Table of Contents
- What is Twitter ghostwriting?
- What does a Twitter ghostwriter do, exactly?
- Are retweets part of ghostwriting services?
- How to sell yourself and find clients as a Twitter ghostwriter?
- Proof of skills
- Pick an industry or niche
- Use regular outreach and marketing
- Build a proper personal brand
- Create a personal website
- Cold outreach
- Ads
- Create content
- Join our premium ghostwriter marketplace
- How much should I charge as a Twitter ghostwriter?
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What does a Twitter ghostwriter actually do? How can I find ghostwriting clients? How much should I charge for Twitter ghostwriting?
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How to start a Twitter Ghostwriter business
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Few people like to talk about ghostwriting, mainly because by definition it is a “covert” activity. Clients don’t like to say they are using a ghostwriter, and ghostwriters can’t really advertise who they are writing for. Here at Tweet Hunter, we often get asked whether or not we provide ghostwriting services because the market is so complex and below the surface.
Which is why we decided to create our very own premium Twitter ghostwriter marketplace. Ghostwriters we let in have an opportunity to work with high-end clients who are ready to pay the price for a premium service, and they also get to use Tweet Hunter to collaborate directly with their clients.
Becoming a Twitter ghostwriter is one of the best ways to start making decent money online. If you’re considering developing this activity, this guide is the ideal resource for you to read. You’ll be able to answer all of the following questions:
- What does a Twitter ghostwriter actually do?
- How can I find ghostwriting clients?
- How much should I charge for Twitter ghostwriting?
- Who are some successful Twitter ghostwriters I can take inspiration from?
What is Twitter ghostwriting?
A ghostwriter is someone who writes content for someone else. The “original” ghostwriter used to write books, whether fiction or non-fiction, the typical use case being writing an autobiography for a celebrity or people looking to build their personal brand.
As social media has become a huge part of our professional lives, many people looking to either develop their personal brand or spend less time on it have started to require ghostwriting services. These people write content for their clients, which they can post on social media afterwards.
So the main responsibility of Twitter ghostwriters is to write Twitter content (tweets, threads) for their clients.
What does a Twitter ghostwriter do, exactly?
Most Twitter ghostwriters will include writing Twitter threads in the services they offer clients. Why? Because threads are one of the top performing formats on Twitter, and they take a lot of time to write. It’s also common knowledge that a well-written thread “hook” (the first tweet of a thread) is the most crucial element, and writing one isn’t that easy. So the ghostwriter’s skills do come in handy.
Many people who offer ghostwriting services for Twitter will also offer to provide a significant amount of tweets for their clients.
Other, less common services include:
- Taking over the DM inbox for clients (answering DMs, making sure their clients get the important ones)
- Engaging with other accounts (spending time in the Twitter feed replying to other people’s tweets)
Are retweets part of ghostwriting services?
Some ghostwriters will include retweets in their package, and they will either disclose that upfront or simply guarantee results to their clients. Sometimes, this alone can explain the huge difference in price between ghostwriters, because a big part of the business is “boosting” the tweets by using a network of people who are getting paid to retweet.
We have researched and dabbled a bit with those kinds of services and have come to the following conclusion: it’s probably not worth it for clients. One reason is that you’ll probably be endangering your clients account when doing that. When the same people retweet the same account over and over again, it sends a suspicious signal to Twitter’s team. Another reason is that your clients will probably get a lot more followers from this, but they won’t be of great quality and probably won’t engage that much with your client’s future content. So we would advise to stay away from that.
Still, it may be hard to sell your “simple” ghostwriting services when your competitors are selling guaranteed results.
How to sell yourself and find clients as a Twitter ghostwriter?
Though the Twitter ghostwriting industry is under the radar, there’s still a lot of competition. Just watch what happens when a big account tweets about needing ghostwriters. It can be tough finding your first clients, ones that are willing to pay a decent amount of money to leverage your skills. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to attract more leads and convert them to clients.
Proof of skills
The single best way to prove your worth is to have real results you can show your prospects. Now we know most clients won’t agree to say they go through a ghostwriter, so you might have a hard time getting references and be able to show high-performing tweets you wrote for other people. Still, it can’t hurt to ask. There’s just one thing you should never do, no matter the circumstances: disclose your client’s identity without his consent. The first thing your prospect will do is reach out to that client to have a reference, and then you’ll not only lose your prospect, you’ll also lose your current client.
If you can’t get a reference and show tweets you have ghostwritten, the best alternative is to be able to show results you’ve gotten for yourself. We believe it’s good enough to be able to show you’ve grown your personal audience to a few thousand people and have gotten a few tweets and threads with several hundreds or thousands of engagement. That’s likely to be what a client will expect in terms of results.
