Marketing Your Voice Online, Interview with Stephanie Ciccarelli of Voices.com

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover 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 your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
This week, Voices.com is pleased to present Julie Williams.
Julie Williams: Hi, my name is Julie Williams. Welcome to the podcast. In my recent audiobook, How to Make Money in Voiceovers even if you don’t live in New York or LA, we talked about a lot of ways to market yourself and one of my favorite people to interview is Stephanie Ciccarelli of Voices.com because if you’ve been around this industry long, you know she is like the expert, the guru of online marketing and she has so much to share.
In a previous podcast, we talked about how to make the most out of voiceover market places so if you didn’t hear that, be sure to go back and listen to that podcast and today, we’re going to talk about how to market yourself online and how to drive your traffic specifically to your website. Okay, Stephanie, the million-dollar question. In the cacophony of voices in our currently global market place, how in the world do we get people to pay attention to us?
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Promote yourself as much as you can and this is a big one. It’s kind of underrated but I’m always pushing it is to participate in the community because we found that people get work through very different ways, obviously, you know, the auditions is one way. Being found and contacted through your page is another but there are all sorts of opportunities for people to be found through maybe comments they’ve left. Self-promotion is very important and it’s often the decisive factor in whether or not someone is able to get work though the market place.
Julie Williams: So when you say leave a comment, you’re talking about you have your VOX Daily blog that comes out, how does it help a talent to leave a comment on that?
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Well, if they are leaving a comment, obviously they’re contributing to the conversation and establish them as an authority but also, when you are commenting on the blog, you have the opportunity to link to your website and in the eyes of Google, the more links that you have, the more valuable and worthy the information on your website is especially if it’s coming from authority site so if you’re a voice actor and you want to find some way to increase inbound links going to your website, then I would strongly suggest commenting on the blogs either at Voices.com or any other winners of the community blog. There are a lot of blogs by voice actors so if you go and comment on any of those, Google will then see those links as being more valuable than say, you know, commenting on an unrelated area like cooking or something. Commenting is so important because not only does it help you with your search results, it also introduces you to other people but make sure that you’re commenting the purpose of being social and make sure what you have to say is relevant and also, you know the last take-away is to comment on blogs that are liked blogs to your industry so you know VOX Daily, wherever else. Anywhere that there’s a voice acting blog, those links are going to be weighted heavier.
Julie Williams: And that would increase search engine optimization for our own personal websites.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Yes.
Julie Williams: What about other avenues of increasing and I ask you this because you’re the expert at it at Voices.com. You do such an incredible job with it.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Thank you.
Julie Williams: What are some other ways that a talent on their own can increase traffic to their sites?
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Well, as I had said before, commenting and leaving a link you know, for the search engines to find, little spiders go around all the time and they love fresh contents. Also, as you have suggested, having your own blog. Now that is very important. Actually blogs are probably the easiest ways to start getting indexed in the search engine because as I said Google loves that fresh content so it’s going to look for it and the blog, because it has RSS Feeds is found really quickly and it updates regularly you know, if you’re blogging, make sure you keep it regular. Blogs rank really well in the search engines so if you’re interested in making your own website ranked higher, then I would suggest having a blog on your site and now, some people prefer to have one at blogger.com because then they don’t have to host it and it’s a lot easier to set up. There isn’t really a lot of technical issues but if you really want to start building up your core site, then what you can do is install some blogging software on your website, maybe it’s a subdomain, maybe it is your website, who knows but if you have a blog on there, then you keep it updated. It will definitely help with your search engine results.
Julie Williams: There are so many things that you can do to increase your search engine results and you may be doing some of them or a little bit of each of them or just one or two of them. Stephanie gets into detail about those in How to Make Money in Voiceovers even if you don’t live in New York or LA and some of the things that she will talk about is how to drive search engines to your sites, press releases, how to write them, why to write them, how to use them effectively to get attention and social networking and the proper way to really get a lot more than fun out of using them.
Thanks for joining us on behalf of Voices.com and Voice-overs.com. I’m Julie Williams wishing you a prosperous voiceover career.
Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.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.