Coaching a CTO and a COO Into Becoming Published Authors

“Executive ghostwriting” carries the highest CPC in this batch at $8.00, on real if thin demand — and a KD-0 SERP that is really a LinkedIn post at DR 99 and a Reddit thread at DR 95. We do not ghostwrite for our own executives. We coach them to publish under their own name.

July 13, 2026 · 6 min read · Richard C.
What we solve

How many of your executives have real expertise nobody outside the company has ever read?

88

conversions a month a sub-second page could recover.

The emergence The commercial pull Who’s competing for attention Growth or decline How PPC Snobs executes here The emergence The commercial pull Who’s competing for attention Growth or decline How PPC Snobs executes here
Quick answer

Executive ghostwriting means writing content that is published under an executive’s name, without their voice actually being in it. We do the opposite: we coach executives to write, or dictate and edit, their own material — so the byline and the voice belong to the same person.

TL;DR
  • “Executive ghostwriting” carries the highest CPC in this whole batch — $8.00 — on real, if thin, demand of 70 US searches a month.
  • KD reads 0, yet real position four is a LinkedIn post at Domain Rating 99 and position three a Reddit thread at DR 95 — the same difficulty-versus-reality gap we keep finding.
  • Real position two is the only actual how-to guide in the top five, and it holds a modest DR 33 — genuinely winnable if you publish something sharper.
  • The practice this term describes — writing invisibly, for someone else’s name — is not what we do with our own team.
  • We coach our own CTO toward publishing in his own voice. The byline is the point, not the ghost.

Most “executive ghostwriting” is a quiet trade: someone else’s words, someone else’s thinking, published under a name that did neither. We built the opposite practice inside our own company first.

The emergence

Real demand is small — 70 U.S. searches a month — but carries the highest commercial value in this entire batch. The volume is choppy without a clean trend: a September 2025 low of 45, a June 2026 high of 90, settling at 80 by July.

70
US searches / mo
$8.00
CPC — the highest in this batch
70
global searches / mo (a U.S.-only conversation)
Source: Ahrefs, US, Jul 2026

The commercial pull

An $8.00 CPC on just 70 searches a month is a striking ratio — this is a low-volume, high-stakes decision, the kind an executive or their chief of staff researches once, seriously, rather than browsing casually.

Who’s competing for attention

KD reads 0, but real position four is a LinkedIn post at Domain Rating 99 and real position three a Reddit thread at DR 95. Only real position two — an actual how-to guide on the practice — holds a modest DR 33, the one genuinely climbable rung on this page.

Who owns real organic position for “executive ghostwriting” (Domain Rating)
How-to guide (real position 2)33
Reddit thread95
LinkedIn post99
Source: Ahrefs SERP overview, US, Jul 2026

Growth or decline

Small and volatile rather than trending — the kind of pattern you see on a low-volume term with no clear seasonal driver. The June 2026 high of 90 is the most notable point, but the series doesn’t show a sustained direction either way.

Ghostwriting vs. coaching to publish
Executive ghostwritingCoaching to publish
Whose voice is on the pageThe writer’s, wearing a maskThe executive’s, actually
What happens next postDepends on the ghost againGets a little easier each time
What the audience sensesPolish, sometimes hollowA real person, thinking in public
What we practice internallyCoaching our own CTO to write

How PPC Snobs executes here

We coach our own CTO through the exact process we’d recommend to a client: capture the real reasoning behind a technical decision, structure it, and hand back a draft close enough to his voice that the next one takes him half the time.

“A ghostwritten post reads well once. A coached executive gets better at this every single time — because it was always actually theirs.”
RC
Article by

Richard Castello

Richard leads performance and search strategy at PPC Snobs — over a decade architecting paid-acquisition engines for DTC and B2B brands, managing live budgets at scale, not recycled SEO filler.

FAQ

Questions, answered.

Writing content published under an executive’s name without their own voice or reasoning actually shaping it — as distinct from coaching, where the executive’s real thinking is captured and edited into a publishable form.

From the author

Why this matters.

Richard Castello on the thinking behind it.

RC
Richard Castello
CEO & Founder

Most growth problems aren’t a channel problem — they’re a seam problem. The money leaks between measurement, pages, and media.

RC
Richard Castello
CEO & Founder · PPC Snobs

I won’t sell you three vendors who blame each other. One team, one source of truth, one number that’s actually real.

RC
Richard Castello
CEO & Founder · PPC Snobs

Buy the engine, not the ads. The ads are the easy part — the system underneath is where the compounding lives.

RC
Richard Castello
CEO & Founder · PPC Snobs
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