Nicolas Cole 🚢👻

Want to get paid $10,000/month to write?

Pick one of these 5 lucrative jobs:

For context:

In 2016, I went from jobless to building the first thought-leadership ghostwriting agency.

In less than 60 days, I hit $20,000/month.

Fast forward to 2025, and in the last 3 months, 8-figure companies have been posting $100,000+ ghostwriting jobs:

• Google
• Microsoft
• Even OpenAI

And these 5 ghostwriting roles have the highest demand:

1. Social Ghostwriting

This is about scaling someone's insights & knowledge to boost their personal brand and attract customers to their business.

Usually, you write for a founder, investor, or business owner.

2. Educational Email Course Ghostwriting

An Educational Email Course (EEC) is a free opt-in made up of a series of emails delivering valuable content over time.

This helps capture attention from website & social content to grow an email list.

3. Weekly Newsletter Ghostwriting

Newsletters are a compounding asset that create a library of content, increase conversion likelihood, and build trust through consistent value delivery.

4. Ghostwriting Thought Leadership Articles

Clients want thought leadership articles to signal industry authority, expertise, and show they're at the forefront of innovation.

5. Ghostwriting Website Content

Website copy needs to clearly communicate what the company does & why potential customers should care.

Otherwise, they will leave the website in seconds.

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📌 But the ONE ghostwriting job with the highest demand?

LinkedIn Social Ghostwriting.

So, I put together a roadmap to help anyone become a LinkedIn Ghostwriter:

• 20+ AI prompts to help you build a business
• My "Leaks & Faucets" strategy for finding leads
• Viral content LI templates (that anyone can use)
• My $3M Sales Call script that closes high-ticket deals
• Voice matching prompt to write in any client's style
• A step-by-step, 30-day implementation roadmap

Want access?

Comment "ghost" and I'll send you a copy (for free!)

My tiny business generates $600,000/month.

The secret?

Copywriting.

At 26, I was a broke copywriter.

Then I learned the secret to great copywriting:

It has nothing to do with sales.

It's all about education.

Because when you successfully educate the customer, they sell themselves.

Here are 7 sales copy sentences my digital business uses to generate millions every single year (steal them for yourself):

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📌 The fastest way to make money on LinkedIn?

It's not copywriting.

It's becoming a LinkedIn Ghostwriter (using these 7 copy sentences in your clients' content).

Because right now, ghostwriting demand on this platform is exploding.

Want help landing high-paying clients as a ghostwriter?

I put together a free, 5-day email course to help you.

Click "Visit my website" at the top of this post to get instant access.

You're 18 months away from a completely different life.

Not "forever."

18 months.

That's how long it takes.

Just a year and a half of:

• Dedication
• Consistency
• And a bit of sacrifice

I was scrolling old photos the other day, and it's insane how much my life changed between 2021 and 2023.

Then again in 2023 to 2025.

(This pic is from 2021 when I grew my quarantine hair out all pandemic!)

Just think in 18-month increments.

You don't have to sign yourself up for a journey that lasts a lifetime. Just commit to achieving 1 big, meaningful goal over the next 18 months.

And watch what happens.

My entire life changed when I committed to writing & publishing every single day on Quora back in 2014.

The longer I’ve stuck with the habit, the more new & exciting opportunities I’ve attracted.

You can too—but only if you start.

Want more help kickstarting your daily writing habit?

Here's a free, 5-day email course with everything you need: https://lnkd.in/gHVMYgYi

In 2016, I hit $20k/month as a writer.

But if I was starting over in 2026?

I'd become a LinkedIn Ghostwriter.

Why?

Because this platform has 1.15 billion users. And less than 1% are posting content consistently.

(Despite knowing they should be.)

Which means there is an *enormous* amount of opportunity for LinkedIn Ghostwriters right now.

Use these 5 steps to land your first LinkedIn ghostwriting client:

1. Say exactly what you do in your bio
2. Be your own case study
3. Make a list of "Leaks" & "Faucets"
4. Pitch In Public
5. Follow up (till they call the cops!)

