Finding Voice Over Jobs Online and How To Get Them

Julia-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voice Over Experts brought to you by voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voice Over Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom, and techniques from top instructors, authors, and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It’s never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and at your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
Now for our special guest….
Ken Theriot: Hello everyone, this is Ken Theriot. In today’s podcast, Voiceover Jobs, Where to Find Them and How to Get Them. Voiceover jobs are posted by the dozens everyday on just one site so there are probably hundreds or thousands available daily. Many of those won’t be available to the public, but the ones in the site I mentioned before definitely are, that’s site is voices.com. It’s free to sign up for a profile and as soon as you do, you get to start putting up samples of your voice recordings.
Making the recordings: That last part might scare some people, but don’t let it put you off at all. If you have a computer, you won’t need to spend more than about $35 to start making professional sounding voiceover recordings and that’s already if you don’t already have a halfway decent mic. $35 is about the minimum price for a USB mic that can yield good quality audio. Then if you don’t have any recording software yet, simply download the free tracking and mixing program called Audacity. To figure out how to make recordings with Audacity, do an internet search for tutorials on Audacity. Or you could check out the Homebrew Audio tutorials on the website www.homebrewaudio.com.
Audition for the jobs: Once you have some demo recordings, you can upload them to your voices.com profile, but the real potential is in auditioning for open jobs. Voices.com will send you notices when voiceover jobs get posted and all you have to do is go to the listing for the job, find out what kind of voiceover they want, quote your price and send the recording in for your audition. Each job posting will have specific details like what their budget range is, the minimum is $100 and what type of voice they need. The listing will also usually, I’d say 90% of the time, contain an attached script that will have parts of what the client is looking for. I highly recommend you record from that script for your audition. This is called the custom audition and will be much more targeted to what the client needs, which will increase your chances of getting the job.
One thing to be careful of at this stage is protecting your recording. If a client is looking for just one paragraph for the entire job and they provide that paragraph as the audition, anyone who reads the entire thing for their audition will have given the client what they need already. Less scrupulous folks can and have simply used the audition to fill their job without having to pay you. Preventing this pretty easy though. Either don’t read 100% of the script or insert a watermark to make it impractical for the audition to be used as a final product.
Getting the jobs: Here is where knowing the reality of a situation can make the difference between success and failure. Before doing any of this, you should know that as with any acting job, voiceover jobs are highly competitive. I would venture a guess that you’ll get a job about every 100 auditions or so. It sounds bad, but it really isn’t. If you know it going in, you won’t be ready to throw in the towel when your 50th audition still has not yielded one job. Do at least 100 before even starting to get discouraged. The people who succeed in this business are the ones who are persistent and focused. There are lots of tips on the web about how to make the best recordings for voiceovers and how to increase your odds of getting jobs, etc. One such source of advice is the Homebrew Audio website at www.homebrewaudio.com.
However you decide to proceed, this is Ken Theriot wishing you good luck in your new voiceover career.
Julia-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voice Over Experts show notes at podcast.voices.com/voiceoverexperts. Remember to stay subscribed. If you’re a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes podcast directory or by visiting podcasts.voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.
This has been a voices.com production.