Writing content can be hard work, especially if it’s not something that you have to do very often. Hiring a ghostwriter is a great way to help with your writing, and to get your content created more quickly.
What is ghostwriting?
Ghostwriting is when you hire someone to write on your behalf, but with the content being credited to having come from you. For all intents and purposes, the reader of your content wouldn’t know that someone else has ghostwritten the content. It should be written to read like it’s being written by whoever is being credited with writing the piece, whether that’s a person or a brand.
Ghostwriting has been a popular practice for hundreds of years, with all sorts of writers and publishers hiring ghostwriters to create content on their behalf. Ghostwriting takes place in literary endeavours or other creative exercises such as song writing.
At Tentmaker we often ghostwrite on behalf of clients who require written copy to go alongside some of their marketing materials such as brochure pages or website content.
How we ghostwrite
The aim of ghostwriting is to be ‘invisible’ to the reader of the content. A reader would presume that the content that they are reading has been written by whichever person or organisation that the written material has been credited to.
In order to ghostwrite, a content creator would need to undertake research on what they are writing about, or be provided with a useful amount of information that they can then collate into a written piece. We usually call this information ‘reference documentation’ – the collated information that relates to the organisation that we’re writing on behalf of, or the themes that we are being asked to write about. The more reference information we have, the better the final content is likely to be.
When we have reference documentation available, we should be able to write content to a proofing stage which can then be reviewed and amended by the client. Typically, when we are producing content we would look to create the content on a similar theme across multiple outputs. That would mean that a blog post would benefit not just from the written content that makes up the post, but also in extracting the content for other uses, such as social media content or presentation slides.
Ghostwriting is a useful way for organisations to have a ready amount of content available for their marketing purposes. It is especially useful for organisations who don’t have the time to commit to regular content creation but who would like to benefit from ongoing marketing exposure.
It’s important to remember that hiring a ghostwriter isn’t just a process of handing off a workload to someone else. You’ll require an initial investment of time to provide a ghostwriter with enough reference information or resources to allow them to get up to speed with what it is you’ll be writing about. Once you have provided good reference documentation, a ghostwriter should be able to produce content much more easily, and across a range of outputs – something that is critical in modern marketing, where digital assets can be spread across many different channels.