—
📌 PS—I put together a roadmap to help anyone become a LinkedIn Ghostwriter:

• 20+ AI prompts to help you build a business
• My "Leaks & Faucets" strategy for finding leads
• Viral content LI templates (that anyone can use)
• My $3M Sales Call script that closes high-ticket deals
• Voice matching prompt to write in any client's style
• A step-by-step, 30-day implementation roadmap

Want access?

Comment "ghost" and I'll send you a copy for free!

(If we're not connected, send me a connection request with the word "ghost" and I'll send it across.)

With 1 simple change, my best friend and I landed our first 2 writing clients in 24 hours.

The secret?

One phrase.

In 2017, Drew and I quit our jobs to start a ghostwriting agency.

• I was living in a rundown, Chicago studio apartment.
• Drew slept in my bed because I had no furniture.
• We sent emails and messaged everyone we knew.

Days flew by.
Stress crept in.
My savings dwindled.
Rent was coming due fast.

I started to panic.

Did we just make a huge mistake?

Then we went to a startup event.

And we kept repeating the same phrase to everyone:

"We run a ghostwriting agency that specializes in writing thought leadership articles for startup founders looking to raise their next round of funding."

The funny thing?

People mirrored that specificity right back to us.

They knew EXACTLY what we offered and to who—which made it way easier to attract the right (and high-paying) clients.

And we left the event with our first client.

In the Uber ride home, our 2nd client emailed us to say "I'm in."

That night, Drew and I could hardly sleep. We had just gone from failed founders to two high-paying clients.

Both paying us more than our old full-time jobs.

All within 24 hours.

We owe it all to that one, little phrase.

And in the next 18 months:

• We landed more clients
• Built a team of 20+ employees
• Scaled to over $2,000,000 in revenue.

This is the power of niching down as a ghostwriter (I dropped 4 more reasons why this works in the comments).

And right now, demand for ghostwriters on LinkedIn is exploding.

Want my free, 5-day blueprint on how to land high-ticket ghostwriting clients on LinkedIn (and other platforms)?

Click "Visit my website" at the top of this post to get instant access.

Clients used to only pay this freelancer $200.

But in 51 days, she landed:

• A $1,100/month newsletter ghostwriting client

• Then upsold another to a $2,500 email ghostwriting project

What changed for Megha Kumar?

Something so simple:

1. Her positioning 
2. And how she approached outreach

And even though Megha's an outlier, she's now in complete control of pricing—and can finally charge a premium for her work.

This also happened to me.

I started calling myself a ghostwriter and made other tweaks to my positioning.

Then I was able to charge $1,000+ for the exact same work I had charged $100 for previously.

But no one teaches writers how to get paid what they're actually worth.

Which is why I co-founded & built the Premium Ghostwriting Academy:

To help 1,000,000 make a living writing online.

—
📌 Want to start landing high-paying clients (like Megha here)?

Click "Visit my website" at the top of this post.

You'll get instant access to my FREE 5-step blueprint with everything you need to make those positioning tweaks, start landing clients on LinkedIn, & make money as a ghostwriter.

Medium is officially dead.

But back in 2018?

I was one of the highest-paid writers on the platform.

And I was making $6k - $12k per month writing articles.

But this is what I mean when I say:

Digital Writing platforms change.

The best platform to publish (or monetize) your writing today... isn't going to be the best platform tomorrow.

Which is why my entire thesis for writing online isn't based on platform-specific tactics. My strategy (and the strategy I teach thousands of writers) is to focus on building a niche library of content.

Because the platforms will always change.

Today, the best platforms to publish your writing are:

• X
• LinkedIn

But it won't stay that way forever:

• Algorithms change
• New platforms come out
• Or another platform gives you better distribution

And if you have a large, niche library of content, you don't have to start over.

All you have to do is copy/paste your highest-performing pieces over to that new platform—and you immediately have a head start on everyone else.

All that money I made on Medium in 2018?

