When artificial intelligence (AI) blasted onto the scene, it shook the ghostwriting community to the core. For years, you may have been making a comfortable living offering your skill and talent to those who either had no time or talent to write their own materials.
You were writing blog posts, full information products, sales copy, emails, and more – and then as word spread to your clients about a free and easy method of generating content, they dried up for the most part.
Now some clients don’t want anything to do with AI. It’s a technology that can’t be used carelessly or your output will be disastrous. It also blatantly says it can and will make stuff up.
So for those clients, it was off-putting to begin with. But those may have been few and far between, and the competition to secure ghostwriting clients (especially at top dollar) was then even more fierce.
Instead of giving up your ghostwriting career, I’m going to share some ways you can use the availability of AI to your advantage. This includes taking the polar opposite approach and staking claim to the “never AI” position if you prefer.
You’re not becoming extinct in the online business world unless you simply give up. You can still thrive and have a very lucrative career – especially now that the shine has worn off and people see that AI can’t compete with tailored human-written content like you can deliver.
Let’s Get the AI Hate Out of the Way
There are plenty of people who abhor the thought of robots taking over human jobs, telling people what to think, and so on. It’s a messy technology, even though it’s far better than the awful article spinners people used to use.
AI can put together a decent piece of content. Some of it may be untrue (and it knows how to write as if it’s verifiable), but it reads well and most people don’t have the talent to put together something even half that good.
But as a ghostwriter, you know you can do better. AI has to be trained by the user to get good output. In fact, some people spend a lot of time creating custom GPTs just to have it mimic their style and knowledge.
If you think about why someone is hiring a ghostwriter in the first place, you’d understand their hesitancy to continue using AI after discovering how much time they waste in redirecting it to get what they want.
What about the cost? AI is free – how are you supposed to compete with that? Well, it’s free, but as we talked about, good output takes a lot of time, and time is money. For online entrepreneurs looking to delegate to free them up for profit-pulling tasks, getting sucked into a spiral of time-consuming prompting is detrimental to their bottom line.
You might hate AI, and if that’s the case, don’t worry – you never have to use it in your business. You can position yourself as the anti-AI ghostwriter. You have to be very vocal (and truthful) about not using this technology.
Clients are going to be finding it hard to find good ghostwriters who are honest about their lack of AI use. I would even make it part of your branding, stating that you are one of the last remaining human-centred ghostwriters and that you promise to tailor your content to the needs of the client – not hand it over to a cold-hearted robotic.
But now it’s time to get honest. AI is here to stay. It’s pretty good when used properly, and it is a strong competitor. So how can you use it to your advantage in serving clients and creating content you can earn money from?
How to Get Hired as an AI Ghostwriter
If you look at the job market, you’re going to find that a large number of jobs are for people who have mastered AI. Now you can position yourself as a master of AI, too – provided you’ve learned all of the ins and outs of using it.
Start with that. Master the process of using ChatGPT and Google Gemini (both free) to start with. If you have the money to reinvest in your business, get ChatGPT Plus and create a custom GPT that writes like you, thinks like you and delivers output tailored to your liking.
Once you know how to research, brainstorm, and create content effectively using AI tools, you’ll be able to leverage it to create content for your clients at lightening speed – with much less work on your part!
Your clients are not going to want to pay top dollar for AI content, and that’s okay. What this means is that you’ll have more clients without it being a time burden – because AI is doing the work for you.
You stay on as overseeing the project, prompting it and making sure the deliverables are perfected. But the heavy lifting is done by AI. You can promote your business as one that gives custom AI content at a fraction of the price it would cost them to hire a human ghostwriter.
Make sure you’re showing examples of the output on your sales pages or in your bids. People need to know that you are an advanced AI user, not just someone who prompts “Write an article about intermittent fasting” and calls it a day.
You want to highlight the fact that your clients can get far more content from you now using AI than they could have if they paid top ghostwriting fees. Marketers who are hungry for a huge volume of content will jump at the chance to get your AI ghostwriting services.
Remember, they need blog posts, social media posts across multiple platforms, email autoresponders, lead magnets, and information products. This isn’t a one time endeavor, either – it day after day, and they can’t keep up with the competition if they don’t have a huge volume of content.
Whenever you work with someone, overdeliver some unexpected material to keep them on a long-term clients. For example, let’s say someone hired you to write a 50-page eBook.
Instead of just delivering that, have AI whip up a lead magnet and 7-day email series in mere minutes that complement the original material well. Deliver it as a surprise and as a show of gratitude for the work. It takes you almost no time and it will go over very well with clients.
Using AI in Your Ghostwriting Business Effectively
So how do you actually use AI in your business? You can use it as much or as little as you want to. If you have an aversion to allowing artificial intelligence to serve as your voice in writing, then you can use it in the preliminary stages instead.
For example, you might start by having AI assist you with research period it can give you information about the demographic audience you are targeting, about the competition and what content they are writing, and about what’s selling in the marketplace.
It can also, depending on which tool you are using, give you up to date research and links to publications that can help you ramp up your speed of learning about the topic you are writing for a client.
Another way you can use it in the preliminary stages is to have it help you with the outlining process. This works very well if you use two AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini and then create a hybrid outline based on unique elements that each one delivers.
You can also only have AI edit your content if you want to maintain your own voice in writing it. AI can do everything from spotting spelling and grammatical errors to improving the readability or giving advice on how you can make the overall piece of content even better.
But let’s say you want to rely on it a little bit more. You can train AI to write like you simply by attaching a piece of your own written content and telling AI to mimic that style. This is a wonderful feature if the client wants you to maintain their voice, and you can take a bit of their content and have AI right identically to them.
You can also have custom instructions that you build into AI so that it always does certain things for you. This might include using or not using certain phrases, eliminating certain types of information, or maintaining a specific style and tone in your content.
The main thing you need to learn about AI in using it in your business is how to prompt it. This has a certain learning curve, where you massage your wording a bit to get the kind of output you want from the very beginning.
You will learn, as you prompt and then have to redirect or correct AI, how to prompt it from the initial stage rather than having to go back and have it fix things. As you find the right prompts, keep a file of those handy so that you can blow through your ghostwriting tasks quickly and easily.
You can categorize them according to the common tasks you will be doing for clients. For example, if you have a lot of clients who ask you to write blog content, you can create prompts that are specific to that, such as asking AI to create a pillar blog post that is highly optimized for a certain keyword phrase.
Turning a Profit with Your AI Ghostwriting in Other Ways
Many people think of ghostwriting as a service that you offer to clients. And in most cases, that’s exactly what this is. However, you can make money with your writing talents in other ways – including ghostwriting under a pen name or for mass clients.
Instead of simply being a voice behind other experts, you can now publish your own information products and niche content that you earn from directly. You can create a pen name and publish your artificial intelligence books in various marketplaces online.
You can also create social media content, such as using AI to make video scripts and storyboards for a YouTube channel or TikTok account where you are earning from content creator funds, virtual subscriber gifts, and the sale of merchandise.
There are many people who are already using talking head AI images that look very realistic but are not human to rake in views and engagement on their social media accounts.
Another way you can profit from AI as a ghostwriter is to consider selling your content to the masses. This is usually done in the form of private label rights (PLR) this content is typically sold cheaper than ghostwriting anyway, and by using AI, you can offer more content at a lower price and sell it to hundreds of people so that your services are still bringing in plenty of money.
Artificial intelligence is a technology that can either be wielded for good or used as a lazy tool that won’t get people the results they are looking for. As long as you either position yourself as a staunch opponent to it or go all in on mastering it as a way to deliver more for your clients, you will be able to thrive in the online marketplace.
