• Coaches
• Plumbers
• Nutritionists
• Yoga Instructors
• Venture Capitalists
• Green Energy experts
• Tech startup founders

These people don’t tend to have the time to write (or have the time to learn how to write) but they do have knowledge they want to share. On the other hand, the ghostwriter DOES have the time to write but doesn’t have the specific industry knowledge. It’s a perfect pairing.

So what services do these people need? And which ones are the most lucrative?

1. Social Media Content

People don’t want to hear from brands. They want to hear from real people.

The most important social account a brand can build isn't its company page. No, the most important social account they can build is that of the founder CEO or their leadership team. This is why it’s such a lucrative opportunity for ghostwriters.

Every single day, more and more business owners, startup founders, internet entrepreneurs, and company executives realize they need to be the voice of their companies.

Let’s take an obvious example: Elon Musk. You might not agree with everything he says, but most business leaders and owners want what he has:

• An audience
• A free media
• They want the news to come to them

But you don’t have to target “celebrity” business owners. Find these people in your niche and DM them, helping them understand how people want to hear from THEM, not their company. You can easily charge $3,000 to $10,000 per month for social media content.

On to the next service!

2. Landing Pages and Sales Scripts

Anyone who sells anything needs this service.

But how is this different from copywriting? Well, most copywriters only think about writing through a sales lens, whereas ghostwriters are trained to write through the lens of education. And this is important because people don’t want to be sold to, they want to be educated.

Let’s imagine you want to buy a hot tub.

You visit a supplier's website, and you’re bombarded with customer testimonials or discount codes for your first tub purchase. But does this help people who are new to hot tubs and have no idea where to start? No, it doesn’t.

What most people need is education on the product itself:

• How long will it last?
• How do you clean it?
• What kind of weather can it handle (storms, extreme heat, etc)

Educating your customers is a much more effective marketing technique than going for the “hard” sell—and is why ghostwriters are in high demand.

You can easily charge $2,000 to write a landing page or sales script.

3. Thought Leadership Articles

This is the service Cole started this ghostwriting journey with and is how he built his 7-figure ghostwriting agency for founders and CEOs.

Business leaders need a way to promote their services, products, or anything else they want to get out into the world (like a book). These kinds of articles can be found across “social” platforms like Medium and LinkedIn and more “traditional” outlets like Forbes and Inc. magazine.

All speeches, podcasts, and books can be broken down and turned into 800-word thought leadership articles—and you can charge anywhere between $250 to $3,000 per article (and Cole has charged $5,000 per article in some cases!)

4. Educational Email Courses

Forget TikTok and IG reels—Educational Email Courses (or EEC) are the most exciting marketing vehicle of the last 10 years.

If you’ve ever been to a company’s website and been bombarded with a newsletter sign-up promising you a discount code or informative “updates” (whatever that might mean!), then you’ve seen an example of where a company needs an Educational Email Course. Going back to what we talked about earlier, prospective customers need education, not the hard sell.

Instead of a newsletter, they should offer an EEC should educate the client on:

• What problem you are helping them solve
• How you’re helping them solve it
• What's your approach for solving it
• And what are you going to help them do that they haven't already tried themselves

Because here’s the thing: the founder, creator, business owner, or salesperson is out in the world answering these questions all the time. They're having individual conversation after individual conversation when instead a 5-day Educational Email Course would educate potential customers on autopilot, answering all their questions, preemptively speaking to any of their objections, building trust, and priming them to see you as the authority and solution to their problem.

We know because we use these in our business (Start Writing Online, Start Writing With AI, and Start Fiction Writing With AI) and we’ve seen our revenue double because of them.

A massively underrated (and highly lucrative marketing tool)—you can easily charge $5,000 for one EEC.

5. Video Scripts

Most people don't realize their favorite creators and YouTubers aren't speaking off the cuff.

If you’re going to get big as a video creator, you must script your videos. It doesn’t matter how good your video production is if what you’re saying isn’t very good. This means the fundamental skill of video creation is not “creating videos” but writing.

This niche is a game of writing quality, so if you know how to write concise, educational, and entertaining video scripts, then you can easily make six figures as a ghostwriter.

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