TCC Podcast #440: Ghostwriting for Clients with Allison Evelyn

When most writers think about ghostwriting, they think books. But there’s a huge opportunity to ghost for business leaders who need content… articles, blog posts, speeches and more. In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Rob is talking with Allison Evelyn (Ally) about how she pivoted from Day Rates and standard copy projects to ghost writing for clients—and how she’s leveraging that work to ghostwrite books in the future. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Allison’s Website
Allison’s Instagram
Get her freebie: Ghostwriter Gold
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  When you think of ghost writing, do you think of books? If so, you’re thinking small. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast.

We’ve talked with several copywriters, from time to time, over the past eight years who have talked about ghost writings. Most of those episodes focused on large projects like ghostwriting books—the in-depth process for writing a book and connecting with the kiinds of clients who need help from someone who can write their book. But ghost writing is more than that. Ghost writing includes any project where a writer steps into the shoes of their client to write something in their name. It can be blog posts, articles published online, emails, webinar scripts and more. 

When you look beyond the book world, the opportunity for ghost writers is huge. Landing these clients isn’t dramatically different from the way that you find, pitch and close regular clients… though there are differences. Usually, as a ghost writer, you’re not writing for lower level employees. Rather, you’re writing for founders, CEOs and other high-level thinkers, so your work needs to be able to reflect that. In fact, your pitches may need to include ideas and insights that a client can use to show up as a thought-leader in their business and niche. Landing work with a ghost-writing clients means you need to show up and be recognized at this higher level.

My guest for this week is Allison Evelyn, that’s her professional name— she mostly goes by Ally. Ally’s been on the podcast before when we talked about an earlier version of her business. Over the past four or five years, the kind of work she does and the kinds of clients she works with has changed quite a bit. When we recorded that earlier episode, Ally was a member of The Copywriter Think Tank. She also taught several workshops about day rates and the kind of work copywriters can get done on those kinds of projects (one of those workshops is in The Copywriter Underground today). With all the changes she’s seen in her business and her personal life, I was excited to catch up with Ally and learn more about her role as a ghostwriter for some prominent online voices. I wish we could talk about a few of them by