Adding new work
One alternative to re-creating a demo from scratch is to add new work to refresh your demo and give it some zing. Subbing in a current sample may be one of the easiest ways to keep your demo on the up and up. If you decide that this is something you’re interested in, keep good records of the work you do and assess it for demo potential.
If you have more than one demo, document the spots that are on each demo at any given time and include details about them to help you keep track of their content and how long you have before certain spots may become tired. Some demos are more evergreen than others but all have an expiration date.
After you’ve created a list of your demos and what they consist of production and copy-wise, you can more easily earmark new work or samples you’ve recorded that can serve as material to update a demo or possibly even serve as material for an entirely new demo.
Getting permission to use work
If you find that something you’ve recorded fits the bill for any of your demos, make a note of it and be sure to ask the client for permission to use part of that project as a segment in your demo for promotional purposes. The holder of the copyright is ultimately the person you want to consult. If it’s not the client you worked with, he or she can look into finding out whether you can use it by going to the client with your request.
Most clients will be fine with this, but you do need to ask. Voice actors we’ve worked with have asked us if they could feature voice-overs they recorded for us on their website or in their demos, and we’ve always said yes. Some of our commercials are hosted online, and voice actors who’ve worked as narrators on our videos are also able to promote the video as a sample for their prospective clients to consider.
Whatever you do, don’t use auditions as spots on your demo or as stand-alone demos to promote your voice. Not only is this misrepresentative of work you’ve done, but also doing so without permission could spell trouble for you in the long run. If you ever want to use an audition on a demo, which at times may be appropriate, you need to ask the client and obtain permission.
Replacing spots
Something else you can do at this point is to create an entirely new spot that fits with the current spots on your demo. Whether it’s a spot you’ve repurposed from a job you did or a new spot altogether, you’re still replacing a spot on your demo.
If you’re given permission, decide which segment of that work you want to use as a spot in your demo. Listen to your demo a number of times to see where your new spot can fit. You may need to rearrange spots to accommodate your addition, especially if you’re replacing more than one spot and if music is involved. If you don’t feel you can do it well, employ a mixing engineer who can help you.
After you have replaced some spots on your demo, consider archiving them so that you can remember how far you have come. Demo by demo, spot by spot, you’ll be able to track your growth as a voice actor and also provide you and your family with an interesting way to monitor your voice and observe changes in how it sounds and ages over time.
Older demos of your voice can also serve as good learning tools. Listen to your demos and take notes on what you did. Documenting your progress can be fun! Perhaps listening to the demos will even trigger memories of your training, of investment in your career, and of the creative process. You may even get a few giggles out of them! A lot of hard work goes into making them in the first place, and you don’t want to see them fade into oblivion.
A demo is like a time capsule in some ways and each voice-over demo you’ve recorded or work that you have done in general tells a story of what you’ve accomplished and what was important to you as voice actor. Just because a spot or demo has been replaced doesn’t mean that it needs to be forgotten.
Part III
Auditioning and Finding Work
In this part . . .
Here we detail the bulk of a voice actor’s day-to-day activities concerning auditioning and finding work. As many voice actors probably agree, doing the auditions is the work. Booking a job is gravy! You can find out all you need to know about how to audition both online and in the real world.
If you’re new to voice acting or you’ve been away from voice acting for a while, make sure you review the increasingly dominant role that the virtual casting environment plays in the industry for searching, auditioning, and hiring voice actors. If you have auditions in traditional settings on location, we also include tips for how to conduct yourself at in-person casting calls.
Half the battle is showing up! This part shows you what is expected of you when you’re auditioning for work and how to promote yourself in a professional manner.
Chapter 9
Marketing Yourself and Promoting Your Work
In This Chapter
Getting noticed online with a website
Using a profile on a voice acting marketplace site
Enhancing your visual brand
Seeing what professional associations can do for you
Reaching out to your connections: Drumming up business
What do you need to do to get noticed? As you may have heard, half the battle is just showing up. In order for your brand to show up, you need to know how to market yourself. Particularly online, marketing yourself includes investing some time and effort into building your web presence.
You may also consider the possibility of paying to get your name out there to attract potential customers to your website. After a visitor arrives at your website, your earlier diligent work along with a clear visual expression of your brand can help persuade people to do business with you.
