This Email Will Piss People Off

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This will probably piss off every ghostwriting agency out there, but after working inside some of the world's most prominent agencies for 8 months, I'm done staying quiet.

Here's exactly how to start your own ghostwriting business and why it's one of the biggest opportunities right now:

The Opportunity That's Staring You in the Face

Every founder needs content. More importantly, every founder needs a personal brand because people trust people far more than they do logos these days.

Look at just about every big successful company—you think of the person, not the brand. Elon and Tesla. Jobs and Apple. It helps them connect with podcast interviewers, media, investors. In business, it's not always the best business that wins—it's the business with the best marketing. And if you're marketing without a personal brand, you're leaving massive influence on the table.

Enter ghostwriting: You become their voice, they get the content, everyone wins.

The numbers? I've seen agencies charge $5,000 to $10,000 per month just for social media posts. Yes, you read that right. Ten grand per month for fucking LinkedIn posts.

The Secret Everyone Ignores

Those viral posts from your favourite founders? Most aren't purely organic. Agencies buy engagement, specifically retweets, from engagement farms controlling networks of high follower accounts.

We're not in the follower-centric age of social media anymore, and those retweets arguably do less than they used to. But when your content gets that initial boost, it gives the algorithm more data points—more opportunities for it to go viral, particularly on X/Twitter.

On LinkedIn, the jury's out on whether boosting works the same way, but there's something to be said about seeing a post with hundreds of likes—it makes it look more authoritative.

Either way, most super viral organic content isn’t really organic.

Positioning

Here's what most people get wrong: they think it's about writing. It's not. It's about positioning.

Call yourself a "freelance writer" and everyone assumes you're broke and desperate. Call yourself an "executive content strategist" and suddenly you're commanding premium rates.

The agencies know this. They hire writers on retainer and pay them around 5 to 10 times less than what they charge clients. Often outsourcing to lower-income countries, with a reliance on AI tooling.

The cardinal sin? Going straight to Fiverr or Upwork. You're racing to the bottom before you've even started.

Instead, build relationships. Treat initial projects as investments. One happy client refers three more. Three happy clients refer nine more. You see where this goes.

Tooling

• Typefully: The best scheduling tool for managing your content calendar ([affiliate link])

• X Pro: Build up swipe files of successful content to see what works

• Podawaa: The best tool for boosting LinkedIn content

• Apollo: Perfect for finding leads—look for founders in certain industries in high-GDP countries with seed funding behind them. They need to build their personal brand to attract more investment and grow their business

• Fathom: AI notetaker for capturing client interviews and insights

• Claude: The best tool for writing email copy and long-form content. Claude Projects helps get the brand voice bang on and introduces unique phrasing and language so content stands out and doesn't look like AI-generated writing

• Grammarly: The free version is fine for catching basic errors

Pro tip: Create a list of AI generic terms to avoid. Things like "bottom line," "dive deep," "game changing"—anything that screams robot wrote this.

Speaking of awesome tooling...

Back to the strategy...

Why Retainers Beat Everything Else

Focus on monthly retainers from day one. It's far easier to sell a service at $2,000/month to 5 people than it is to sell to 100 people at $100/month. That's the beauty of a service-based business.

Don't let people haggle or undercut you. Set your rates and stick to them. The clients who try to negotiate on price are usually the worst to work with anyway.

What They Don't Tell You About Scaling

Most agencies scale by outsourcing to cheaper writers. Quality nosedives. Clients become the QA department.

Smart ghostwriters? They stay boutique. Three to five premium clients max. Deep relationships. Premium pricing.

Understanding Platform Strategy

Twitter: Needs broad appeal to go viral. More hyperbolic, sensational content performs.

LinkedIn: Industry-specific content thrives. More nuanced, corporate-friendly.

You can specialise in one platform or offer both like many agencies do. Sometimes Twitter works for people, sometimes it doesn't and they should only be on LinkedIn (I’m looking at you, B2B).

Personal Brands Should Be Personal

But here's where most people get it wrong: they think personal branding means only talking about your industry. If you work in recruitment, you write about recruitment. WRONG.

Personal brands are much more than that. You wouldn't go to a networking party and only talk about recruitment—you'd have no mates. You talk about all sorts of things that make you uniquely you, whilst positioning yourself as someone who knows their shit.

This is what even premium agencies miss. Most agencies "Steal Like an Artist"—they scan platforms for high-performing content, then mimic the format and idea. Sure, this can work for going viral, but it's a shortfall when building a personal brand because it becomes less personal. A personal brand needs to be personal.

Let me drill this point home: I’ve produced several viral Twitter threads which have achieved more than 2,000,000 views a piece, but most of these have done zilch to actually build these personal brands because super viral content is usually about somebody else.

Your Next Move

Getting your first client: Never start cold. Approach people in your own network first—tell them what you're offering and ask if they know anyone who would benefit from turbocharging their personal brand.

The fastest way? Work for free in exchange for a testimonial (though I'd be more inclined to offer a discount for a testimonial—you can also be your own testimonial).

I found my first clients on Reddit (and there's a section on it in my writing course that's usually $159, but you can get it for FREE if you keep reading).

Once you’ve exhausted your own network, then go cold with outbound. If you haven’t already seen it, I wrote a guide on that here.

The Adweek copywriting guide is a timeless classic and helps you build up a slippery slope element into your writing. You can also watch videos by Nicolas Cole and subscribe to his emails for more insights.

Other golden rules:

• Don't write in big block text

• Make the first lines punchy to stop the scroll

• Ask yourself after every piece of writing: What's in it for the reader? (Readers are selfish!)

Speaking of premium ghostwriting...

If you're a founder reading this and thinking, "I need this but can't be bothered building it myself," I'm taking on three more clients for direct ghostwriting partnerships.

If you haven’t already gathered, I’ve worked with some of the most ambitious CEOs on the planet and know a thing or two about building a personal brand through high-quality writing.

I'm not cheap, but I'm significantly cheaper than those $10k/month agencies. And you get me directly, not some outsourced writer who's never heard of your industry.

Just reply to this email if you're genuinely committed to building a personal brand that matters.

New Referral Programme Alert - As Promised

Refer one person to Any Way Income using your unique link, and I'll send you my complete Digital Writing Course (usually worth $159) completely for free. Everything I learned about building my income writing from corporate to independence.

I recently uploaded another module about using Claude to write highly compelling content as well.

To your success,

Lewis

P.S. Yes, this will probably annoy some people in the industry. Good. Someone needed to share the blueprint.

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