I Have Never Sent A Follow Up Email, Ever.

The Strategy that makes me 5k a month from writing, without follow up emails.

Let me start by saying I am not a marketing guru. I am not a copywriting king.

I don’t even write sales copy, but I do make a good living from writing. I have never sent a follow-up email in my 18 years of writing online for money.

I know what you’re thinking, “There is no way that’s true; it’s some kind of gimmick.”

It’s not, and I am going to tell you exactly how I get clients to follow up with me, pay me and then recommend me to their friends.

It’s not sexy, but it does work, it’s not a hack or a get quick rich course. I have nothing to sell you. I don’t even have any social media handles you can follow.

I am that much of a ghost writer.

My Strategy is not for you if you’re about growing your profile or getting rewarded with gold stars from followers for being ‘great’ at blogging.

If you genuinely love writing and want to get paid to do it without having a profile, a portfolio of work, or ever sending a follow-up email, then you are going to love this.

How to Get Ghostwriting Clients.

The web is awash with websites; you might have noticed. Everyone is hustling to have their little piece of internet real estate, and everyone, including your Grandma, is on the net.

Let’s use my mother as an example of how this works.

My mother is an artist. She takes tiny flowers and mushrooms and sets them in resin to make what she calls resin mushroom crystals.

She knows I “Do things on the internet”.

She comes to me one day roughly four years ago and says:

“Alex, I want to sell my resin mushroom crystals on the internet. How do I do that?”

My mother does not understand how the world of the net works, so I tell her the following, secure in the knowledge that it won’t happen.

“You will need a website that can take payments. Then you need to photograph your resin mushroom crystals, and put them in your online webshop.

Next, you drive traffic to the shop by advertising on Facebook and Instagram. You will need some SEO as well, and some blogs to entertain all who come to see your fantastic resin mushroom crystals’.”

She nods. I leave thinking, ‘Great that’s the end of that I do not need to build her a website and run her store, Hoorah!”

Three weeks later, I arrive to take her to lunch.

“Come with me I want your opinion of my website ‘Resin Mushroom Crystals for the Seriously Enlightened.”

She has found a $99 course online ‘How to Launch Your Passion Project on The Internet”, she brought it and then did it.

Her website wasn’t great, but neither was it the worst I have seen by a long way. She had already made four sales from putting her Resin creations on her Facebook page.

“Now teach me about this thing called blogging. I think I need a blog.” It was then that it hit me.

There must be thousands, hundreds of thousands of people doing — ‘how to launch your passion project’ courses online.

It didn’t take me long to find out that yes, there are thousands.

I am not knocking the courses like the one my mother did. It was excellent. The teacher was friendly and clearly knew her stuff.

She taught students, whom she rightly assumed had little to no knowledge about starting a webshop. She was an affiliate for Shopify, but she stated that numerous times and Shopify is simple to use and easy to get your passion project up and running.

She then talked about growing a community through ‘niche’ neighbouring on Facebook, interest and Instagram.

Lastly she said a very casual “So now you just write about what you love to target SEO traffic and keep customers engaged with your product.

It was that last tiny piece of information, like writing about what you love enough to rank for it on google and keep people engaged is the easy part! As we know creating content is the hardest part after creating the website.

The teacher of this course loved her topic so much that she thought everyone who has a passion project would love to write about it. As if the mere act of loving it would make them great at writing about it.

As you also know, writing is not easy. Even if you love something, it’s not as simple as tossing a few thousand words onto a website every month to rank for SEO or engage your customers.

This is where a lot of these sites start to flounder.

After the initial high of actually producing the website and getting all the gears moving no one finds you. You have no audience to buy your product.

So have to advertise on Facebook, Instagram and google.

‘let me be clear, anyone who is selling resin mushroom crystals does not know the machinations of Facebook advertising, or how SEO works.’

They may try writing a blog post, invariably most of them give up because writing is hard, especially when what you want to do is make resin mushroom crystals.

Enter ghostwroiter extraordinaire.