If you’re really just getting started on Twitter, have 30 followers and no client, then perhaps you’re a bit early. One thing you can do is pick 10 people you’d love to write for, write up 5 tweets and a thread for them, and send it over to them for feedback. If you can’t show proof of results, at least show proof of skills. The worst thing that can happen is they won’t like it, but at least you can try to get feedback to improve.
Pick an industry or niche
Let’s get real: low-value threads that are written by non-experts aren’t very likely to perform. Some might, whether because they are artificially boosted or contain all the copywriting techniques to generate higher engagement, but if the value isn’t there, then there probably won’t be a lot of value in the new followers they generate.
This is why most people who look for a ghostwriter are trying to find someone who understands and knows their specific niche or industry. There are Twitter ghostwriters who specialize in fitness, crypto, startups, SEO and more.
And guess what? They are able to charge way more than ghostwriters who will just write about anything.
Now this doesn’t mean you have to be the #1 expert on the topic you choose. But you probably should be reading a lot of content about the niche already, and understand what people in that space will want to read.
Use regular outreach and marketing
Many traditional marketing techniques still work pretty decently in the ghostwriting industry. Though it is a competitive field, it’s still quite disorganized and implementing some simple things can pay off really fast.
Build a proper personal brand
The amount of people who reach out to me with the name “Millionaire 10x Ghostwriter blablabla” is too damn high. And to be honest, I rarely (if ever) reply back because there’s just so many of those on Twitter you can’t even tell who’s who anymore. I strongly recommend you create a professional-looking personal brand if you want to be taken seriously by more people. One where you show your name, and have a nice picture and banner made. But don’t get me wrong, some people have created amazing businesses with those “millionaire habits” type of brands. It may be too late though to jump on that train.
Create a personal website
Sounds obvious, but many people don’t have that. Just use your regular name or something related to ghostwriting as the domain, and start writing up some content about your process, your expertise, and more general blog posts about Twitter ghostwriting. You’ll start getting into SEO rankings far more quickly than you think.
Cold outreach
As we mentioned before, it’s good to pick a niche before you start doing cold outreach. You’ll be far more effective if you send 10 DMs a day where you show you know your stuff, rather than 100 DMs where you have no added value. There are a couple of ways to go about this, but you can search for tweets where people mention they’re looking for a ghostwriter and reach out to them, you can piggyback on other ghostwriter’s tweets and reach out to people who interacted with it, or you can simply use keywords to find leads that fill in your needs. For example, use Twitter advanced search to find people with less than 2000 followers but with the “CEO” title in their bio.
Ads
Why not? Using Twitter ads can be an effective way of targeting the exact demographic you want. You may want to create some sort of lead magnet before you do that because it’s likely people won’t want to pay for your services immediately after clicking an ad.
Create content
Blog posts. Newsletter issues. Threads. YouTube videos. There aren’t many people dominating the whole online media landscape with “Twitter ghostwriting” as the main offering. This is still a niche waiting for more people to compete in it and fill the void. One great example of how to properly execute that is Alex Llull. He produces a LOT of content about how to write on Twitter, so much that we even contracted him to write some of our blog posts and newsletters. And he gets people who want to become clients of his on a weekly basis.
Join our premium ghostwriter marketplace
If you’re a ghostwriter with experience and you’re looking for more clients, it’s likely we can take you on into our premium ghostwriter marketplace, the “Upwork for Twitter ghostwriters” if you will. We do operate a careful selection though because all of our clients are expected to commit to spending at least $1000/mo in ghostwriting. Because of that, we ask that you apply to join the marketplace and we can verify your credentials before you do.
Once you join, you become listed in the marketplace and clients can directly reach out and subscribe to your services. Tweet Hunter then offers a suite of features that help with client/ghostwriter collaboration, in addition to helping with payment, invoicing, and other admin stuff nobody likes.
Do you need to find a Twitter Ghostwriter? Try Tweet Hunter’s Marketplace today!
How much should I charge as a Twitter ghostwriter?
What’s nice about being a ghostwriter is you can charge whatever you want. If you’re just starting out, charging a couple of hundred dollars per month for a weekly thread sounds like a decent amount. But say you take on a few clients with that pricing and have no time to take on more, well you can always fire your clients and take on more high-paying ones.
The Twitter ghostwriting market doesn’t have any specific rules in terms of pricing, but based on our experience, this is what we’ve seen:
(all prices are on a monthly basis and include 1 thread/week)
Tier | Tier Description | Pricing ($/mo) |
Beginner | No experience, no clients | $200 |
Mid-tier | 3-5 active clients in broad niches | $600-800 |
High-end | 5+ high-end clients like execs, CEOs or successful entrepreneurs | $1200-2000 |
High-end + specialized | 5+ high-end clients in highly sought-after niches that require technical knowledge (crypto, tech, scientific) | $3000+ |
