How to Succeed AI Ghostwriting or Not

The emergence of AI shook the ghostwriting community to its core. After making a comfortable living for years, you’re now faced with the decision to adapt or quit.

You were writing blog posts, full-information products, sales copy, emails, and more—and then, as word spread to your clients about a free and easy method of generating content, they dried up for the most part.

Now, some clients don’t want anything to do with AI. It’s a technology you cannot use carelessly, or your output will be disastrous. It also blatantly says it can and will make stuff up.

So, for those clients, it was off-putting to begin with. But those may have been few and far between, and the competition to secure ghostwriting clients (especially at top dollar) was then even more fierce.

Instead of giving up your ghostwriting career, I will share some ways you can use AI’s availability to your advantage. If you prefer, you can take the polar opposite approach and stake claim to the “never AI” position.

You won’t become extinct in the online business world unless you give up. You can still thrive and have a very lucrative career – especially now that the shine has worn off and people see that AI can’t compete with tailored human-written content like you can deliver.

The Alternative: Anti-AI Positioning

Many people loathe the thought of robots taking over human jobs, telling people what to think, etc. It’s a messy technology, even though it’s far better than the awful article spinners people used to use.

AI can create decent content. Some of it may be untrue (and it knows how to write as if it’s verifiable), but it reads well, and most people don’t have the talent to create something even half that good.

But, as a ghostwriter, you know you can do better. AI must be trained by the user to get worthwhile output. Some people spend a lot of time creating custom GPTs to have it mimic their style and knowledge.

Suppose you think about why someone is hiring a ghostwriter in the first place. In that case, you’d understand their hesitancy to continue using AI after discovering how much time they spend redirecting it to get what they want.

Time vs Money

What about the cost? AI is free – how are you supposed to compete with that? Well, it’s free, but as we talked about, sound output takes a lot of time, and time is money. For online entrepreneurs looking to delegate to free them up for profit-pulling tasks, getting sucked into a spiral of time-consuming prompting is detrimental to their bottom line.

You might hate AI, and if that’s the case, don’t worry – you never have to use it in your business. Instead, you can position yourself as the anti-AI ghostwriter. You have to be very vocal (and truthful) about not using this technology.

Clients will find it hard to find good ghostwriters who are honest about their lack of AI use. I would even go so far as to make it part of your branding, emphasizing that you are one of the last remaining human-centered ghostwriters and promising to tailor your content to the client’s needs—not hand it over to a cold-hearted robot.

But now it’s time to get honest. AI is here to stay. It’s pretty good when used correctly, and it’s a strong competitor. So, how can you use it to your advantage in serving clients and creating content from which you can earn money?

How to Get Hired as an AI Ghostwriter

If you look at the job market, you’re going to find that many jobs are for people who have mastered AI. Now, you can position yourself as a master of AI, too – provided you’ve learned all the ins and outs of using it.

Start with that. Master the process of using ChatGPT and Google Gemini (both free). If you have the money to reinvest in your business, get ChatGPT Plus and create a custom GPT that writes and thinks like you and delivers output tailored to your liking.

Once you know how to research, brainstorm, and create content effectively using AI tools, you can leverage them to create content for your clients at lightning speed—with much less work!

Your clients will not want to pay top dollar for AI content, and that’s okay. It means you’ll have more clients without being a time burden – because AI is doing the work for you.

Focus On Volume Clients

You stay on as overseeing the project, prompting it, and making sure you perfect the deliverables. But the heavy lifting is done by AI. You can promote your business as one that provides custom AI content at a fraction of the price it would cost them to hire a human ghostwriter.

Make sure you show examples of the output on your sales pages or in your bids. People need to know that you are an advanced AI user, not just someone who prompts, “Write an article about intermittent fasting,” and calls it a day.

You want to highlight that your clients can get far more content from you now using AI than they could have if they paid top ghostwriting fees. Marketers hungry for massive content volume will jump to get your AI ghostwriting services.

Use AI Ghostwriting for Multiple Content Formats

Remember, they need blog posts, social media posts across multiple platforms, email autoresponders, lead magnets, and information products. It isn’t a one-time endeavor, either – it is day after day, and they can’t keep up with the competition if they don’t have a vast volume of content.

Whenever you work with someone, overdeliver some unexpected material to keep them as long-term clients. For example, someone hired you to write a 50-page eBook.

Instead of just delivering the eBook, prompt AI to whip up a lead magnet and 7-day email series that complement the original material. Deliver it as a surprise and a show of gratitude for the work. It takes almost no time and will go over very well with clients.

Effectively Using AI in Your Ghostwriting Business

So, how do you use AI in your business? You can use it as much or as little as you want to. If you have an aversion to allowing artificial intelligence to serve as your voice in writing, you can use it in the preliminary stages instead.

Research

For example, you might start by having AI assist you with research. It can give you information about the demographic audience you are targeting, the competition and content they are writing, and what’s selling in the marketplace.

Depending on which tool you are using, it can also provide up-to-date research and links to publications that can help you accelerate your learning about the topic you are writing about for a client.

Outlining

Another way you can use it in the preliminary stages is to have it help you with the outlining process. It works very well if you use two AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and then create a hybrid outline based on unique elements that each one delivers.

You can only have AI edit your content if you want to maintain your voice in writing it. AI can do everything from spotting spelling and grammatical errors to improving readability or giving advice on how you can make the overall piece of content even better.

But let’s say you want to rely on it more. You can train AI to write like you simply by attaching a piece of your own written content and telling AI to mimic that style. This ability is a great feature if the client wants you to maintain their voice, and you can take a bit of their content and have AI write identically to them.

You can also have custom instructions that you build into AI so that it always does certain things for you. It might include using or not using specific phrases, eliminating certain types of information, or maintaining a particular style and tone in your content.

Prompting AI Ghostwriting

The main thing you need to learn about AI in your business is how to prompt it. Prompting has a learning curve, where you massage your wording to get the output you want from the beginning.

As you prompt and then have to redirect or correct AI, you will learn how to prompt it from the initial stage rather than going back and fixing things. As you find suitable prompts, keep a file of those handy so you can blow through your ghostwriting tasks quickly and easily.

You can categorize them according to the everyday tasks you will be doing for clients. For example, if you have a lot of clients who ask you to write blog content, you can create specific prompts, such as asking AI to create a pillar blog post that optimizes for a particular keyword phrase.

AI Ghostwriting Variations

Many people think of ghostwriting as a service that you offer to clients. And in most cases, that’s what this is. However, you can make money with your writing talents in other ways – including ghostwriting under a pen name or for mass clients.

Instead of simply being a voice behind other experts, you can now publish and earn from your own information products and niche content. You can create a pen name and publish your artificial intelligence books in various marketplaces online.

AI Ghostwriting for Social Media Content

You can also create social media content, such as using AI to make video scripts and storyboards for a YouTube channel or TikTok account, where you earn from content creator funds, virtual subscriber gifts, and merchandise sales.

Many people already use talking head AI images that look realistic but are not human enough to rake in views and engagement on their social media accounts.

Sell Private Label Rights

Another way you can profit from AI ghostwriting is to consider selling your content to the masses. It is usually in the form of private label rights (PLR). This content is typically sold cheaper than ghostwriting anyway, and by using AI, you can offer more content at a lower price and sell it to hundreds of people so that your services are still bringing in plenty of money.

Artificial intelligence is a technology you can either wield for good or use as a lazy tool that won’t get people the results they are looking for. As long as you either position yourself as a staunch opponent to it or master it to deliver more for your clients, you can thrive in the online marketplace.