(upbeat music) This episode is brought to you by Smiles Northwest. When you say hello to someone, one of the first things they notice is your smile. That's why having a dentist you can trust is really important. At Smiles Northwest, they have you covered, whether that's cleaning, restorative, cosmetic, orthodontics, or implants, they are focused on providing the best comprehensive care to you and your family.

Smiles Northwest always invests in the latest technology, has their own in-office dental lab, and are constantly training their team in the newest advancements in dentistry. Visit smilesnw.com and book an appointment today. You're listening to Let's Talk Jobs, where we give you practical insights into jobs and careers. I'm Tim Chen, and today we're talking about ghostwriting and how to help thought leaders tell their stories.

Now, one of my favorite stories of all time is that of Cyrano de Bergerac. If you're not familiar, it was a play written by Edmund Rostand in 1897, and this story, there was a man named Cyrano. Now, he didn't consider himself to be a handsome man because he had this really large nose that he was deeply ashamed of.

Unfortunately for him, he loved a woman named Roxanne, but his fixation on his looks prevented him from opening up his heart to her. Now, he had a friend named Christian, who was this handsome Brad Pitt of a man, who also was attracted to Roxanne, but he didn't have the, let's say, vocabulary to properly impress her.

So he and Cyrano made an arrangement. Cyrano would finally get to write love letters to Roxanne, but Christian would take credit for the letters by delivering the messages to Roxanne. It's tragic, I know. Now, I won't spoil the ending, but you should check it out. The essence of ghostwriting is a little bit like that.

You have an executive audience who wants to deliver a message, and a ghostwriter helps create the content that allows them to tell their story in a way that is impactful to their audience. So today, we're going to have a conversation with Troy Peterson, who is a freelance ghostwriter and content marketer.

In this conversation, he's going to cover topics such as how to write and tell a compelling story, how the field is challenging but highly rewarding, and then he'll give us some tips on how to start or build a career as a content marketer. All right, let's get started. Hey guys, today we're talking about how to be a ghostwriter and how to help thought leaders get their message out.

Joining us is Troy Peterson. Troy, how you doing? - I'm doing great, it's good to see you, Tim. - Good to see you, Troy. Hey, can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing these days? - Yeah, so basically I'm a ghostwriter, which is kind of a funny word, but my mission is to help thought leaders and innovators to tell stories through the written word.

Obviously there are a lot of mediums. My focus is specifically writing. I help companies and leaders get their thought leadership in the form of lots of blog posts and sometimes articles that get placed on different industry or mass media websites. - There's one thing that you said to me once, which just made me chuckle, 'cause it totally aligns with my philosophy as well, and your version of this is every piece has a purpose.

And for me as a web marketer, my take on that is every pixel has a purpose, right? Everything's gotta be done intentionally. And you actually just mentioned, whether it's contributed articles, blogs, or eBooks, like everything has to serve a purpose. Can you help me understand what that means to you for each of those mediums?

- Yeah, sure. No, I mean, so sometimes thought leadership is a little bit about ego, right? Let's be honest. You wanna get your ideas out there, you wanna sort of be in the conversation today, especially on social media. But in terms of a company investing in me and in my time, what makes a good story?

What makes a good thought leadership piece that's written for a blog or for getting placed via PR on a website or media? It really comes down to three things. It has to be the intersection of a subject matters, personal passion. There has to be an audience for it that's interested in that topic.

And importantly, I think people forget about this. There has to be a business opportunity associated with it. 'Cause otherwise, why are you gonna spend the money and the time to get that post out there? So I have spent a lot of hours in my career looking at analytics and Google Analytics primarily and looking at what different pieces of content drive an audience interest.

And I think that is a super important element to what I do. And whether I'm looking at the analytics on a daily basis or my client stakeholder is looking at the analytics, we wanna understand the work that we're doing and what kind of an impact it's gonna make on the business.

- I love where you went there 'cause like you, I'm a total data nerd, right? And the thing is, in the world of content creation, there's science to it and there's art. And sometimes the art comes in a form of opinions that may or may not be substantiated by data.

And I'm kind of curious, as you're working with your clients or even just pitching a medium that's maybe most appropriate for a topic, like what data are you looking at and which ones kind of help you shape a recommendation on whether, hey, like based on whatever you're seeing in a trend, this should be an article versus, you know what, this is probably better suited for a blog or even ebook.

- Yeah, I mean, I guess there's, part of what makes a good story is also what, it has to drive an action, right? So, and that ties into analytics or data. So that action, and again, I believe every article ought to have this, right? I try to ask this question every time I do an interview is like, what do you want your reader to do ultimately after they read this?

So sometimes it's, you know, the data is simply, we want to drive exposure to our website, right? So we think about, you know, what's the, how does the topic going to drive interest and whether it's, you know, keywords that are gonna be searchable through SEO or thinking about, you know, catchy headlines and anecdotes that might drive people from an email newsletter to read it.

But, you know, the other data points that are sort of more impactful is how many business discussions did we get actually started with this? Because when you think about thought leadership, the goal is ultimately to engage in a conversation, usually. So, you know, how many, if we, you know, if it's a blog post and we cross posted on, you know, from LinkedIn or X/Twitter or Instagram, like did we actually get people engaging with that, engaging in a conversation, you know, even better from a, you know, sort of B2B point of view, did it actually get somebody to reach out to our sales team or through our contact form?

And, you know, and then ultimately like the creme de la creme is did this article that we write start a conversation that ultimately led to some kind of a sale, right? That would be, that doesn't happen very often. A lot of times that's the accumulation of, you know, the thought leadership work that I do that ultimately will lead to a sale at different points in the journey, the lead journey.

But those are the data points that we're looking for. - Yeah, you know, I would even add to that because, you know, like as the web piece of it, working with someone like you, the data that's important for me, and you called that out earlier, is having a strong point of view, first of all, on who your target audience is, and then you measure engagement, right?

And I think if not done thoughtfully, there is no such thing as a one size fits all, right? So you can't just assume a template that you create would just work for everyone. And I think you point out a good example of like a thought leadership piece. There's a very specific audience, executive audience you're going for.

And you can only go down to a very technical audience. Like maybe there is a product announcement that's a very popular one, right? You write one for technical audience, but that one is so specific, like the engagement might be very dependent on like just the demand of your product, as opposed to maybe writing a periodic piece, which is playing on a current trend, right?

And to your point, all of these have different audiences, they have a different objective. So you have to be very purposeful around like what CTAs you wanna put in there, right? And like I've done a few studies in the past where like you work so hard creating an analyst, like let's say a first party analyst report, right?

Based on cool trends. And it's easy to regurgitate key learnings and key findings from the report. But what it doesn't do is put an opinion on why it's important for the user. And like in both cases, I've seen the one where if there is a thoughtful perspective on an industry trend of what your report supports, that marriage usually results in higher engagement on clicks and gathering names for a report, as opposed to just pure spitting out the data.

- Right. - And written for different audiences is very powerful, right? And so you're totally right. As a matter of fact, a CTA on a thought leadership piece might be come check out our EBC, right? And that's a very different than come get a demo or download this white paper.

- Right, yeah. - So I like that. I've always been wondering, you know, like, so like between like contributed articles or blogs, you know, they're similar in nature in that you're writing basically an editorial story. E-books to me is a very, very different beast. 'Cause you have to go deep and broad and it's gotta be a highly valuable piece for someone 'cause hopefully it answers jobs or helps them understand how to do their job better.

Right? - Yeah. - Can you give us some examples, like just topically, and obviously I don't have to, you know, say the customer name or whatever it is, but like some examples of e-books that are really, really like impactful for you. 'Cause again, anyone looking to create an e-book today might want some guidance on what to, how you have to approach it.

- Right, right. Yeah, I'm trying to think of back to some good examples, but yeah, you know, back to your point about different audiences. So one of my clients is an app development firm. Actually they were my last full employer before I decided to break off and go independent.

But we, early on in my work with them, we, you know, we decided we wanted for existing prospects. So if you think about the funnel, this is not a piece to drive awareness. It was a piece to send, the sales team could send to existing prospects to better understand what they do.

But basically the idea was to, you know, step-by-step go through what the typical app development process looks like. And it's not a perfect piece of content because every case is really different. But we, you know, we talk through and explain in detail the different pieces and, you know, the feedback, you know, the ROI on that was, you know, basically feedback from the sales team that it, it really helped them further their discussions and sort of give them a nice leave behind to explain their, you know, the process.

But then also it was a great opportunity to reach back to sort of old leads or cold leads and sort of re-engage with them with a piece of content. Another example, we did an e-book about enterprise applications, same client, enterprise mobile applications, and the opportunity for basically to create apps for your workforce that would allow them to do their jobs better.

So this was, this one we used more at the top of the funnel. We used it to drive awareness. And it was really, it was actually, we did a study leading up to it, some research about, you know, look, we commissioned a quantitative study to ask workers, you know, how they felt about their existing tools that they use to do their job.

And we found basically, you know, not surprisingly a lot of dissatisfaction around sort of the off the shelf tools that companies provide them. So basically the e-book was an overview of the research findings, but put in the context of, you know, there's an opportunity with the maturation of mobile applications and mobile OSs, specifically iOS and Android, to, for companies to fairly inexpensively create custom apps to support their workforce.

And we promoted it through a lot of newsletters that specifically targeted HR and IT teams, and drove quite a few new leads into this. The system and built a newsletter list with that. So that, those were just two examples of e-books that sued very different purposes, but I thought, you know, both were very effective at what they did.

- That's really, really cool. And I find myself envious of people like you, because the skillset that's required or the broad set of skillsets to dive deep into any given topic quickly, and to become an expert quickly, to be able to write something sensibly credible, is not something that I find easy to pivot, you know?

And I would never cut it in your world, Troy, like I couldn't do it. - Well, it's so man-made, I mean, it's not easy. It's not easy for me either. In fact, that difficulty defines really how I prefer to work. It shapes how I prefer to work, which is, and it's a bit of a challenge, because I'm a freelancer.

I don't have the overhead of a company, you know, the security that comes with working for a company, and I don't have HR benefits and all that stuff. That's a whole different topic, but, you know, to do what I do well, I feel like I can only work on, you know, sort of two to four clients at a time.

So, you know, I mentioned, you know, this app development firm that, happy to share the name, by the way, it's ArcTouch, they're really good at what they do, and they work with big brands and lots of big media companies to build their mobile products, basically. But I've been working with them since 2014, whether it's, you know, full-time or when I left in 2020.

And then, you know, even the other clients that I've had the most success with, I work with over a long period of time, and I get to know, you know, their business really closely and can dive, you know, deep over time. But it is, you know, it is daunting, especially if you're gonna go deep on an e-book, if you're just starting to work with somebody, because you're, you know, it's gonna be fraught with a little bit more peril if you try to do an e-book on day one of working with a client.

So my preferred working situation is no more than two to four clients and sticking with them for a long period of time. - Well, that's a good tip. I think you're right. Quantity versus quality, right? And giving yourself the time to really dive deep is really important. You know, back to the actual discipline of ghostwriting itself, to me is fascinating, right?

'Cause I think about people who ghostwrite for presidents or for CEOs, right? And there's a art of having to understand their tone and personality to write something that genuinely looks like it came from their behalf. And it's a little different than obviously ghostwriting for like a blog or e-book, for example.

Can you tell us a little more about the, just ghostwriting itself as a function and what it means to you, the different applications or how to do it well? - Yeah, it's a complex question, but I'll try to break it down. The most important thing is to understand the context of somebody's work.

And I think, you know, I've thought a lot about this a lot. I think one of the reasons I'm able to do what I do is honestly my career path in working in a lot of different roles. And specifically, you know, there's a lot, I started as a journalist.

There's a lot of people who do what I do, started as journalists. But I think the sort of secret sauce layer for me being able to be, to do this for as long as I have is that I've worked in business in different roles. And, you know, you and I worked together at Logitech.

Logitech is a great example. I started in doing sort of block and tackle public relations, media relations on their PR team. And then I, for a year or two, I worked as their full-time, the full-time PR writer. And I wrote a lot of press releases and I wrote some reviewers guides.

So basically, you know, when we had new products, we'd write a guide and send out a unit to a list of media and sort of give them tips on the best way to try it out. But, you know, I wanted to learn, at that point I was super intrigued with, started to get super intrigued with the sort of product development.

I loved Logitech's products, still do. And I had an opportunity to shift over to the gaming group and become actually, I was a global product manager there for a couple of years and also did some game developer relations. So I did some business development and I learned about operations and I learned about product development and I learned about supply chain and how to build materials in a spreadsheet and understand the, you know, sort of ROI.

So tons of great learnings in that. And then, you know, after Logitech, I did a lot of different sort of digital marketing 'cause digital became the thing. So I've had this broad experience in business. So I think I have this built-in context. Everything's a little different, right? But I have this sort of built-in context that allows me to understand when I'm talking with somebody, a new thought leader that I haven't talked to before, to usually at least on the surface level, understand their business context and their work context.

And, you know, and then it's just a matter of like, you know, going back to journalism school and, you know, knowing how to ask questions and even beyond that, being curious, right? Being curious, asking, just like you're, you know, sitting at a bar with friends or around a campfire with kids, you know, asking questions and being naturally curious and listening, right?

That's the last part is listening. And so all of those things, I think, combine to allow me to do what I do. You know, the challenge of, you mentioned of sort of tone and voice, it's important. And I think that comes through some trial and error when I'm first working with somebody and kind of goes back to the point I made earlier about, I prefer to have longer engagements with people because as I go along and I learn their style through more conversation and more access, then I can better sort of channel their voice and, you know, turn it into something on my first try that they're happy with, proud of, to put their name on.

- As a writer, how do you deal with just harsh criticism and feedback? That would probably break me down as a human. So I'm pretty sure, like you mentioned, like it's been a journey for you and I'm pretty sure you learn a lot of things on the way to build a thick skin.

Like how do you process criticism? Like how do you do it? - Well, yeah, I mean, you have to, it's human nature to get defensive, right? And I think I get defensive like everybody else. I try to minimize reacting in the moment, right? And just try to take it in.

And if, 'cause your brain's first instinct is to shut it down. So it's just, I don't have a great answer for that other than you have to on some level be okay with feedback that you're not always gonna agree with. And then the real trick is to turn that feedback that you may not agree with and then find a compromise, if that's what it takes to finish your work that you're proud of.

But ultimately you also have to know, like if it's a ghostwriting gig and this person's name is going to appear on top of it, they have to be proud of it, right? So you have to get to that point where they're proud. And I actually kind of relish that challenge.

I've just seen my name on stuff once in a while, but it's a totally unique challenge to get somebody to sign off on like something that you basically wrote that has their name on it. - Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Shifting gears a little quick for here. So what advice would you give to someone who is at the start of their career going, and they generally know that they like writing, they don't know what to do with that.

So what advice would you give them? And then alternatively, for someone who is a little more seasoned, what advice would you give them in terms of what they should consider when evaluating future moves in a career and whatnot? - So my advice early in your career would be to start broadly.

When I first made the transition, I went to a tech PR agency when I left newspapers. And by working at a tech PR agency, I was able to start getting exposure to different businesses, whether a lot of B2C, a lot of B2B, understanding customers, understanding the media landscape, understanding audiences and what motivates different audiences and how to sort of start to create messaging targeted at different audiences.

And that's a great foundation. I wouldn't recommend anybody that's coming out of college or early in their career to specialize too much, honestly. You wanna know what you're good at and really good at, and you can sort of hang your hat on that, but it's really important to have that, to sort of get a broader context to do your job well and understand a bigger landscape.

'Cause as I said, I think that's something that has allowed me to have that context when I'm having those first conversations with thought leaders today is to sort of point back to those broader experiences that I had earlier in my career. When it comes to leaders that maybe wanted to focus more on writing or be ghostwriting later in their career, I mean, I think if you realize that like me, you really relish the storytelling above all else and you relish this idea of helping businesses get their thought leadership out and actually achieve some kind of ROI out of it, which is what I do.

That's the time to consider it. I think there's two ways to go. There's one would be to work at a bigger agency where maybe you have benefits and things like that. Bigger marketing agencies, a lot of them have internal writers these days. Sometimes really big companies have content marketers, they call them, that do a lot of writing, so that's another path.

If you get to my point in my career where I've been doing this for a while and I've got a decent professional network, then you can think about freelancing. I haven't, I've been lucky, I haven't had to do a whole lot of marketing, but there's definitely ups and downs that you have to be prepared for when you're freelancing.

- But Troy, those are super, super helpful conversation for me 'cause you reminded me of a lot of really good things and even in the web marketing world, like a lot of muscles to exercise. And I would agree with your statement around starting your career as a generalist, right?

I think I also started my career in a agency side of the business, and you just get exposed to so many different aspects of that discipline, I totally agree. Kind of coming back full circle, as kind of just kind of closing thoughts, again, every piece having a purpose is so important, right?

And if you're entering this field, being intimately familiar with your audiences and the mediums of what you're gonna write for is really important. Do you have any closing thoughts for us, Troy? - No, I mean, I do think AI is interesting right now. Like I said earlier, Tim, I have some mixed feelings about AI, but I think one of the reasons why I believe there's gonna be people like me for a very long time is AI is great at helping look back and assimilate background knowledge on things, but in terms of AI's role in writing, it can't, at least right now, it can't really lead, right?

So we still have, our leaders are human, our innovators are human. They're using AI tools to lead and to innovate, but in terms of telling their stories, I think we're a long way away from AI being able to look forward and to lead, right? Which is something only humans can do.

So yeah, aside from that, I think I'm good, Tim. I've really enjoyed having this conversation with you and love your podcast. (laughing) - Thanks a lot, Troy. - Great having you on. We'll have to bring you back on this show 'cause there's other things I wanna talk to you about that has nothing to do with ghostwriting, but I just love to get your perspective on stuff, but thank you for following it.

For more information on Troy and information, just follow the descriptions below. Troy, thank you for your time. - Awesome, thanks, Tim. I appreciate being on. (gentle music) (upbeat music)