The scary truth about Ghostwriters 👻

This blog is automatically transcribed using AI and might have typos or grammar errors. It’s not the robot’s fault.

Who are they? What do they really📝 write about? Who uses them and why do they use them? Will they 😱 scare your readers away? So many questions to answer and I thought why not bring on an expert to share with us the ins and outs of hiring a ghostwriter?

On this episode I was being joined by Anthony Garone, who is a local ghostwriter. Anthony and I met at our friend Tisha’s event, Social Connect.

About Anthony: After working more than 20 years in the technology and software industry, I started my own company to fill a major gap I saw everywhere: there’s way too much boring content out there. There are a lot of great companies and personal brands with dull blog posts, bland web copy, and no clue how to build a following. So, I use my diverse talent stack to help fix that problem.

Next time you read a blog or an article ask yourself, "Was this written by a Ghostwriter?".

See below the show’s transcription:
Mary

Ghostwriters? Who are they and what do they really write about? Who the heck uses a Ghost Writer and why would somebody use a Ghostwriter? Will they scare their readers away? I have so many questions going through my head about ghost writers and who actually hires a ghost writer? Like do you have someone writing your entire book for you or your manual? And I thought instead of just trying to answer these questions via Google or YouTube, why not bring on an expert to talk about all the ins and outs of ghostwriting. Hi, everyone. I'm Mary Fain Brandt, and this is 15 Minutes of Fain. You can find me here every Tuesday at 02:00 p.m.. It's my new time. We move from twelve to two and I think it's a much better time slot. If you like this time slot, give me a thumbs up or a heart or something, send me a message and let me know. The weekly show here is 15 to 20 minutes and I literally drop a quick tip on business development, your favorite apps and program, or rather my favorite absent program, and of course everything LinkedIn related.

Mary

Big shout out before we get the show started, to the official sponsor of 15 Minutes of Fain, StreamYard. That's how I'm going live. It's so freaking easy. You get to go to the live button, and at the end you hit the big red button that says End broadcast. And as you saw, you can have slides up intro videos, outro videos, and bring comments on. Let's check this out. Here we go. David's here, he says, scared. You can bring comments on the screen, have up to ten guests in the, what do they call it, the green room. I think that's what they call it where people hang out before a show. It's just super easy to use. So after the show, you guys, I have an affiliate link for a few things. I'm going to just drop all of that in the comments, and so if you're interested in trying any of the tools that I use, you can just click on that link and find them. And if you sign up for Streamyard, guess what, I'll go ahead and jump on a 15 minute call with you and help you get set up because that's how much I love Streamyard.

Mary

Now back to the ghost story. I mean, ghost writer. Today I'm being joined by Anthony Garone, who is a local ghost writer. And when I say local, I mean that he lives in my state, now Arizona Anthony and I first met at Tisha Marie Pelletier's social connect event, which is a great event. If you're in Arizona, you should definitely check out my girls' event, so it's a lot of fun.

Mary

Now why do you need a Ghostwriter? Who hires a Ghost Writer? How can a new viewpoint be based on your copyright? How can that enhance the copy that you have? I do want to say, Anthony says that the ghost writer term, this is what he had. He says, we take your ideas and package them in a way that the market will find enjoyable. Now, I've got to learn more about this because why? I think I can write pretty well. Sometimes I don't have the time. Sometimes I talk about the process and not the transformation. Well, let's get Anthony on stage. Anthony. Anthony. There you are.

Anthony

Hello. Wow, the green room is really nice. I really had a good time back here.

Mary

I got you some eminent water.

Anthony

Red ones are only very good.

Mary

It's so fancy, right? Oh, my God. I just love it. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I mean, when we first met at the beginning of the year, at that event, you and I just standing over in that corner just chatting away.

Anthony

Right.

Mary

I really enjoyed talking with you. And so I thought, writing and copying, this is such I got to turn it off. Such a big part of owning a business. Writing is probably one of the most important skill sets, and yet it's probably overlooked, right. People think about their website and their coaching packages, but they don't think about everything that's involved with the writing. And I think that's where ghost writers come in. But before we get to that, Anthony, tell everyone about your business, how you got started, all that good stuff.

Anthony

Yeah, sure. So I started Edify Content with my business partner, Ellis Fitch. She's a marketing and copywriting expert. She works for Infusionsoft and we met at InfoArmor when we got acquired by Allstate for half a billion dollars, which was a pretty crazy thing to go through. She's an author and I'm an author. I have two of my three books here. This one is about winning the job search, like finding a job. And I've hired a lot of people, and so I have a book of advice. I had this other book about playing this, it took me 22 years to learn how to play one impossible piece of music. So I wrote a big book about that and the life transformation I went through. But essentially, I just like writing. And when Alice and I were talking about what we were going to do next, after Allstate. Content marketing came up, and it was during the pandemic when sales teams realized, hey, we can't meet people face to face, I guess we have to count on what's on our website. And then they went to their websites and said, there is no way we're going to sell anything with what we've got.

