It must be a wonderful thing to be one of those chefs in the TV cooking competitions, able to take a stack of surprise ingredients and instantly whip up beautiful, tasty dishes from them.

For most of us, if that’s what we had to do every day, it would just be overwhelming. Particularly when we are first learning to cook, startling creativity is not what we are after.

We just want good results from reasonable effort. After all, those flamboyant chefs spent a long time, years at least, faithfully following recipes until they developed the understanding and the skills they needed to pull off those creative miracles later in their careers. Continue Reading

If you can write in someone else’s voice, writing for voice –e.g., scripting or outlining speeches and presentations for corporate executives, small business owners, and public officials — can be a lucrative niche. One of the great things about it is that once an executive (or that person’s “handlers”) get comfortable with you, you will have a steady stream of work, and it will be hard for any rival to dislodge you.

In the early days of this relationship, however, there’s a need for some quiet persistence and some diplomacy. The need arises because the speaker (or his/her advisors, in larger corporations) almost always wants to add more and more detail that dilutes and obscures the main message. Continue Reading

Many freelancers, in a wide range of fields, think of hired writing help as something for larger projects, for corporate clients, not something for the independent one-person shop. It can be hard to imagine hiring someone to help with writing tasks if you:

• Cannot see a reason why you would need writing help, or
• Cannot visualize how you would work with that writer.

Why Hire Writing Help?

Some freelancers feel a little guilty when they do not do their own writing. It’s on their list of tasks they mean to do. But they avoid it, or they do not have time, or what they write just does not seem to have the impact they are looking for.

Part of the problem is that everyone one of us knows how to write, and we all do it every day. It is hard to farm out a task that seems like an extension of a daily activity. And that’s just the kind of thinking that perpetually postpones the creation of marketing content.

It isn’t a question of whether you should do your own writing on principle. It is a question of what gets the writing done. A white paper that is never finished (or never started) will bring you exactly zero new prospects.

What are some symptoms that point to the need for a little help?

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“Ghostwriting” business communications is a lucrative and satisfying writing niche that requires some special skills and the right mindset. I’ve had excellent projects writing presentations for CEOs of very large corporations, and writing trade and newsletter articles for one-person consulting shops.

What they have in common is that these projects go beyond contributing good writing — professional, grammatical, persuasive, interesting — to capturing the client’s voice. When people are familiar with a given CEO or consultant, for instance, hear those presentations or read those articles, the ghostwriter’s contribution should be transparent, leaving the client’s themes, values, and style clearly visible to the audience.

These opportunities often come along after you have already been writing for a client for a while, or as a referral from one of your new client’s colleagues. You have been recognized as a skilled and dependable writer, and the client asks if you could help them with a more personal message, whether that message is delivered to employees or investors or trainees or clients or the media.

If such an offer comes your way, recognize from the start that this is different from your previous writing projects, and make sure you don’t blow it!

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While many business rely on hired writers to generate content, whether marketing material or documentation or training guides, “ghostwriting” business communications is a somewhat more rarefied skill. I’ve written previous posts on Freelance Switch about this kind of ghostwriting as a satisfying and lucrative specialty.

I’m talking about writing where you truly impersonate an individual, not just a corporate view, and that goes well beyond writing a marketing brochure or a web page for a company. For example, I’ve worked with clients where in addition to producing training content for them, I wrote presentations and speeches for their top executives, to launch the training. And those presentations had to be in the style of those executives, they had to use the words, pet phrases, and favorite analogies that their audience would recognize.

I also ghostwrite trade journal articles and newsletters for other consultants. Again, their readers are expecting a certain style, familiar vocabulary and themes, and that’s what adds the ghostwriting touch to the project.

And it is easier too in this kind of business when you focus on a well-defined target market.

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“I find it painful to write.” That’s the first sentence in an e-mail I received from a training consultant, asking me for editing help on a guest column she was asked to contribute to an e-zine. That column would put her in front of hundreds of prospects, with the endorsement of a leading trainer in the field.

And the training consultant is not the least bit reluctant to make presentations, do coaching, step into the classroom or into the room to engage, educate, and inspire. She’s terrific at working with people.

But she needs help to create written content that is equally engaging and inspiring. She either puts it off indefinitely, giving up many opportunities to promote her business, or she forces herself to do it, but the results are not so great.