You can also market yourself in other ways, including sharing your story and explaining to others how you can potentially work together. Networking is a way to expand your territory while making new friends. So many different businesses need voice-overs recorded, and they may not even realize how voice acting can help them. When you network with other people, you may be the first person they’ve ever met that does voice acting. As a result, getting your story down pat before you head out into the world of business networking is a must.
In this chapter, we explain how to create a web presence to help people find you and how to advertise your website using pay-per-click options. We share a glimpse of how you can shape the way people visually perceive your brand and how you can network to help you drum up business for keeping your microphone warm, and hopefully, cash flowing steadily into your studio.
Creating an Impressive Web Presence
An effective Internet marketing strategy is one of the keys to a successful voice acting business. Your business needs a multi-pronged approach to ensure positive results. One of the first things any voice actor needs to do before jumping in full force to self-market is to build a website. This website can be a traditional one or it may be having a profile on a voice-over marketplace. Most people have both. In the following sections, we focus on how you can build your web presence with a personal website that you can be proud of, how you can utilize social media, how you can maximize how people can locate your presence, and how you can advertise online. (We discuss a marketplace site in the “Utilizing a Voice Acting Marketplace Website” section in this chapter.)
Building a personal website
When you modestly invest in securing a domain name and hosting a website for your business, you’re able to use this virtual real estate to maintain an aesthetically pleasing and up-to-date website that promotes your voice. In other words, you have a place to hang your hat and show people who you are and what you’re about.
Many voice actors prefer to brand their websites using their name, while some take a more creative approach with how they are branding themselves. When picking your domain, you need to factor in availability, how easy it is to spell/type, and also how well the domain name reflects your br
and. Even if you aren’t a computer genius, you can find innovative ways that beautifully reflect your business while giving you the ability to update your content easily using a content management system such as WordPress. Look on websites like NetworkSolutions, Yahoo!, and GoDaddy to see if the domain name you want to buy is available.
After you know that your desired domain name is available, secure the name by purchasing it and perhaps even extending your ownership by more than just the one-year option. You also need a web-hosting package. In the event that the company you bought your domain name from doesn’t provide a web-hosting package, you can find several good web-hosting companies out there, including www.hostgator.com, www.rackspace.com, and www.1and1.com.
After you have a web host, one of your first orders of business should be to install a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress. A CMS gives you the flexibility to update your content as often as you want. You don’t need to know about computer programming to have a beautiful and functional website. These platforms allow you to change the graphics and text of each page using a WYSIWIG editor (“What you see is what you get”) that also helps you to rank higher in the search engines.
Wondering what you should write
On your website, highlight and promote your abilities so clients know what you can do. You’re the only one who knows exactly what you are great at, so make sure you prominently and honestly feature those skills.
Along the same lines, your spelling, grammar, and choice of words definitely impact your audience. If you write in the third person (he, she) rather than the first person (I), you can use your name in the body of your profile and increase your visibility in the search engine. Whichever you choose, use it consistently.
Telling customers what you can do for them
Clients require your services because you can do something for them that they can’t do for themselves. As a result, you want to write text for your website that addresses their needs while respecting the fact that they need something specific and have limited time to find what they’re looking for. Some needs that someone requiring your services may have include artistic and technical needs.
The customer expects that most voice actors can also serve as audio engineers to a degree, meaning that you can record your own voice, make edits, and also present the best audio quality possible. Some may even expect that you can include music or sound effects, or you can draw upon the talent of other voice actors when producing their project.
Refer to the later section, “Filling out your profile” for more help. That section focuses on using a voice acting marketplace website, but the same premises apply about how you can write compelling text about yourself and your abilities for your website.
Marketing on social networks
These days it’s not just about who you know, it’s about how many people you know that matters. Social media now plays such an important role in getting more friends — and thus more business prospects.
With social media, virtual friendships have increased the number of friends and potential networks you are connected to. You can have similar interests and business goals with those friends, which in turn allows you to share opportunities and successes in your voice acting career.
The three main social media sites that we suggest you use to market your voice acting include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which we discuss in the following sections.
Facebook
Facebook (www.facebook.com) allows you to join groups, add friends, and incorporate applications into your profile to share content and help direct people to your website. You can include links from your profile to your own website and blog. The ability to post notes and update your status on the fly also gives you an opportunity to communicate to all your friends at once. Your profile can promote your voice and invite your clients to join. You can send out emails to your members easily to announce and share a new demo, talk about work you’ve recently completed, share your studio news, and more.
