Answers
Everything a CEO asks before hiring someone to write for them. Pricing, process, time commitment, and the questions about executive ghostwriting you need to know.
Written by Morgan Snyder, founder of Thought Leader Today.
What does an executive ghostwriter actually do?
An executive ghostwriter gets the ideas out of your head and onto the internet in your voice. For most of my clients that means LinkedIn posts, though the same raw material becomes newsletters, keynotes, op-eds and occasionally books.
The work is roughly 20% writing and 80% extraction. You already have opinions about your industry. You share them in board meetings, on sales calls and in the car on the way to the airport. Then the meeting ends and they disappear. My job is to catch them, shape them into something a stranger can follow, and put your name on it.
What it is not is a content mill producing motivational posts with your headshot attached. If a post could have been written about any company in your category, it shouldn't go out.
Should a CEO be posting on LinkedIn at all?
Your buyers decide before they meet you. 6sense surveyed about 4,000 B2B buyers for its 2025 Buyer Experience Report and found 94% of buying groups had ranked their preferred vendors before they ever talked to a seller. The favorite they walked in with won about 80% of the time.
That decision gets made somewhere, and right now it's happening without you. When a buyer searches your name, they find a company page and a headshot, while your competitor's CEO has two years of posts about the industry you both work in.
Trust is also moving toward people rather than institutions. In the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, among people whose trust shifted over the past five years, national government leaders took a net 16-point hit while "my CEO" gained 9 points.
How much does a LinkedIn ghostwriter cost?
The market runs from roughly $800 a month for two templated posts to $5,000 and up for a full executive program. Foundera's 2026 comparison puts the typical freelancer range at $2,000 to $5,000 a month for four to eight posts with a check-in call. Agencies running strategy, interviews, design and account management start around $3,000 a month.
Thought Leader Today engagements start at $2000 a month for one executive, with a second executive at the same company added for $1500.
The useful way to price this is against the alternative. A junior marketer costs more than any of these options and won't write in your voice.
How much of my time does this take?
Somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes a month once we're past onboarding.
Onboarding is heavier. Expect one 90-minute conversation where I ask what you think the industry gets wrong, what you argue about with your leadership team, and which decisions you've gotten wrong in a way you're willing to talk about.
After that, the leanest version I run with a client is text messages. Something happens at a conference or a competitor does something dumb, he texts me two sentences about it, and I turn it into a post. Other clients prefer a 30-minute call once a month. Both work. What doesn't work is a CEO who disappears for a quarter and expects the posts to still sound like them.
What happens in the first 30 days?
Week one is the voice conversation and an audit of whatever you've already published, including the posts you deleted because you thought they were too blunt. Those are usually the good ones.
Week two I build a voice guide and a set of content lanes, which is a short document naming the four or five subjects you're going to be known for. Nobody gets credit for having opinions about everything.
Weeks three and four are the first drafts. You'll hate something in the first batch, which is fine and expected. That reaction is the most useful information I get all quarter, because it tells me where the line is between how you talk and how you're willing to be seen talking.
By day 30 you're publishing on a cadence.
How do you capture my voice?
By listening to you talk and writing down the parts that don't sound like anyone else.
Voice lives in specifics. It's the words you reach for, the things you refuse to say, the jokes you make when a call goes sideways. I collect those in a voice guide and then write against it, which is also what keeps a second writer or an AI tool from flattening everything into the same LinkedIn cadence.
The test I use: if your head of sales read a draft with no name attached and knew it was you, it's right. If it could be any CEO in your category, it goes in the trash.
Do you use AI to write the posts?
I use AI the way a writer uses a research assistant. It helps me pull background, check a claim, or look at a transcript faster than I could alone. It does not decide what you think.
There's a reason to be careful here beyond taste. Pangram scanned more than a million social posts in July 2026 and flagged 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts as fully AI-generated. LinkedIn has started rolling out a way for members to flag posts as AI slop. When half the feed is machine-written, sounding like a person is the entire advantage, and you don't get that by handing a model your bio and pressing go.
Is it ethical for a CEO to use a ghostwriter?
Every speech a president has given in the last century was drafted by someone else. So was most of the business writing you admire.
The line is authorship of the ideas. If the opinions are yours, the stories are yours and you read and approve every word before it publishes, a ghostwriter is a writing partner and nobody is being misled. If an agency invents a point of view for you and you rubber-stamp it, that's a different thing and it usually reads like one.
Everything I write starts with something you actually said.
Why not just use ChatGPT myself?
You can, and for a first draft of an email it's great. The problem is that the model has read the same internet as everyone else's model, so it produces the average of what's already there. Averages don't build a reputation.