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One of my clients, for whom I regularly ghostwrite newsletter and trade journal articles, often drafts material and then sends it to me with a request “for a little wordsmithing.” Fortunately, he has learned that what he is really asking for is a writing consultation. Over the years, I have become his trusted ghostwriting resource (See From Temporary Help To “Trusted Ghostwriter” ) and I have acquired that status largely by going beyond “wordsmithing.”

Mechanical Fixes

Like many clients, when he first started working with me, he thought in terms of “fixing” and “improving” the fine points of his drafts, working at the word level of the material. He wanted me to:

• Fix grammatical problems or particularly striking style problems.
• Suggest a better word or phrase here and there, where he was groping for the right expression.
• Recommend edits to reduce the word count to what was needed for a particular publication, or for his newsletter.
• “Punch it up” a bit, which he thought of as using sexier words for the mundane language he started out with.

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Some great long-term client relationships, for writers, originate from the client’s lack of time rather than their perceived lack of skill. In other words, they bring on writing help because they do not have the time to handle all the internal demands for writing services. This may be a chronic overload, or it may be a short term bulge in demand.

Either way, the more quickly you demonstrate that you can write in the client’s voice – that you can not only “write,” but you can “ghostwrite” — the more likely that you will become a trusted resource for that client.
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What you do not know — or pretend not to know — about your client’s business, product, or service can be one of your greatest assets as you help your client communicate with employees, investors, customers, or prospects. Even though you have been hired to write in your client’s voice, it can be a mistake to write completely within your client’s mindset.

You may be crafting an important address that a company executive will be delivering (live, printed, online, or recorded) to motivate employees to adopt new practices and adapt to new conditions. You might be introducing a new product or service to the sales force, with the hopes that they will be able to effectively communicate the benefits of the new offering to prospects and customers.

Whatever the specific task, very often the main challenge to delivering the message with impact is not the client’s lack of communication skills, but their failure to look at the message from the perspective of the audience.

The people whose messages are at the heart of the communication, whether top management, internal experts, or product team members, have been wrestling with the topic for so long that they begin to assume that key points, new directions, and essential elements that they have developed over a period of time will now be instantly obvious to anyone. Continue Reading

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When the CEO of a large corporation motivates employees with a company-wide presentation, some of the impact derives directly from the CEO’s personal style. Recognizing the CEO’s usual themes, turns of phrase, and favorite examples convinces the employees that their corporate leader truly cares about the subject in question.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the one-person coaching or design or writing or training business must sell the person as much as the product or service. When freelancers use articles and newsletters and white papers and other giveaways to enhance their visibility among prospects, to win their trust, getting their personal styles across to the prospect is just as important as any other element of those communications.

Neither CEOs of large companies nor freelancers running their own businesses always have either the time or skill to produce these communications themselves. So, if they are smart, they hire writing help.

When you can capture enough of their style to write in your client’s voice, you create opportunities for repeat business. Clients learn to love writers who can mimic the key features of how they express themselves. Continue Reading

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As freelancers, we have many ways to interact with our peers to help us keep abreast of new ideas and emerging trends. We network with others like ourselves for moral support, for answers to business questions, and to develop strategies and skills and resources that can make us more successful.

You may belong to online discussion groups, get electronic newsletters and paper journals and magazines, or tune into regular podcasts. Perhaps there is a local group of designers, or writers, or trainers, or whatever your particular line of business may be, and you get together from time to time to share ideas and experiences.

This is an excellent practice, especially as independent freelancers do not have the natural social settings that employees of corporations do. We have to build our own social and professional connections, to assemble sources of ideas that we can draw on to enhance our own businesses.

Just don’t stop there. If all of your networking is with people like you, and little of it is with people who look like your clients, you are probably missing some great opportunities to grow your business.

Note that the “networking” I’m talking about here extends to any method of gathering more information that can help your business. That includes reading newsletters and listening to podcasts, for instance. And it includes learning how to be a better writer or designer or whatever you are, and not just to direct connections to more projects and clients. Continue Reading

Tell people you are a “ghostwriter” and they will conjure up enticing visions of you rubbing elbows with major entertainment celebrities, top athletes, and business icons. They are thinking of those books where the famous tell their tales and the political heavyweights push their policies, knowing that most of those people needed professional help to craft readable, persuasive, entertaining narratives.

But there are legions of ghostwriters working on more mundane projects in the business world. Mundane, but lucrative. They might identify themselves as “copywriters” or “freelance editors” or “public relations specialists” or something else, but each one is writing words to put in the client’s mouth. Continue Reading