I want to help you audit your ghostwriting business so you know exactly what to focus on to reach your next ghostwriting milestone.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve had clients for a while, it’s important to stop and take stock of where you are on your ghostwriting journey.

Because what got you here, won’t get you to where you want to go.

So, where do you want to go?

• Do you want to land your first client?
• Do you want to break the $10k/month ceiling and scale your income?
• Do you want to create life-changing time and location freedom?

All of these are possible with ghostwriting IF you have a humming ghostwriting business.

So in this post, we’ll help you with a 5-part audit you can use to assess the health of your business (and see what you need to focus on next).

The 5 Premium Ghostwriting Pillars are:

• Pillar 1: Premium Positioning
• Pillar 2: Premium Offer
• Pillar 3: Premium Outreach
• Pillar 4: Premium Sales
• Pillar 5: Premium Fulfilment

Let’s dive in!

How to score yourself in this audit

For each Pillar, we’ll ask a series of questions.

After reflecting on each question, give yourself an emoji ranking for the Pillar:

• ❌ means you don’t do any of this in your business
• 👻 means you have parts of this in your business, but there are areas to improve
• 🤑 means you have this nailed and it’s helping you land more clients (and high-paying deals)

Ok, let’s go!

Pillar 1: Premium Positioning

Too many ghostwriters make the mistake of writing “anything” for “anyone.”

They write landing pages for a FinTech startup. They write IG posts for fitness instructors. They write marketing emails for a local business selling nutrition products.

It’s much easier to differentiate yourself, charge more, and scale your 1-person writing business by creating efficiencies. And you do this by offering less—not more.

Offer less by following this simple positioning formula:

• Solve 1 specific problem
• For 1 specific person
• In 1 specific (unique) way

When you dial in your positioning, you attract MORE work because once that 1 specific person finds you, they instantly know you are for them (rather than struggling to figure out what you can do for them). This makes it easier for the client to say “Yes” to what you’re offering.

Now, to the ranking.

Answer these questions to rank yourself in this Pillar:

• Do you solve 1 specific problem, for 1 specific person, in 1 specific way?
• Is this clearly communicated in your social bios?

Give yourself a ranking with either ❌, 👻, or 🤑.

Alright, onto the next Pillar.

Pillar 2: Premium Offer

How you build a ghostwriting offer for your clients comes from your positioning.

It doesn’t matter what ghostwriting service you’re trying to provide (and it doesn’t matter which one you think is “more lucrative”), if you don’t effectively frame the Problems and Solutions of what you offer, it’s going to be hard for someone to say “Yes.”

So, when you talk with a client, you need to be able to clearly communicate two parts to your offer:

• Why they need your offer:
  • What’s their Specific Problem?
  • Why do they have this problem?
  • What’s the consequence of not solving this problem?
  • What’s the Ultimate Negative Outcome if they carry on with this problem?
• What can they do to fix the problem?
  • What’s the Specific Solution (hint: your service)?
  • Why do you recommend solving this problem with this solution?
  • What’s the benefit of using this solution?
  • What Ultimate Positive Outcome do you create with this solution?

This forms the basis of your “Irresistible Offer” script that you use on every sales call with a client. It’s a jumping off point for the content you create to promote your services. It’s how you describe yourself to people asking about your service. It even influences how you package your service.

If you get this right, you can charge far more than any of your competition:

So, to see how you rank on this Pillar, answer these questions:

• Can I frame my service as an Irresistible Offer?
• Do I have an Irresistible Offer Script for what I provide?
• Have I packaged this offer up to communicate the “outcomes” rather than saying I’ll perform a series of “tasks?”

Give yourself a ranking with either ❌, 👻, or 🤑.

And if you want more help creating an Irresistible Offer, then this post is for you.

Pillar 3: Premium Outreach

The vast majority of ghostwriters get outreach wrong.

They start with “Hey, I’m a ghostwriter.” They try to sell the person on their services right away. They offer to work for “free” because they’re just starting out and want to build their client base.

