To make money writing online, you don’t need to be a “better” writer.

Most ghostwriters who aren’t earning the amount of money they want believe their bottleneck is their writing ability.

This means they end up:

• Reading more books on writing.
• Dropping another $750 on a writing course.
• Dedicating more time to improving their craft (at the expense of learning other, non-writing skills).

Now, you have to be somewhat competent as a writer to charge for your work.

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But if you think getting better and better at writing will mean people will pay you more and more, then I’ve got a rude awakening for you. Because to make more money as a ghostwriter is not just about improving as a writer.

It’s all the other skills that surround the writing that make your clients feel valued, heard, and comfortable which turn you into a profitable ghostwriter.

Let’s dive into the 5 non-writing skills you need to master:

Make Money Writing Online: 5 Non-Writing Skills To Make You Dangerously Profitable As A Writer

Skill #1: Free Consulting

If you do not understand how to help people for free, you will never be able to charge for your expertise.

Whenever you get introduced to someone, whether it's a reader for your own writing or whether it's a client for ghostwriting, your goal isn’t to figure out how to make money from that person straight away. Your goal (and your bottleneck to earning more) is working out how you can help them for free.

And, more specifically, how can you demonstrate you understand:

• The problems they’re faced with
• The outcomes they care about
• And the transformation they want to experience

Because if you can’t point this out to them for free, then you’ll never be able to get people to pay you to solve a problem, generate an outcome, or create a transformation with your services.

Free consulting is how you EDUCATE your way to landing paying clients, not trying to force them into buying something they don’t want.

This leads us to the next skill.

Skill #2: Sales

If you want to make more as a writer, there's no other way around it:

You have to learn how to sell.

So many writers resist this fact:

• They delay it
• They tell themselves it’s “selling out”
• They think, “My work will speak for itself—I don’t need to sell!”

I promise you every ghostwriter who makes a ton of money ends up learning the art of sales.

But here’s the good news.

Sales is not about sales. Sales is actually about education. When you approach sales as sales, it feels really difficult. No one likes to push hard to try and convince people to buy something from them.

But when you approach sales as education and combine it with a free consulting approach, you flip the entire process on its head. Instead of “Let me sell to you” you’re saying "I just want to make sure I can help you.”

So, with your ghostwriting service think about:

• What problems your services solve
• Why your clients have these problems
• And, if relevant, why your clients can’t see these problems in their business

Then, position your service as a solution to all the problems you’ve just educated your potential client about and how it generates the outcome they want.

In the end, sales becomes about helping someone out with the services you provide, not “cheating” them out of money.

Skill #3: Account Management

Account management is about how you interact with the client at every stage of the relationship—from sales to project completion.

The art of account management boils down to doing a good job of anticipating the client's needs. If you are reacting to what the client is asking for, that is not the highest level of account management. Instead, you should be anticipating the next thing that they would like, not waiting for them to give you the next task to complete.

You want the customer to go, "Wow, you held my hand and you were so attentive that you're the only person I want to work with, I couldn't imagine trying to find someone who is as attentive as you."

It’s moments like this that:

• Builds a lasting relationship
• Makes it easier for the client to keep buying from you
• And extends the lifetime value of this client (and gets you referred to other people in their network)

It might sound “boring” to begin with, but this is one of the most important skills you can master as a ghostwriter.

Skill #4: Understanding Different Business Models

Most writers don't really spend a lot of time studying business models.

As a ghostwriter, this boils down to how you’re charging and delivering your service:

• Are you charging something that's higher ticket where the person has to pay in full?
• Or are you breaking up that payment into monthly payments?
• Is it a low-ticket offer that upsells people on a high-ticket offer? (e.g. a ghostwriting digital product → ghostwriting “done-for-you” service).

Part of what allows you to charge more as a writer is figuring out the best possible business model for the thing that you want to do, whether that's a service or a product.

As much time as you spend thinking about, practicing, learning, studying the writing component of what you do, you should spend the same amount of time studying the business side of pricing and business models.

Skill #5: Personal Branding

I think this is one of the most misunderstood terms in all of marketing.

Personal branding is not:

• Doing viral TikTok dances
• Posting pictures of what you ate for breakfast
• Keeping your feed up-to-date with your latest selfie

Personal branding is about the association people make with your category.

You shouldn’t be aiming to become known in “general.” Instead, aim to become known for a niche (or category) that you own.

All over the internet, you’ll hear marketing “influencers” explain how the single most important thing for your personal brand is to share your story. But your story, by itself, does not matter. It only matters when it serves as an example to your reader or customer.

And the only purpose of providing an example is to drive home a point and explain something that matters to them, the customer. It has very, very little to do with you.

So, what does your “personal brand” mean for you as a ghostwriter?

Let’s work through an example:

You are a former programmer who worked at Series A FinTech startups and you now ghostwrite for CTOs, specifically CTOs at banking startups.

Your personal brand and category hang on the fact that you know how to help the CTO scale their message or communicate to new or existing users. Your background in building banking apps shows you understand what these CTOs need to do to communicate to their audience. This is why your story matters, not because you built the best banking app in the world (although, well done if you did!) but because you know how to help your target audience.

So, personal branding is about evangelizing yourself BUT within a specific category.

And if you don't understand that second component, you might get a bunch of random people following you, but you're not going to know what to do with the attention, where to direct it, and how to turn that attention into paying ghostwriting clients.

Now, here’s the bottom line:

Not every day is going to be a writing day and not every day are you going to feel like your writing is improving.

But that's okay because all of these other skills are what allow you to get ahead of 99% of other ghostwriters out there.

The big idea, and I hope this is what you're left with, is that writing is only a piece of the puzzle. You can't just spend all day crafting the best sentences and then expect your:

• Your business to grow
• Your revenue to go up
• Your monthly earnings to become more stable and consistent
• And have people seeking you out instead of constantly grinding to find your next gig

If you want all of these things to happen and if you want all of these unfair advantages, you have to be willing to do things that the average person is not willing to do.

And the average ghostwriter is not willing to do all of these things—but a Premium Ghostwriter IS ready to do these things.

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