That is how I started ghostwriting for passion project websites.

I am not a natural marketer, and I don’t like cold pitching my writing and then following up with emails trying to convince potential clients to pay me to write for them.

How I Get Clients To Email Me.

Type something random into google. I started with Crystal Healing.

I only do USA website because I live in Australia and the US dollar exchange rate is excellent.

After you put in crystal healing, choose a town from anywhere in the USA, for example:

Crystal Healing, Idaho.

Click on the first webpage. What is your instant impression of this page?

Does it look active? Does it have a blog? Does it have an overwhelming amount of purple? Does it look like they need more quality content?

I choose the websites I am going to approach based on:

How active they look. Do they have a recent (within one month) blog or article? Are their Facebook and Instagram feeds are current. You want them to be active but not have a lot of recent content.

If it looks like no one has loved this page for more than three months or blog posts are dated March 2019 — move on.

There is plenty more out there. These websites are just waiting for the domain name to expire, and the owners have probably stopped trying to create a business.

I then write a free no strings attached 600-word’ blog post’. I don’t lie and say ‘I love Crystals; they are my passion. I want to write about them every day and spread the amazing mineral love’ — It’s bad karma.

I do say:

Hey, I’m Alex,

I write blogs/stories and content for websites like yours. I love writing, and I would love to write for your website. I see you haven’t put out a new blog recently. After spending some time on your website and looking at your social media, I have written a blog post for you.

It’s free, no strings attached. If you want to put in on your site, that would be great and if you want me to write more for you, email me. I charge $100 for 1000 words, depending on how often you would like me to write for you.

Have a great day. Talk Soon

Alex.

That is the exact email I send.

How you make this work.

Personalise it to their website and socials. If they talk about the magical properties of crystals, so do you, if they talk about using crystals to cast spells, so do you. If they make crystal mandalas well you just happen to know a ton about that.

You’re treating this free small piece of content like your cold call, your initial pitch, your follow up email and your repeat first booking all in one.

I would rather spend 20 minutes in research and 30 minutes writing a cracking piece of content to illustrate what you can do for them, than trying to get them to engage with me so I can pitch them.

I always state my price. I have tried not standing my fees up from, but it ends up being more work, and sometimes they try and negotiate you down. I get a much higher uptake by telling clients upfront on how much I cost.

Sure they might try and get me cheaper, to be honest, I just say my fee is not negotiable downwards unless they buy more. 90% of clients who want me to write for them, just say. ‘Great can we start on Monday’.

It takes me about 45 minutes, including edits to write a 1000 words. So $100 for me is pretty good money. But you can charge whatever you want.

Most people who start ‘passion websites’ do it because it genuinely is a passion, but they quickly realise that the content mistress is harsh and hungry and writing useful blogs takes time.

If your even an average writer you can write good blogs and website owners will pay you for that skill. They realise you’re better at it than them and it saves them a lot of time.

If you’re prepared to do this, it works.

I have about 15 on the go at one time. Some I write for weekly some I do two posts a month, for one client I now do a weekly job and 4 Instagram mini-blogs a week and a monthly newsletter I charge them $1200 a month.

What if you don’t want to write about crystal healing?

Then choose another topic.

I write for a horse chiropractor, a woman who sells felted cat hair beenies, a keto blogger, a woman who teaches knitting, a man who trains birds to speak, a reiki master, a golf pro, an organic skincare brand and of course the crystal healers.

What if you don’t want to write about any of that stuff? Then ghostwriting is not for you, my friend.

Think about it this way, If you got an email that said:

“Hey I love what you write on Medium, can you write me 1000 words on my organic hair shampoo, I will need it by Wednesday, and I’ll pay you $100.”

Would you turn that down?

Why this works is because you write the words then send it to the customer.

Of course, they may not want it, but for me, this is much more effective than cold pitching and following up and trying to convince them to buy my work without actually showing them what my work can do.

If you love writing and want to make a living as a writer, this is a great way to earn money while waiting for your Medium career to take off.