These approaches are wrong for three reasons:

• Reason 1: The client has no idea why they should listen to you. They only care about whether you can educate them on a problem they have, and how you can help them solve it (two crucial steps before going for the sale!)
• Reason 2: Free work isn’t always valuable work. Free work is only valuable if the client understands the problem your free work is going to solve for them.
• Reason 3: Building your client base is code for “I have no experience.” The client will immediately see working with this person will cost them precious time because of all the hand-holding they’ll have to do.

Here’s an example of some poor outreach:

Instead, Premium Outreach is all about EDUCATING the potential client on the problems they have, the solution you offer, and the outcome you create for them with your solution.

This works across all of your outreach. In the cold DMs you send, with warm contacts, and even the content you create about your service (after all, this is just education).

To see how you rank on this Pillar, answer these questions:

• Do I target one specific person in my outreach (and not get distracted by clients outside my niche)?
• Do I educate my prospects FIRST about their problems in my outreach?
• Do I explain the benefits and Ultimate Positive Outcome in my outreach?

Give yourself a ranking with either ❌, 👻, or 🤑.

Let’s dive into Premium Sales!

Pillar 4: Premium Sales

The secret to mastering the art of sales and landing more clients for your ghostwriting business?

Free Consulting.

Sales isn’t about being “salesy” or using underhand tactics to seal the deal. It’s about education. Your job is to educate the client on the problems they are having, the Ultimate Negative Outcome of not solving it, how they can solve it, and the Ultimate Positive Outcome they can generate when they do solve it.

Do you see a pattern here?

Here’s how to run any sales call:

Now, to rank yourself on this Pillar, answer these questions (to get a top score, you need to be doing all of these on your sales calls):

• Do you start the call by listening to the client’s problems?
• Do you educate them on the problems they are having, how to solve them, etc (are you using your Irresistible Offer script?)
• Do you stack everything that’s in the offer before dropping the price with the client?
• Do you always leave discounting until after the call?

Give yourself a ranking with either ❌, 👻, or 🤑.

Alright, onto the final Pillar!

Pillar 5: Premium Fulfilment

You’ve landed a ghostwriting deal—congratulations!

Now it’s time to prove you can deliver the outcomes you promised in the sales process AND delight the client so they keep coming back to you for more work, recommend you to their network, and see you as their trusted advisor.

This is crucial because working with high-ranking people is a massive upside to ghostwriting:

So how do you set yourself apart with Premium Fulfillment?

Rank yourself with these questions:

• Do you spend time auditing a client’s existing content to see what you can repurpose?
• Do you come to calls prepared with interview questions and a working title for an article/thread/newsletter/post?
• Do you have a project plan for the engagement which the client can always access to see progress?
• Do you keep communication short and to the point?
• Do you give the client specific pointers when asking for feedback on a piece of work?

If you run all your ghostwriting engagements like this, it’s hard not to delight the client.

Finding good, reliable writers is hard to do. Once clients find someone they like working with, they’ll keep giving you more and more work. It’s how you build job security for life.

Give yourself a ranking with either ❌, 👻, or 🤑.

Where do you go from here?

Alright, that’s it!

How did you do?

Here’s how to interpret the results:

• If you ranked a Pillar with a ❌ then this needs immediate work. Start taking daily action to implement the frameworks shared here (and in our free Skool group) to remove these bottlenecks from your business.
• If you ranked a Pillar with a 👻 then great! You have a solid foundation to build on. But to reach your ghostwriting goals, implement frameworks we shared here (and what we share in our free Skool group).
• If you ranked a Pillar with a 🤑 then awesome work! You’re crushing it. Focus on dialing these in even further to keep your business humming.

Now, we know what you’re thinking:

Which one of these Pillars is the most important?

They are all equally as important. But as we’ve seen in this audit, they build on each other. You can’t do Premium Fulfillment without Premium Sales (because you need a client!). And you can’t do Premium Sales without a Premium Offer (because you need to know why your client needs your service).

Start with the first Pillar and work through them until you’ve scored a 🤑 in each. This is your path to a successful (and lucrative) ghostwriting business.