We suggest that if you want to keep business and personal matters separate, you should create separate profiles — one for your personal self and one for your business. You can opt to create a Facebook page for your business that people can “like” and follow you on a professional basis. That isn’t to say that you can’t share personal things through your professional profile, but you can be more selective with what elements of your personal life you choose to share, given the audience viewing the updates.
Twitter
Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a channel that many techie social networking types have embraced as an alternative way to keep people up on what they’re doing. Twitter gives you the ability to sign up and provide a flow of personal updates while also allowing you to follow or subscribe to the Twitter update feeds of your family, friends, colleagues, or your favorite movers and shakers. For example, you can be on the lookout for people in the industry who share interesting things on their Twitter feeds. If you follow them, they may follow you back! Similarly, you may be followed by those who are interested in what you have to say. When you use Twitter, you can share recent work you’ve done or general things like how to take care of your voice.
One of the more popular ways to classify a tweet is by using a hashtag (#) before a word. Doing so makes it easier for others with similar interests to find what you’re talking about. For example, a popular hashtag being used in the voice-over industry is #voiceover.
Twitter updates can be searchable on the Internet and also published in the public timeline. If you want to limit access to your updates, you need to check the box to “protect your updates” Twitter feed.
Avoiding social media burnout
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by social media and social networking, you may find that maintaining too many profiles on social networks may become one more thing on your to-do list or the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Having several profiles on social media can also become addicting if you’re constantly updating, tweeting, or reading what others are doing instead of actually doing anything yourself. Social media has a lot of noise, so be careful and spend your time social networking wisely.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is one of the oldest social networking sites specific to professional networking. It focuses on facilitating the connection of service providers in a traditional manner. Why is LinkedIn great for voice actors? LinkedIn classifies nearly every aspect of what people do in their professional lives and makes it simple to connect with others in the industry of your choice or related industries. You can add friends and develop a network of other voice actors, producers, casting directors, and so forth. You can also observe a “six degrees of separation” type family tree of who knows who, how they know each other, and how you may also become acquainted with someone who is a friend of a friend by means of an introduction from a mutual friend.
Optimizing for search engines
Search engine optimization, also referred to as SEO, is one of the most powerful Internet marketing tactics. Search engine optimization basically is the process in which the careful and strategic placement, analysis, and use of keywords on a particular website can enable optimum search engine rankings. Being found in the major search engines is vital to anyone who conducts business on the Internet.
SEO has two unique areas — on-page optimization and off-page optimization, which we discuss in the next two sections, that you can use to quickly increase your site’s visibility in search engines.
On-page optimization: What you can control
When you think of on-page optimization, focus on all the elements and factors in good search engine ranking that you can control. Examples of on-page optimization include the following:
Domain name or website address, also known as the URL
Website content, such as the articles you write about and the pages that describe your
product and services
Page formatting, which is the specific layout of the page, and keyword selection (keywords are words searched for by those individuals interested in what you offer. For example, you can use keywords, such as “voice-overs,” “announcer,” or “narrator”), use of images, and any element you can edit, modify, or delete at a moment’s notice
How your web pages are linked to each other
Having good, well-written content on your website is your first priority. Why do we say your first priority? Because all search engines display search results by ranking the content of a specific page within a website. Google doesn’t always just list the home page of a website as being the most relevant. Google also provides the searcher with the page within a website that contains the text that is the most relevant to the search phrase.
To take your text to the next level, jot down pictures that come to mind when thinking about your keywords. You may find doing this activity offline with a pencil and paper is helpful when you’re sketching out your vision and setting your mental juices in motion.
To help you come up with important information about yourself to include on your personal website, check out our suggestions in the “Utilizing a Voice Acting Marketplace Website” later in this chapter, which also apply here.
In addition, you want to pick keywords that improve the chances of your website appearing in a search engine. To do so, think about what you’re great at and also about what people searching for your skill set may be looking for. If you’re trying to attract work in broadcast, for example, you can include keywords such as “radio imaging,” “liners,” “sweepers,” or “station IDs.” If you work primarily as a character voice artist, you may wish to consider words such as “cartoon voice,” “animation voice actor,” “video game voice,” or “character voice.” You can also try keyword analysis to see which words are better than others in terms of how often people search for them on a monthly basis through search engines, such as Google or Yahoo! For more information about picking keywords for optimizing your website, we encourage you to read Search Engine Optimization For Dummies by Peter Kent (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).
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