How Do I Get Started as a Ghostwriter?

You can get your start as a ghostwriter, writing articles and full e-books for other people, by performing just a few simple tasks. You need to perform three steps: create a very basic sales letter to sell yourself on your skills (complete with proof), get the contacts to bring in some initial work for you, and follow up with those clients to get repeat business.

Before you do anything, setup a simple site that describes what makes you a good ghostwriter. Not the best ghostwriter possible, just a good one. What education and experience do you have? This page does not have to be fancy, and it does not need to be something you'd spend more than 60 minutes on. You don't need to advertise any extra services like proofreading, scanning documents, or article rewriting. Your only goal is to sell your article WRITING services. So, this page needs three things: samples of your articles (three or four), your rate per article and a link for people to e-mail you so you can arrange the payment.

To get your first batch of articles, I would run a special promotion. Figure out how much time you are willing to put into your article writing per week, and how much money you want to make from it. Let's say you were going to put 20 hours into your ghostwriting business this week. It takes you 15 minutes to write an article, and you'd be happy with 500 dollars. Simple math tells us you can write 80 articles this week, and if you wanted to make 500 bucks, you would charge $6.25 per article. (This also means you'll get paid $25 per hour to write, which isn't bad at all). So, create a set number of slots... say, four slots where you write 20 articles for people. Each slot costs $125. Post this offer on high traffic forums or freelance sites, or contact mailing list owners in your niche and offer to pay them a certain percentage of the profits as their commission.

Once you have your first batch of ghostwriting clients, the hard part is over. You'll find that if you do a good enough job, many of your clients will want to do business with you again. I have found from my own freelancing ventures that many people will recommend you to their friends. In fact, at this point you can fire those clients who took up most of your time and were difficult, and keep doing business with people who were the easiest to deal with.

That's how you get started with ghostwriting. Setup a sales letter, run a special promotion to get that first rush of clients, then follow-up with them later to get repeat business.