I didn't write a single new piece.

Every single thing was a copy/pasted Quora answer I had written 2-4 years prior.

And Medium paid me over $100,000 per year for that content.

Library > Virality

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📌 Want to start writing online (and building your library of content)?

Here’s a FREE 5-day email course with everything you need to:

• Build a daily writing habit
• Generate hundreds of ideas
• Start going viral with ease

Click here to get instant access: https://lnkd.in/gHVMYgYi

I'm a pro writer.

Some fun facts about my writing career:

• In 2014, I was the most-read writer on all of Quora—out of 200 million users.

• In 2015, I set the record for the most Quora answers republished by major publications.

This is how I ended up getting my writing into Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, Harvard Business Review, and dozens more.

• In 2016, Inc Magazine republished so many of my Quora answers that they offered me my own column.

Two and a half years later, I became one of their Top 10 columnists and ended up replacing my full-time income writing viral articles on their website.

• In 2016, I also published my first memoir, Confessions of a Teenage Gamer.

It's about growing up undiagnosed with Celiac Disease and having a very lonely childhood, while simultaneously climbing the ranks to Internet stardom in the World of Warcraft.

• In 2017, I started the first ghostwriting agency specifically for founders/executives, called Digital Press.

• By 2018, we had grown Digital Press to 23+ full-time employees (writers, editors, and a sales team), 80+ concurrent clients, and $2,000,000 in annual revenue.

• In 2020, I published my second book, The Art & Business of Online Writing.

• In 2021, I co-founded Ship 30 for 30—which went on to become the fastest-growing cohort-based writing program on the Internet, helping over 10,000 people start writing online.

• In 2021, I also co-founded Category Pirates—which became a 6-figure paid business newsletters on Substack, and grew into a multimillion-dollar consulting business.

• In 2021, I also co-founded Typeshare—the leading SaaS platform for digital writing templates.

• In 2023, I co-founded Premium Ghostwriting Academy—which is now the largest training program for ghostwriters on the Internet.

• In 2023, I also co-founded Write With AI—a number 2 paid education newsletter on all of Substack.

• In 2023, I also published my third book, The Art & Business of Ghostwriting.

• In 2025, I co-founded Ghostbase—a proprietary AI model trained on 10+ years of my own ghostwriting knowledge and frameworks, that ghostwriters can use with their clients to create pro-grade content in seconds.

• And in 2025, I founded my own publishing house, Different Publishing, to handle all my own book distribution and create new categories of audiobooks (specializing in Immersive Audiobooks).

I share all of this to give you context.

I’ve been doing this “online writing” thing for a long time.

And I’ve re-engineered success over and over again, in a wide variety of different business models AND “types” of writing, all on my own terms.

📌 But if I had to start out today?

I would become a LinkedIn ghostwriter.

Because right now, more businesses are waking up to the cold reality that they need to hire a ghostwriter.

And the starting salaries I keep seeing are $150k - $300k per year.

Want a 5-step blueprint to help you get started?

Click "Visit my website" at the top of this post to get instant access.

In 2018, I dropped $6,000 on a book I didn’t even want.

Why?

To land my biggest ghostwriting client to date.

Here’s the story of how I helped one man become a New York Times best-seller (and discovered an ugly truth about the publishing industry):

Back in 2018, I had a ghostwriting client who ran an events business.

He decided becoming a best-selling author would boost his “credibility” (and scale his business).

Little did I know this would involve me.

One day, he came to me with an offer:

“Cole, I love you and I love your agency, so I have an introduction that would be really helpful for your business... but I would like something in return.”

“OK, shoot,” I said.

“I know the CMO of one of the largest technology companies in the world...

A multi-billion dollar company...

I'll introduce you directly to him and I will put in such a good word that it's almost guaranteed they will want to work with you...

But I want you to buy 300 of my books.”

At the time, ordering 300 books at $20 a piece was no small amount of money for my agency.

It would cost us $6,000.

But I had a feeling this would pan out and I liked him. He’d been a good client and I wanted to help him become a NYT best-seller.