Mary

I can believe that, because they probably wrote it from that one, two, three bullet point, right. Mentality, not transformational. Not from the heart. Very strategic and analytical. Very dry, I would imagine.

Anthony

Really dry. Ellis and I have a term called featuritis, and we feel that a lot of people have featuritis when they write on their website. It's kind of like, here's what we do, here's service number one and service number two and service number three. They don't talk about results. They don't talk about the problems they're solving for the customer. When you go searching for something like a service or a product, you're searching for a solution, you've got something, there's a gap in your life and you need it filled. You don't need it filled by innovation, business solutions. No one looks for those things. Those terms are meaningless.

Mary

They just want to know that you can solve the solution. They don't care about the journey to get there, right? Whether you walk through three red doors, turn left, pick up a coffee mug, right, or whether you have to do five coaching calls or if you have to do five online applications, nobody cares about the process. They care that you can solve their problem for them. Right.

Anthony

Yeah. I mean, when you bring your car in for an oil change, I need my oil change. The result is I drive away with a car that has fresh oil. And the car companies, they know this, right? They don't say, come in for a five W 20 and a new oil filter, and they're like, coming for an oil change, here's how much it costs. And that's a really, really simple idea. But my friend owns, he's a guitar builder and a repairman, and we talked last night a lot about this, how people bring instruments to him not to get them fixed, but for the experience they have after he's repaired their guitar. That's why they bring it in.

Mary

They sound good now, right? They don't have to worry about it.

Anthony

Yeah, they play well and they're enjoyable.

Mary

I love it. Okay, so Anthony, I've got some basic questions for you.

Anthony

Sure.

Mary

Who the heck hires a ghost writer? Like, is it people that want to write a book? Is it business owners? Is it CEOs of Company? Can you tell us a couple of your favorite clients that you've worked with?

Anthony

Oh, man. Well, we worked with over 60 clients at this point, just in two years. So I think that goes to show, people are looking for ghost writing and copywriting. Anyone really can hire a ghostwriter. In the situations where we get hired, it's usually I'm writing for a CEO or Ellis and I are writing on behalf of employees at the company, or we're just doing copywriting and general marketing. The thing is, for tech companies in particular, like SAS companies, they want their developers to write blog posts, but developers don't have time to do that. They have 30, 40 minutes, sure, for a meeting, but they don't have two, three, 4 hours to write an article and slog through it and edit it and find screenshots and all this stuff. So they generally will come to us and say, hey, will you meet with a developer and just write an article for him or her. And I'll spend because I have a technical background, I'll spend 40 minutes with them, get the gist of what they're trying to say, and then I package it into something that people will want to click and read. We make recommendations on titles, and we write meta descriptions and header tags, and we play the SEO game. So Ghostwriting is very handy for a lot of companies because they want their people to have stuff published on the web, especially leaders at companies. Any business owner would love to have, like, thought leadership pieces on the net. Well, that's usually Ghost written, and if it's not very good, it probably isn't Ghostwritten, because founders are just trying to get their ideas out, but they're not professional writers.

Mary

They're busy being the founder or the CEO. You can only wear so many hats, and there's only so many hours in the day. I think one thing is that we all need to stay in our lanes that we're really good at, utilize the skills that we're great at, and what we're not great at, hire out, source out.

Anthony

Lot of marketing directors, believe it or not. They're like, hey, we've got to get it's not for them. It's for their teams. They're like, we need blog content. We need it with this person's name on it. So generally it's like we just get an article out and I get either a recorded zoom call that happened internally or I will interview the person and get their language down and, like, actually capture. I type really fast, so when they're speaking, I generally type everything that they've said and then I can actually capture their real language and sometimes pretty it up or make it easier to understand. But I capture a lot of their voice in these calls. And then when I write the article, I make sure that the things that they say are actually included.

Mary

Yeah, because it's important right. I think one of the questions for the stigmas is, I can't have anyone else write, it won't sound like me. So I'm very casual, conversational, I use fun words, so if someone were to come in and write very analytical and linear, it wouldn't sound like I wrote it. So can you tell when someone else has written the copy. Are you that good, right? That it sounds like whoever hires you.

Anthony

Well, I think less about the tone and the quality and more about okay. It doesn't seem realistic that this person is doing all of these things. There's no way this CEO has his hands on the keyboard and is developing the application and is doing all this presenting at conferences and is writing these articles every week. These things, it's just not realistic. There's only so many hours in the day and, so chances are, if you see leaders writing for things like Forbes or other publications, either a ghost writer has been involved in a small way, whether it's through editing or just helping, or the ghost writer might have completely written it. There are definitely articles that are completely written by executives and there's plenty of them. But I can tell you I get hired by companies where the executives write because someone in marketing is like, look, I love that you love to write, but we need this to be good and we need people to want to click it, and they don't need 3000 words, they need 1200.

Mary

Got you. Clear and concise versus character count or word count.

Anthony

Yeah.

Mary

So being that I'm a small business owner, entrepreneur, love supporting my small business owners, and I work with I know a lot of people that do courses and landing pages and that kind of stuff. Is that something that you help the small business owner with? Like really getting the right copy on the pages so it does convert?