The other problem is time. The bottleneck for most CEOs was never typing. It's deciding what's worth saying this week, which of your opinions is actually differentiated, and whether the story you want to tell will land the way you think. That's editorial judgment, and it's the part a tool doesn't do for you.
How many posts should a CEO publish a month?
Four to eight, published consistently, beats twenty in a burst followed by silence.
There's an unexpected reason to keep a steady rhythm. Semrush studied 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited by AI search tools and found most cited posts had only 15 to 25 reactions, while about 75% of the people who wrote them had posted at least five times in the previous four weeks. The systems now summarizing your industry to buyers reward showing up regularly and explaining things clearly. They do not reward going viral.
Should I post from my personal profile or the company page?
Your profile. In that same Semrush study, 59% of the LinkedIn citations appearing in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode pointed to individual people rather than company pages.
People follow people. The company page is for job postings, product news and anyone who already decided to look you up. Your profile is where the judgment lives.
What should a CEO post about?
Four things work, more or less in this order.
What you believe about where your industry is going, especially where you disagree with the consensus. What you've learned running the company, including decisions that cost you. What your customers keep getting wrong or keep asking about. And the occasional look at how the work actually gets done, which is more interesting to outsiders than it seems from the inside.
What doesn't work: awards, conference selfies with no point attached, and reposted press releases. Your accomplishments are already on your website. Your thinking isn't written down anywhere.
Our CEO won't post. How do I get them started?
Lower the ask. Most executives aren't refusing on principle, they're refusing a vague request to "be more active on LinkedIn," which sounds like a second job.
What tends to work is starting with one conversation and one post. Not a strategy deck, not a content calendar. Record a 20-minute conversation about something they already argue about, turn it into one post, show them the replies from people they respect.
It also helps to bring the reason rather than the tactic. Hiring, sales cycles and investor conversations are all easier when people already know how your CEO thinks.
Can you write for more than one executive at our company?
Yes, and it usually works better than a single account. A CEO talking about market direction, a founder talking about the origin story and a revenue leader talking about how buyers actually behave cover far more ground than one person can.
The requirement is that they sound different from each other. Same company, same facts, different voices. If all three profiles read the same, everyone can tell what happened.
What if legal or compliance has to approve everything?
Plenty of my clients are in regulated industries, and the work still ships. It just needs a defined path rather than an open-ended review.
Usually that means agreeing up front on the claims that are pre-cleared, the numbers you're allowed to use publicly, and one named reviewer with a turnaround window. The danger isn't legal saying no, it's a draft sitting in a queue until the moment it was written for has passed.
How do you measure whether this is working?
Impressions and followers are the easy numbers and the least interesting ones. They tell you a post traveled, not that it did anything.
The ones worth watching: inbound conversations that start with someone saying they've been reading your posts, the share of your sales calls where you don't have to explain who you are, candidates who cite your content in interviews, and profile views from the specific companies you're targeting.
I report on the vanity metrics too, because it's useful to know what's working. I just don't let anyone confuse them with results.
Will this help us show up in ChatGPT and other AI tools?
It's becoming the main reason to do it.
When a buyer asks an AI tool which vendors to look at, the answer is assembled from what the internet says about you. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found unlinked brand mentions correlated with AI visibility at 0.664, roughly three times the correlation for backlinks. Being talked about matters more than being linked to.
An executive who publishes regularly, guests on podcasts and gets quoted in trade press generates exactly that kind of mention. The company page alone generates almost none.
What kind of companies do you work with?
Mostly companies with real operations and real revenue. Footwear, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, consumer products, professional services and a few software companies. Mid-market CEOs and venture-backed founders in roughly equal measure.
The common thread is a leader who knows their category cold and has never put any of that thinking somewhere a customer could find it. The industry being unglamorous is an advantage, since a tech founder is competing with every other tech founder for attention while a CEO in commercial equipment is competing with a trade magazine and a spec sheet.
Do you only do LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is usually where we start because it's where the buyers are, but it's rarely where it stops. The same conversations become newsletters, podcast episodes, keynote material, bylined articles and, for a few clients, books.
One engagement that began as LinkedIn posts turned into a full book project, which is fairly common once a CEO realizes how much material they've been sitting on.
How do we start?
A 30-minute conversation where you tell me what you're trying to build and I tell you whether I'm the right person for it. If we both like it, you get a short proposal with scope and price, and we can be publishing inside three weeks.
Morgan Snyder is the founder of Thought Leader Today, a social publishing house for category-defining executives. He writes LinkedIn content, newsletters and books for CEOs and founders across footwear, healthcare, finance, manufacturing and technology, and hosts the Chief Brand podcast.