“Alright, I'm game.”

So I forked out $6k and ordered 300 copies of the book.

(By the way, the intro he made became our biggest client and would pay us a FULL YEAR in advance.)

When the book launched 300 copies of this guy's book showed up at my door.

Box after box piled up, all across my house.

“What am I gonna do with all of these books?!”

I gave them away to everyone I knew and when people came over, I’d be like “Hey, I have some extra books, why don’t you take one?”

But did my client his the list?

On the week of the launch:

• Every interview he’d done dropped
• Every article we’d written was published
• And every influencer in his network promoted his book

And the week after, he hit the NYT bestseller list.

Then, one week later, the book completely fell off the charts. The book made him zero money.

But he:

• Called in every favor possible

• Spent tons of money getting his team to promote the book

• And returned all those promises he made, costing him money

Getting the New York Times as a badge probably cost him $250,000+.

I realized that becoming a best-selling author is not about who writes the best book.

It's about who's willing to do the most work on the marketing side and spend the most money.

Becoming a New York Times best-seller is 100% just a marketing game and a budget game.

The whole experience changed my perspective on whether I should aim to be a best-seller.

There are situations where having that badge is valuable.

But if you get the badge, but nobody reads the book, does it even matter?

—
📌 Ghostwriting helped me build a billion-dollar network.

Want to get paid to write for industry leaders?

Click "Visit my website" at the top of this post for a free, 5-day email course showing you how to get started.

Yesterday, Amazon started laying off 30,000 employees.

But the worst part?

These 30,000 layoffs are 10% of Amazon’s corporate employees—normally the “safest” from cuts.

They want to be "organised more leanly" to take advantage of AI.

One of the hardest-hit divisions was Amazon Web Services.

Which is shocking because AWS just had a massive, global outage only a week ago.

So, you’d think they need as many employees as possible to avoid that $581 million (estimated) loss from happening again.

This is just another brutal reminder:

You don’t owe your employer your loyalty.

Because that loyalty is often one-sided.

They'll let you go:

• Less than 2 months before Christmas
• When grocery prices are near record highs
• With ZERO hesitation

There is only 1 safety net you can count on:

Yourself.

We live in an age where whoever invests the most in themselves, wins.

There has never been a better time in human history to get an obscene return on your own individual learning.

The more you invest in new skills, the more money you make.

Just PLOW resources back into yourself.

Nothing will give you a better return over the time horizon of your life.

(Not even Bitcoin!)

This is why I built the Premium Ghostwriting Academy.

To train people on these in-demand skills:

• Sales
• Writing
• Business
• Marketing
• Offer Creation
• AI Prompt Engineering

No one can take these away from you.

You can start learning these skills TODAY.

And ghostwriting is the perfect vehicle to master all these skills.

Right now, the fastest way to get started is by ghostwriting on LinkedIn.

So, I put together a complete crash course on how to become a LinkedIn Ghostwriter before 2026.

It has everything you need to get started.

Click here to get (free) instant access: https://lnkd.in/emKAwqQZ

The fastest way to make money on LinkedIn isn't by going viral, building an audience, or selling digital products.

No, the quickest way is to become a ghostwriter.

This is why I'm so bullish on ghostwriting:

• Easy to start (no writing skills needed)
• Get paid to write (anywhere in the world)
• Huge potential upside (I hit $200,000/yr in under 60 days)

But landing your first client is the hardest part.

So, follow these 5 simple steps to get your first client (even if you suck at sales or have never ghostwritten before):

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📌 The demand for ghostwriters has never been higher.

And right now, ghostwriting is the easiest way to make money as a writer on LinkedIn.

So, in this free, 5-day email course I show you how to:

• Charge premium prices
• Get paid to learn & build your network
• Land high-paying clients like creators, founders, and CEOs

And more!

Get started (for free) here: https://lnkd.in/ekP2H9Ut

Do you want to:

• Dominate a niche?
• Build a library of content?
• Attract an audience of loyal readers?

