VOICE OVER: The Steps to Building Your Business
After all the training, after setting up your recording environment, mastering your DAW, and all the classes, now it is time to actually build your business. This is a lot of work but will pay you benefits for years to come.
Some of the things you must now learn will stretch you and sometimes even frustrate you. Depending on how strong your skill set is with technology, you will have more of a learning curve to master business development.
Business development has a few steps you must master
- Marketing (some of these not all)
- Social media
- Facebook ads
- LinkedIn ads
- Cold calling
- Video Production
- Blogging
- Audio Podcasts
- Sales
- Landing pages
- Funnels
- Freelance Sites
- Payment Platforms
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One of the most important things you must master is yourself. Being aware of your talents, what you are good at, and what you need help with. Building your voice over business will rely on you as well as the people that you associate with that can help you.
Knowing yourself and mastering the negative talk in your own head will be an obstacle as well. Being able to continue on every day even when things are not looking the best is going to be key for you.
Patience over the next few months and years will be critical to your success.
This will not happen overnight.
Doing these steps daily
- Daily Marketing Activities
- Auditioning for at least 10 jobs every day
- Making at least 5 contacts with potential clients daily via social media
- Posting valuable content at least twice a day on social media on at least 2–4 platforms
- Setting up email marketing campaigns
- Running Facebook ads
- Daily Revenue Generating Activities
- Completing vo work in a timely fashion
- Billing completed jobs immediately
- Connect with clients you have not done work for in more than 30 days
Voice over is a very competitive industry. From beginner level to expert, there are thousands of people getting into this industry every day. The good news about that is that thousands leave the industry every day as well. This is because most people have no plan on how to start, build, and grow a successful voice-over business. They have no idea what it really takes to build a business. Having solid business development strategy is key. However, you must be flexible and willing to adapt to changing technologies and trends as they occur.
You must know what will work for you to be successful. One size does not fit all in this. You are unique and you must be able to see what your capabilities and talent will allow you to do.
Developing a schedule or to-do list is critical. If you do not have this then you are simply aiming at nothing. When you write these things down and execute on them great things will happen over time. You will be able to chart your growth as well as redirect your efforts on the fly as or if needed.
This is my schedule:
- 5am gym
- 7am in studio looking over todo list (LOL)
- complete voice-over work from the previous day
- 8am Audition
- 9am creating posts for social media
- Blogging
- Images
- Audio clips
- 9:30am preparing for YouTube Live Stream
- 10am YouTube Live Stream
- 10:30am create 4–10 minute audio podcast
- 11am-2pm Client Coaching Calls
- 3pm-4pm Cold Calling/emailing Potential Clients
- 6pm-7pm Educating myself on marketing (reading, youtube, podcasts, etc)
- 7pm-8pm More Coaching Calls with clients
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This is my Monday through Friday. This is how I build my business on the Voice Over side as well as the Coaching side. Of course, this can change from time to time and I simply have to adjust.
Building my business over the past decade has gotten me to this point. My current schedule is a result of some major work to even get to this point. I am going to tell you this. If you are not putting in work during every free moment you have, you are not serious about building your voice over business. This will either be a priority for you or it won’t. Your success or failure depends on you working harder and longer than you ever have.
This is if you actually want to have a career in voice-over that gives you a good lifestyle.
To give you an idea of some of the skills and software I use that help me build my business, here is a list.
- Buffer
- Kajabi
- Canva
- YouTube
- Obs Studio
- Photoshop
- Adobe Premiere
- WebinarJam
- Wevideo
- MailChimp
- MailShake
- Gmail
- Microsoft Office 365
- Godaddy
- AudioBlocks
- GraphicStock
- Adobe Audition
There are more but I wanted to give you an idea of the skillsets you will want to develop as well.
