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Inside our Premium Ghostwriting Academy, we have writers earning:

• $10k/month.
• $20k/month.
• Even $50k/month.

(Here’s a picture of a few of our most successful students at our recent Velocity Mastermind in Scottsdale, Arizona)

But they were only able to hit these awesome numbers by fixing 8 common faulty beliefs all writers suffer from at some point in their careers.

So, if you’re looking to earn more as a ghostwriter, let’s get to work breaking the limiting beliefs holding you.

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Faulty Belief #1: "Nobody can afford my services."

Here’s what you’re doing if you believe this to be true:

You’re taking the two people you talked to this month who can't afford your services and extrapolated to a sweeping conclusion that isn't reflective of reality.

I promise you there are millions of people in the world who can afford your services—you just haven’t found them yet.

But here’s the brutal reason why you believe no one can afford your services:

You think what you’re selling is a lot of money.

It doesn’t matter if it’s $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000—if someone says, “This is too expensive!” you immediately agree with them because you secretly think it yourself.

This faulty belief is keeping you stuck and keeps you in a vicious cycle of:

• Switching niches.
• Changing your offer.
• Not facing any skill deficiency that’s limiting outcomes for your clients.

So, fix this faulty belief (and these other 7) first before doing any of the above.

And if you’re wondering who would pay a ghostwriter $5,000, check out this post.

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Faulty Belief #2: "I need more clients."

No, you need the same number of clients or fewer clients to pay you more money.

I lived this mistake for years building my ghostwriting agency. Our original offer was 3 articles per week (so 12 per month) for $3,000. So this meant we were getting paid $250 per article.

And it took us 2 years to learn and realize 2 important realities about our offer:

1. This was too much volume for the client (they couldn’t keep up with the calls & the review process).
2. They would have been happy to pay us more to publish less so that the service didn't require as much of their time.

So, after 2 years, we changed our offer to 2 articles per month for $5,000.

This was a 10x increase in price for a tenth of the amount of work. And clients were still happy to pay us for our services!

In fact, getting more clients is going to compound the problems you have with your existing offer and I promise you, if you don't clean things up now, more clients just means more problems.

So if you’re looking to scale from $5k / month to $10k or $15k per month, the game isn’t more clients. The trick is to get your current clients to pay you more and all new clients to pay you for your newly priced offer.

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Faulty Belief #3: "I'll charge more when I'm more experienced."

When ghostwriters tell me this, I always ask:

What does “more experienced” mean for you?

Define it. Give me an objective metric we can measure.

Does it mean:

• Working with 3 clients?
• Consistently earning $10k/month?
• Once you’ve read 10 books on writing?

They can never give me a specific metric of what it means to be more “experienced.” And even if they do, spoiler alert, once they hit that milestone, they’ll still feel inexperienced.

The real issue they’re avoiding is why don't you think you deserve to charge more… TODAY.

I’ve mentored 1,000+ ghostwriters at this point and without fail 100% of the time the root issue here has nothing to do with experience level or how many clients they've worked with. Instead, it all comes down to their relationship with money.

They're intimidated by charging more because:

• They've never done it before.
• Or they tried once and a client pushed back, saying it was too expensive.
• Or they are still struggling financially themselves so they can't fathom them asking a client to pay what they charge because they only have $200 in their checking account.

I get it. I’ve had to work through all of these same issues myself and I can't tell you how many writers I've coached out of these same faulty beliefs.

This is why having a mentor, joining a community, or taking a program (or having all 3, like inside my Premium Ghostwriting Academy) is how to quickly solve this by desensitizing you to charging more.

But if you don’t, here's what's going to happen.

Eventually, your frustration at yourself for undercharging but overdelivering for clients will become greater than your fear of charging more. And one day you'll get so fed up with it you’ll throw out a higher number on your next sales call. The client won't even think twice about it and they'll just say, “Sure that sounds good!”

Then you're going to sit there and wish you had listened to me and just charged more 6 months earlier.

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Faulty Belief #4: "My niche got saturated. I think it's time to pivot."

This is another pattern I've observed a thousand times.

A writer steps into a niche. They land a few clients quickly and they think they've struck gold. They’re a genius!

Then, two or three months later, a couple of those clients churn. And immediately the writer thinks the niche is dead and the offer doesn't work anymore. They rush into pivoting their niche.

Here’s the truth:

Neither of these extremes is correct.

• You aren't a genius just because you landed three clients back to back.
• And your business also isn't dead just because a couple of clients churned.