Anthony

Yeah, for sure. Ellis is really the marketing brains behind our operation. When we have technical people who want stuff written, I'm generally brought in. But for nearly everything else, Ellis is brought in and she and I work together a lot because I'm a technical person and sometimes what I write is legitimately boring and she makes it better. And then sometimes she has to write stuff for really technical landing pages and I have to tell her, hey, this isn't correct. This actually isn't how the app works.

Mary

So you have this business partner, you guys working together, bring both sides of copywriting together. I love that.

Anthony

We're probably the only agency that does copy and marketing that was founded by a developer and a marketer.

Mary

Okay. So David said, you know, his designer question, it was graphic designers, catalogs ads, social media post for clients that I'm developing layout. That was his question. And then he said, Anthony has addressed I think so. David, if he does work, his company does work with entrepreneurs, small business owners, getting that copy for ads, landing pages, social media post, etc. So I think that you answered David's question.

Anthony

One other popular question that does come up is do you guys design stuff for us? And we generally say like, they'll ask for an ebook or they'll ask for a PDF lead magnet kind of document, and so we'll write it. And then I do work with designers and we'll subcontract that work out, or I'll work directly with the designers who work at the company and we collaborate on the documents that we're writing.

Mary

Okay, so typically the reasons that someone would hire a ghostwriter don't have enough time. They're not a good writer, they probably overwrite. We tend to think more is better, like, oh, I need to have a 500 word or a 2000 word article. So you help people really get their ideas clear and concise, come across clear and concise.

Anthony

Make it so it's enjoyable and hits the SEO targets that they have. They often have keywords they're trying to target or they have a channel they want to reach, like the front page of Hacker News or Reddit or something like this.

Mary

It makes sense. That makes sense. Well, we are at our 15 minutes, and I try to keep this brief, short, clear and concise. So hiring a ghostwriter can really help you then level up your content, which can create more leads or opportunities. I like to say opportunities. I don't think everything's about sales. My whole thing is connect, cultivate, convert to opportunities, which could mean writing for a bigger publication, getting on radio, TV, live shows, podcasts, and of course, bringing in leads if you're a business owner. But I really think that we need to think about opportunities and not just sales, because if we don't think about all the opportunities and we're missing out. So who knows, I might be talking to you in the future. I've got some things coming up in 2023, and I might need a set of eyes, like, here's what I've got written down, but how can I word it better? Or what I feel is the SEO component. There's a lot of people that are good writers, but I don't think that we're thinking about SEO all the time.

Anthony

That's correct. Yes. And the tools we use are hundreds of dollars per month just to have access to, and then you have to learn how to use them. So it's a pretty sophisticated universe of stuff.

Mary

I'm not going to learn how to use it. I'm not going to buy it. That doesn't make sense for someone like me. Right. So it makes sense if I was working on something very important, right, than to have to hire a ghost writer copywriter to go ahead and go over that and not only make sure that it's clear and concise, but to make sure I have that SEO component built in. I think that we forget about that. We only think about websites.

Anthony

Oh, yes, people definitely do.

Mary

So, Anthony, you guys, after the show, I'm going to go in and I'll answer any questions you have, although I'm not the expert on this one. I just provide experts to you guys so you can level up your businesses and your careers. But I will go in and share the links. I have affiliate links like the StreamYard and a few other tools that I love using a consultation like booking link and my LinkedIn Success checklist. So I'm going to drop all that in after. Now, Anthony, where can people learn more about you? How do people contact you? Where do you want them to connect with you?

Anthony

Yeah, sure. So our business URL is edifycontent.com. That's Edifycontent.com, and then if you want to reach me, you can just go to anthonygarone.com. That's my personal website, and I'm one of the easiest people to find on social media and easily to reach. So reach out. I'd love to talk to you.

Mary

Yeah. So, you guys, if you're watching the replay, go ahead and type in hashtag replay so I know and go ahead and ask questions. Anthony and I will go back to this live show and answer any of the questions that you might have. We'll drop it in all of our links so you can connect with us because we're here to support you and your growth in your business or your role at your company. So, Anthony, thank you so much for your time today and I look forward to seeing you at one of these upcoming networking events locally because there's a few coming up in December and I have one that I think you might be interested in. So stay right there and let me go ahead and I guess that's it. That's all we got. You guys,

Anthony

One quick thing, thank you. And in the comments, if you watch through the end of the video, look in the comments, I will leave some remarks on what people look for when they're trying to find a ghostwriter.

Mary

Oh, that is good. Thank you so much. Well, you guys, I'll see you next Tuesday at 02:00 p.m. In the meantime, make sure that you ring my bell on LinkedIn to get notified of all my content when I'm posting because I'm dropping free tips every week. And for my career professionals, every Monday, the B show where we drink coffee and talk about career tips and trends. We go live every Monday at 07:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, right here on LinkedIn, my favorite platform. So take care and I'll see you later online. Ciao.

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