How to Make Money Writing Online With Zero Audience

Writing online is one of the best ways to make a living on the internet.

But traditionally, making a living by writing online has been a long game.

You spend countless hours crafting blog posts, optimizing for search engines (SEO), and slowly building an audience.

It can take months, even years, to see any significant income from your efforts.

But what if there was a way to fast-track your online writing success? A way to skip the waiting game and start earning right away?

This method is called Ghostwriting.

By writing for others, you tap into existing audiences and platforms, getting your words in front of a large number of people instantly.

Businesses, entrepreneurs, and established creators already have audiences, or at the very least, the money to spend on growing them. They need high-quality content to engage their followers and drive their businesses forward, and they're willing to pay you for it.

Marcos started The Birdhouse, a highly successful ghostwriting agency.

His approach is centered around scaling and monetizing personal brands primarily on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

He offers a unique guarantee to his clients: they will make more money than what they pay for his services each month.

18 Olives helps write newsletters and social content for early-stage tech companies, venture capital firms, and financial organizations.

They contributed to the Morning Brew team during their growth from 1 to 3 million subscribers.

JK Molina is one of the most well-known ghostwriters on Twitter and helps clients by managing their accounts, crafting tweets that resonate with their audience, and enhancing their overall engagement on the platform.

He then started and sold TweetHunter (an AI SaaS tool to help build and monetise your Twitter audience) for $1.4m.

Opportunity #1: Ghostwriting Agency

Create a ghostwriting agency that specializes in specific industries such as finance, technology, or healthcare.

By focusing on a niche, the agency can develop deep expertise and attract clients looking for writers who have a thorough understanding of their industry.

You can go further and specialise in certain platforms only - for example, Marcos Ruiz focuses on LinkedIn and Twitter only.

Beyond just writing on social platforms, the agency could offer related services such as SEO, content strategy development, newsletters, books, blogs, and scriptwriting to help clients maximize the impact of their content.

A good way to structure this would be as a productized service where it’s a fixed amount per month for a set number of written pieces/channels per month.

Opportunity #2: Ghostwriting SaaS

Looking at the popularity of tools like TweetHunter and others, there’s a clear demand for AI-assisted ghosting platforms that help automate all the necessary tasks.

Develop a SaaS tool that helps users manage and automate their social media content. Incorporate AI to generate draft posts, suggest content based on trends, and analyze engagement to refine future posts.

Twitter has made its API quite expensive but there are still other options:

Choose a niche to write content for - ideally, pick something you’re interested in or have some knowledge about.

Reach out to businesses or creators in your niche and offer to ghostwrite for free or heavily discounted until a certain point (for example, they don’t pay until you help them gain 1000 followers or 5 booked calls).

By doing this you can go to clients with case studies and proof that your services work and that you know what you’re talking about.

You can also go on Fiverr and Upwork to get some initial traction.

One way to find the first few clients is to go on TweetHunter and use the tweet inspiration tool to find people tweeting in your niche.

Make a list of the ones that could benefit from your services and contact them.

Once you’ve built up a few case studies, ask your clients for testimonials and publish them on your website and socials.

This is an example of a bad pitch:

You need to make it personal, give value for free, have a zero-risk offer, include proof and have a low-effort CTA.

An example of a good pitch:

These platforms are a great place to get in front of your ideal prospects whilst building authority and sharing your case studies and testimonials.

As mentioned already, you can reach out to your ideal prospects directly via cold email or via their DMs.

Start a newsletter talking about writing for your niche and sharing valuable information and strategies that your prospects can use.

Create both long & short-form content on TikTok, YouTube and IG. This can position you as a thought leader in your industry and help you demonstrate your knowledge.

This is more expensive but can prove to be way faster at getting clients. Run Google, Meta, Twitter and LinkedIn Ads to get in front of your desired audience immediately.

Give a referral bonus to any of your clients you refer other people in their network.

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Here's what you get:

Benefits: