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This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features , 34, of Las Vegas, Nevada. Dunham is a creative marketing specialist and brand strategist who runs a side hustle ghostwriting LinkedIn posts. Revenue from her ghostwriting business currently hits between $9,000 and $12,000 a month, or around $110,000 to $120,000 a year in addition to her full-time salary. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
When I started the ghostwriting side hustle, I was working as a marketing manager at Action Window Tinting in Las Vegas, handling brand awareness and social media content creation for the company. I was already spending most of my day writing content for other people’s brands, so the transition into doing the same thing for executives on LinkedIn felt like a natural extension of work I was already doing every day.

Starting the LinkedIn ghostwriting business in 2022

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
I started the LinkedIn ghostwriting business in 2022. The inspiration came from a pretty simple observation. As a marketing professional, I was constantly in orbit around business owners and founders through client work and industry events, and I kept noticing that most of them had LinkedIn profiles that were either empty or hadn’t been updated in years.

These were smart, accomplished people with genuinely interesting things to say, but they had no time or interest in sitting down to write. One of them asked me offhand if I could help with a few posts. I charged $300 for the month. He got three new business inquiries directly from those posts, and that was the moment I understood there was a real market here that nobody around me was talking about.

Launching the side hustle with under $50

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money did it take to launch?
If I have to be honest, the startup cost was almost embarrassingly low. I spent $29.99 a month on LinkedIn Premium Career to make outreach easier and about $15 on a Canva Pro plan, so I could put together a basic one-page service menu to send to potential clients. That was it. Total launch cost was under $50.

The first step was identifying who I wanted to work with. I made a list of 20 executives in industries I already understood, like real estate, marketing and professional services. Then I sent each of them a short personalized message on LinkedIn explaining what I did and offering to write one post for free as a sample. Out of 20 messages, six people responded, and two became paying clients within the first two weeks. From that point, I stopped offering free samples and started charging from the first conversation.

Studying comment sections on high-performing posts

Are there any free or paid resources that have been especially helpful for you in starting and running this business?
A few stand out. The first one is Notion, which I use to manage every client’s content calendar, draft library and approval workflow in one place. It is free at the basic level, and I ran the entire business on the free plan for the first year before upgrading.

The second is Justin Welsh’s LinkedIn OS course, which cost around $150 at the time and gave me a much clearer framework for understanding what performs on LinkedIn compared to what just looks good. It changed how I wrote for clients almost right away. The third is simply LinkedIn itself. Spending time studying the comment sections on high-performing posts in my clients’ industries taught me more about what their audiences respond to than any course ever did.

Building a single onboarding document to save time

If you could go back in your business journey and change one process or approach, what would it be, and how do you wish you’d done it differently?
For the first eight months, I was starting every new client relationship from scratch, sending information back and forth over email, asking the same questions repeatedly and spending the first two to three weeks just trying to understand their voice and goals well enough to write anything useful. So what I wish I had done earlier was build a single onboarding document that every new client fills out before our first conversation.

It covers things like their target audience, three brands they admire, topics they want to be known for, words and phrases they never want used and examples of content they genuinely liked from other people. Getting that information upfront cut my ramp-up time per new client from about three weeks down to four or five days. I lost probably six months of efficiency before I figured that out.

Learning another person’s professional identity

When it comes to this specific business, what is something you’ve found particularly challenging and/or surprising that people who get into this type of work should be prepared for, but likely aren’t?
Not many people expect how personal the work actually gets. People assume LinkedIn ghostwriting is just writing posts for someone. What it actually is is spending enough time inside another person’s professional identity that you start thinking the way they think and communicating the way they communicate.

Also, many clients struggle to articulate their own voice. Most executives know what they want to say but have never had to describe how they say it. I had a client before who kept rejecting drafts without being able to explain why they felt wrong. It took three weeks of back and forth before I figured out he naturally used very short, punchy sentences and hated any kind of corporate language, none of which he told me upfront because he had never thought about it consciously. So people getting into this work should be prepared to be part writer and part therapist. The writing is the easier half.

Tightening up workflow to keep long-term clients

Can you recall a specific instance when something went very wrong? How did you fix it?
About a year into the business, I was managing three clients at the same time and published a post for the wrong person. The content was right, but it went out under the wrong executive’s name on their profile. One was a real estate investor, and the other was a marketing consultant, so the post about property acquisition strategies sitting on a marketing consultant’s LinkedIn was immediately noticeable to anyone who followed him closely.

He messaged me within 20 minutes. I deleted the post, called him directly and took full responsibility without making excuses. Then I wrote him three bonus posts that week at no charge and tightened my entire workflow the same day. Up until that point, I was drafting and scheduling everything inside a shared Google Doc with no clear labeling system between clients. After that, I moved everything into separate Notion workspaces, one per client, with a mandatory double-check step before anything got scheduled. That client stayed with me for another two years after that incident.

From charging $300 a month to up to $2,500 a month

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the side hustle earn?
Consistent revenue took about five months to materialize. The first two months were unpredictable. Like one client paying, then a gap, then another client, with no real pattern. By month three, I had three paying clients, and by month five, I had enough recurring retainers that I could predict what was coming in each month without guessing.

I started at $300 per client per month for a basic package of eight posts. By month six, I had raised my rates to $800 per month per client after getting referrals and building a small portfolio of results I could point to. Right now, I manage six clients at rates ranging from $1,200 to $2,500 per month depending on the scope, which includes posts, articles and occasional newsletter content. Monthly revenue from the ghostwriting business currently sits between $9,000 and $12,000 depending on the month. Annually, that puts the side hustle somewhere around $110,000 to $120,000 on top of my full-time salary.

The genuine satisfaction of discretion

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
The discretion of it, honestly. There is something genuinely satisfying about being the person behind the curtain for someone whose name a lot of people recognize professionally. I’ve written posts that got thousands of impressions, started real business conversations and opened doors for clients in ways they didn’t expect, and almost nobody knows I had anything to do with it.

Aside from that, I enjoy the puzzle of it. Every client is a completely different person with a different industry, a different audience and a different way of seeing the world. Getting inside that well enough to write something that sounds exactly like them, not like me, is a skill that takes real work to develop. I find that genuinely interesting even after four years. It never really gets repetitive because no two clients sound the same.

Take your current rate and add 40% to it

What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
Raise your rates before you feel ready to. Most people starting a service business undercharge for the first year because they are waiting to feel confident enough to ask for more. That confidence never arrives on its own, but only shows up after you charge more and realize the clients still said yes.

This is how you should do it. Take your current rate and add 40% to it. Send that number to the next new client inquiry you get without apologizing for it or explaining it. If they say yes, that is your new floor. If they say no, you are exactly where you started, and you lost nothing. I stayed at $300 per client for four months longer than I should have because I kept telling myself I needed more experience first. The day I sent a proposal for $800 and got a same-day yes was the day I stopped second-guessing my pricing entirely. Nobody is going to tell you that you are ready; you just have to decide that you are.