The Power of Personal Storytelling in Writing

When most writers think about ghostwriting, they think books. But there's a huge opportunity to ghost for business leaders who need content... articles, blog posts, speeches and more. In this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Rob is talking with Allison Evelyn (Ally) about how she pivoted from Day Rates and standard copy projects to ghost writing for clients—and how she's leveraging that work to ghostwrite books in the future. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Allison's Website Allison's Podcast: Holy F Allison's Instagram Get her freebie: Ghostwriter Gold The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Transcript: Rob Marsh:  When you think of ghostwriting, do you think of books? If so, you’re thinking small. This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. We’ve talked with several copywriters, from time to time, over the past eight years, who have talked about ghostwriting. Most of those episodes focused on large projects like ghostwriting books—the in-depth process for writing a book and connecting with the kinds of clients who need help from someone who can write their book. But ghostwriting is more than that. Ghostwriting includes any project where a writer steps into the shoes of their client to write something in their name. It can be blog posts, articles published online, emails, webinar scripts, and more.  When you look beyond the book world, the opportunity for ghostwriters is huge. Landing these clients isn’t dramatically different from the way that you find, pitch, and close regular clients… though there are differences. Usually, as a ghostwriter, you’re not writing for lower-level employees. Rather, you’re writing for founders, CEOs, and other high-level thinkers, so your work needs to be able to reflect that. In fact, your pitches may need to include ideas and insights that a client can use to show up as a thought leader in their business and niche. Landing work with ghost-writing clients means you need to show up and be recognized at this higher level. My guest for this week is Allison Evelyn, that’s her professional name— she mostly goes by Ally. Ally’s been on the podcast before when we talked about an earlier version of her business. Over the past four or five years, the kind of work she does and the kinds of clients she works with have changed quite a bit. When we recorded that earlier episode, Ally was a member of The Copywriter Think Tank. She also taught several workshops about day rates and the kind of work copywriters can get done on those kinds of projects (one of those workshops is in The Copywriter Underground today). With all the changes she’s seen in her business and her personal life, I was excited to catch up with Ally and learn more about her role as a ghostwriter for some prominent online voices. I wish we could talk about a few of them by name, but as a ghostwriter, you usually need to stay behind the scenes so your clients can shine. Even if you’re not interested in ghostwriting for clients, a lot of what Ally shares in this interview about working with clients applies to the normal back and forth with all clients, and if you put her suggestions to work in your business, I promise, you’ll be more successful. Make sure you take notes as you listen to this one. As usual, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. No matter what kind of copywriting business you want for yourself, The Underground is packed with resources to show up as a business owner—not just a freelancer, find clients, and solve big problems that clients are happy to pay big money to get off their plates. From copywriting and business templates to get you started (including a legal document and a proven onboarding process) to workshops to help you build your authority, attract clients, create products and services your clients want to buy, and more—The Underground is like a starter-kit for your business… or a complete business-in-a-box that you can plug into your own business and hit play. As questions come up, you have access to our private Slack community, monthly group coaching, and regular feedback on your copy. I’ve been inside a lot of memberships, and The Underground is the best value for content writers and copywriters I’ve ever seen. You can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu And now, my interview with Allison Evelyn… Rob Marsh: Ally, welcome back to the podcast. You were here Well, see, it's been a long time—episode 172, and we were talking about launching, I think you were launching your first program, but a lot has happened since, not just like work-wise, personally, years have passed. Catch us up. What's going on in your copywriting life? Allison Evelyn: Yes, so dearest listener, we were just talking about how before, when we talked, and then I was a panelist at The Copywriter Club In Real Life, which was wild because it was early 2020. At the time. I was a New Yorker. I was living in New York. I was power walking in Adidas. I was launching programs and having memberships and doing day rates. And then. Since I have moved on in life, moved to Arizona. I am now in cowgirl boots all the time. I line dance. I met a man. We got married just at the time this airs, it'll be about five months ago that we got married, and I am now, after being in the tech world for a while, gone back to my roots of ghost writing. And so that's what we're gonna dive into today, and I'm really excited about it.  But I do think it's almost apt that I've gone back to my roots of ghostwriting because now, at this point, on the day of our conversation, I have been a California-born native of the Bay Area. I have bicycled the beaches living in SoCal, I power walked in New York City. I road triped the country for eight months alone with my cat and all these other states. And now I'm living this Arizona country dancer life. I think all of our experiences channel into what we're meant to do and what we're meant to do, and how we show up as copywriters and ghostwriters. And part of mine has been being many different people, even as me, let alone ghostwriting for other people, Rob Marsh: I don't think this is an uncommon thing for copywriters. Obviously, we come from a wide range of backgrounds, and oftentimes we've lived two or three lives, or we've had two or three different careers or whatever, as we come to it. So it's interesting that you mention that as an intro to ghostwriting because ghostwriting involves basically stepping into the boots of another person, another person's life, and telling the story or talking as if you're them. So, let's talk about how you get started. We'll talk about ghostwriting books in a minute, but, and that's what most people think about, when they think of a ghostwriter, they're thinking, oh, right, I'll write a book. But there are so many ways to do this. I mentioned before we started recording. I used to ghostwrite blog posts for a CEO. So let's talk about ghostwriting across the board. You know? What does it involve? And how do we get started? That's a really big question.  Allison Evelyn: Yes, absolutely. And I would guess there's quite a number of people listening who are currently more identifying as copywriters or content creators. And this morning, I was rooting down. I really wanted to feel really prepared and just hunkered before this conversation. So I had this, like, coffee and I was like, coffee shop, and I was writing through, okay? What is the difference between copywriting and ghostwriting? And I think what it boils down to is, at least in my spirit, when I'm copywriting, or ghostwriting, copywriting is like, you're helping create this brand. You're capturing the essence, but you're often helping to build it right? You're helping determine if there's an almond pancake batter company, like, are they a sassy one, or are they more organic based right? You're helping create and determine the story.  But a ghostwriter is like this real person or an organization or group, but most often, right, an individual who you're already working with a voice like a real, living, breathing person who has an essence, and rather than creating it, you're often helping to understand and extract who is that actual person? Because, as we know and we will talk about, a lot of people we know do not write how they talk like the real person they are is one way, and when we're ghostwriting, some of the resistance we're going to face and some of the pushback methods I'm going to talk about is helping people actually be who they are and tell like the real stories of who they are. But I think a lot of us were getting started, if we've been in copywriting, you know, we think of, okay, we're, we're creating a voice, we're, we're creating a persona. And then ghostwriting, you're kind of shifting into a lot more question asking and going, Okay, who is this person? What am I pulling out?  For me, my own journey, I'm going to be honest, I became a ghost writer and did not know it, because I didn't know the term. And to your point, I thought ghostwriting was for books only. So when people asked, Hey, could you come and write this article for me? A magazine asked for me to put forward an article and do a layout. Can you write that? For me? I didn't know that was ghostwriting. I still thought that was just content creation.  So, just a shout-out. Some of you could be ghostwriters, and you don't actually know it or haven't realized it, and for getting into it, I think a lot of it is like naturally, when we're working with people on copywriting projects, or we're creating content. Some of it is just offering and putting it out there. Hey, do you have articles coming up? Have you done video scripts? Like, we start putting things out that are just more personal, that are from the person. Hey, I've been working on social media. Hey, I've been working on a landing page.