Then write online for six months using these 3 content buckets:

—
📌 These are the 3 content buckets I used to build my 348,000+ audience of readers.

How?

By writing consistently online.

Writing online is the easiest way to dominate a niche in 2025.

Want the secrets to writing online (so you can start building your audience on LinkedIn)?

Click here to grab a paperback copy of my self-published book, The Art & Business of Online Writing: https://lnkd.in/eamfbRGm

If you want to be right, be pessimistic.

But if you want to be rich?

Be optimistic.

Because if you are:

• Lazy
• Low-agency
• Pessimistic

There are far fewer opportunities for you today to succeed.

But if you are:

• Ambitious
• High-agency
• Optimistic

Then there has never been more opportunity available in human history.

You choose.

Recently, an entrepreneur friend texted me, asking my opinion on whether or not he should start a podcast.

Here's what I said:

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I've been on dozens of podcasts.

And writing and publishing my ideas on the internet has helped me refine and clarify my thinking.

Which has made it so much easier to talk about my ideas in podcast interviews.

And I've found writing is the foundation for every type of creative work:

• Storytelling
• Podcasting
• Designing
• Marketing
• Selling

So, want to clarify your own thinking through writing?

Here's a free, 5-day email course with everything you need to build a daily writing habit.

Click here to get instant access: https://lnkd.in/gHVMYgYi

Landing $5,000 ghostwriting clients takes 9+ months.

Unless you have this shortcut:

I spent my first year as a ghostwriter struggling to:

• Learn the basics
• Figure out what works
• Know the mistakes to avoid

Which is why I mentor ghostwriters like Mark Matousek—so no one else is "forced" to face the same challenges I went through.

And I've developed a shortcut anyone can use.

Here's how Mark landed a $5,000 ghostwriting client (in 4 dead-simple steps):

Step 1: Say exactly what you do in your bio.

Don't get "clever" here.

Get clear by telling people:

• The service you provide
• The person you provide it to

For Mark, you instantly know he ghostwrites Educational Email Courses for HR Tech startups.

Flawless execution.

Step 2: Be your own case study.

You don't need testimonials (or an audience) to get started.

Instead, prove you can get results by delivering them for yourself.

So, one of the first things I train my students on is how to build their own Educational Email Courses.

And Mark built himself a great one called:

The Startup Founder’s Leadership Manual.

Step 3: Make a list of leaks & faucets.

To land your first client, tap into your network:

• Leaks: People you know you can help.
• Faucets: People who know someone else you can help.

You might not realize it, but you have tons of opportunity sitting right under your nose.

Step 4: Send free consulting Loom videos.

Most cold outreach messages get completely ignored.

Why?

Because they read like spammy pitches.

So, I train my students to send 3-minute Loom videos showing potential clients how an Educational Email Course can help them capture missing revenue.

Which is *exactly* what Mark sent to his $5,000 client.

Now, he may be an outlier.

But it just goes to show what's possible when you take a shortcut and just follow a proven roadmap (like Mark did!).

📌 Want some more help landing high-paying clients as a ghostwriter?

I put together a free, 5-day crash course showing you how to:

• Charge premium prices
• Get paid to learn & build your network
• Land high-paying clients like creators, founders, and CEOs

And more!

Get started (for free) here: https://lnkd.in/eaRPayVZ

You only need 3 specific skills to make $200,000/year as a ghostwriter:

• Offer creation
• Premium positioning
• And "Free Consulting" outreach

You don't need:

• A portfolio
• An audience
• Testimonials
• Or case studies

I had NONE of these, but I still sold $3,000,000+ in ghostwriting services, working with over 300 industry leaders.

And right now, demand for ghostwriters on LinkedIn is exploding.

But only IF you execute these 5 steps to land high-paying clients:

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📌 Want a proven ghostwriting blueprint to help you make money as a ghostwriter?

I put one together—11,000+ have already used it to get started.

Click "Visit my website" at the top of this post to grab a free copy.