The skill to build here is about managing the highs and lows of running a business. When something is trending down, you have to be level-headed enough to realize that it's temporary. You know the levers to push and pull to land your next couple of clients.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re a genius again!

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Faulty Belief #5: "I need to hire someone."

Here’s how this one typically plays out:

Once a ghostwriter is making $10k/month (or higher), they immediately think, “I'm swamped I need to hire someone!”

So they try to jump too quickly to the next level. But all hiring does is compound all their existing problems. I know because I made this mistake over and over again building my ghostwriting agency (all the way up to $180,000 per month).

Here are some golden rules I learned the hard way:

• If your business isn't enjoyable now hiring someone isn't going to make it enjoyable.
• If your business isn't profitable now hiring someone isn't going to make it more profitable.
• If your business is inefficient now hiring someone isn't just going to magically make it efficient.

One of the biggest faulty beliefs in business is thinking once I hire someone then it'll be easier.

Every single time I hired, I thought I’d be able to relax. But in reality, the problems were taken forward as we grew, the business became more stressful and complex, and way less profitable.

Before you hire, you need to get your one-person business working efficiently and profitably:

• You need to dial in the offer.
• You need to raise your prices.
• You need to perfect client fulfillment.

Only when the business is running smoothly and you have plenty of margin to play with do you hire someone to take over a set of responsibilities in the business.

Here’s my team’s very first off-site (when we were doing $60,000/month):

Faulty Belief #6: "If I share too much with the client on the sales call, they won't need me anymore."

Everyone has this faulty belief, even some of the smartest CEOs I know.

The fear is that if you give away too much away for free, then no one will want to buy from you. But the opposite is true. The more you give, the more people trust and buy from you.

Instead, on sales calls share everything:

• Strategy
• Execution steps
• Potential pitfalls

Then I use this one-liner: "Whether or not we work together, I just want you to be successful."

And boom! This disarms them because you’re not pitching them anything. You’re just sharing everything you know, as if you were friends. And they often respond: "This sounds like a lot—can I just hire you?"

The strategy is free, but the execution is expensive.

This is the “Free Consulting” strategy I teach inside our Premium Ghostwriting Academy.

We teach you how to find problems, spot opportunities, and create outcomes people want in their businesses. Then you give, give, give until the person’s practically throwing money at you.

So if you’ve been trying to land clients by scraping leads from LinkedIn or spamming people with an email automation tool, try this.

The “Free Consulting” approach is about understanding (and using) the most simple rule in all of human civilization: the more you give, the more you get.

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Faulty Belief #7: "I need to build an audience."

You don’t need:

• A podcast
• A newsletter
• Or to build your audience in any other way

If you're under $20K/month, focus solely on cold outreach and free consulting.

I scaled my agency to $180K/month with no audience, no newsletter, no podcast. We just mastered these two skills and reached a 50% close rate on our sales calls. This gave us tons of business to deliver on. Everything else was a distraction.

Because that’s the beauty of services. You only need two clients to double your revenue. It’s that simple.

And trying to get them through building an audience is how you play this game on hard mode (instead, use these 4 ways to build trust with your clients).

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Faulty Belief #8: "I can just figure this out on my own."

You can try and figure it out on your own or you can simply pay for the answer.

Because figuring it out on your own will take you:

• Years of mistakes
• Hours of frustration
• And days of second-guessing yourself in your business

You’ll make all the same mistakes I did. And that’s why I created PGA, because I want more writers to escape the overworked and underpaid cliché of the freelance writer. I just want you to be successful!

Because no matter what you choose in life, it will always take you twice as long and cost you twice as much as you expected. So let’s shortcut that process.

I’m not telling you this because you’re not smart or capable. I’m explaining this because I don’t want you to hit a brick wall and then throw in the towel because you’re so frustrated.

I say this as someone who has spent $196,000 on one coaching program over the last 3 years (yes, that’s $68,000 per year!). But this small investment has helped us to scale to $5 million in revenue this year.

So it’s been completely worth it.

With education, you’re not really paying for the information.

The primary value is being able to:

• Ask questions when you’re stuck
• Make an informed decision using the experience of others
• Stress-test your thinking with people who’ve done exactly what you need to do

And more.

As someone who built an agency without any outside resources or help, let me tell you it was very, very painful and lonely. I wish someone could have asked someone about all the problems that came up in the business so I didn’t keep making the same mistakes over and over.

I would have saved myself a lot of stressful nights.

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