← A VO's Journey: Voiceover and more voice over
A VO's Journey: Voiceover and more voice over
Ep. 271: Kickstart Your Voice Over Career: From Planning to Action
00:29:58
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Hello. Hello. Welcome to Avio's Journey to Vo's Journey podcast. It's Monday, May 20th. Super excited. Today we have launched our Memorial Day week Specials over@aviosjourney.com We've got all of our courses 30% off as well as coaching, one on one coaching. I've done some big reductions there as well as only $24 to give us a shot. Try us out at VO's Journey Lead Academy. So check it out over there. Lot of amazing stuff. There'll be a link below that you can get to VO's Journey Lead Academy as well as VO's Journey and our courses for the Memorial Day week special. So with that in mind, had to get that out of the way. So you know where to go. Today our, our topic is stop talking, start doing kickstarting your voiceover career. Do you like that title? Probably not, but anyways, we like the idea of getting our voiceover career out and going and kicked off. I think I get asked the most what to do to really kick start my business, right? Like kickstart a voiceover business. And funny thing is, is that we think that always relates to someone who's just starting. But the reality is many of us could be in this business for five or 10 years or a couple years, one year, two years, three years, five years, 10 years, 15 years. And we need to revitalize our business as well. We need to revamp it or we need to just kick it in the butt, get going. So that's what we're going to kind of talk about today. And you know, the whole point of this show, of course, is to help you out and kind of try to sidestep all the things that I step in. So because of that, you know, I'm going to give you kind of stuff that I'm going through, what's happening with me, you know, in my voiceover journey and you know, what happens, I think, to all of us and how to really get more voiceover work and temper some of those challenges. All right, so with all that, that's a big, that's a tall order for us to get in one episode. But let's kind of, you know, let's dive into some actionable steps, right, to really kind of, I think, transition from planning to, you know, executing a successful voiceover career. Because that's what we're all trying to accomplish, right, is we're trying to get voiceover work and become successful. And I think many of us, if you're anything like me, you get ideas, you get A lot of ideas. And then you want to. You like those ideas. You talk to some people, they think they're great ideas. And you start to plan, and you start to think through, and you start to take some action on the planning part, and you start to search and you start to do this and you start to do that. You might have been around voiceover for a while, and you, you know, you got some ideas. You see, maybe there's a place in the market, there's a niche you want to target, right? And you start this planning process. The planning process is vital to our success. We need to plan.
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Right.
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You know, Lincoln says, what I'll spend, you know, four hours, five, six hours sharpening my axe and two hours cutting down the tree. I mean, planning is everything. Preparing is everything.
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Right?
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We know that. However, okay, it is more evident to me than ever before that we have to give ourselves boundaries, limits. So what do I mean by this? One of the biggest challenges I see from the voice actors I work with that are struggling to move forward is that they have set, or let me rephrase, they have not set any sort of start date, launch date. Instead, they have given themselves unrealistic expectations to feel when it's time to start. So what do I mean by that? So I mean that I see a lot of voice actors will come to me and said, you know, I know I got to get this done. I got to do that. I got to do that. And I'm going to then, you know, launch my business or I'm going to revamp my business. I'm going to get new demos. I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. But I got to do XYZ first. I'm like, okay, I mean, that's fine. You've got to do some things. However, what I see happening then is that there is no hard date. There's no date that they put down on a piece of paper or type of on their computer or put in their mind that they're going to start. No matter where they are, no matter whether they think it's great or it's crappy, still, they don't put down a date. And because you don't put down a date, what happens is, is you're in this constant state of flux. Like this constant state of, well, I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet. I'm almost there. I'm all this comes up, I need to do that. This comes up, I need to do that. Oh, something happened here in my personal Life. I'm waiting. Like, there's always waiting. There's always, like there's, there's, there's always something else that comes up. You know what? It feels almost like money. Do you guys ever. You ever, like, you. You got some money in your savings account and something comes along and no more money. It's almost like. And. But the funny thing is, is when you didn't have any money in your savings account, everything went on. I mean, you still made it. I mean, things are tough, but you still made. But, but once you get money saved us, somehow something comes and takes the money. Like, it almost is like, you know, it's almost like you're. You create the scenario, right, that you're trying to create or not create or prevent, right? And I think I'm getting at the point, and we had the quote earlier today, right, by Walt Disney, the way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing all right. And the same with this title today, right? It's stop talking. Start doing kickstarting your voiceover career. There has to be a time, a moment where you say, I'm starting now. I'm starting to do XYZ now. I'm going to go for it. I'm going to take the leap. I'm going to join that website, I'm going to get that demo. I'm going to reach out to those people. I'm going to do those auditions. I'm going to join Avivo's Journey Lead Academy. I'm going to do whatever you need, whatever it is that you've got to take to step, you've got to take that step, because if you don't, you're always just going to be stuck. And from one of my favorite quotes from the movie Braveheart, you know where he says, where, you know, Mel Gibson says to his lieutenant, he says, do you know what happens if we don't go? And the guy says what? He says, nothing. Nothing will happen. And I love that quote because it is so true. If we don't take action, something, nothing will happen. Nothing. And I think for all of us, if you stop for a moment and think, what is the worst possible thing that could happen? Nothing. Nothing. In order for us to have success, in order for us to get massive success, we have to take massive action.
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Okay?
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The idea here of taking actionable results, right? And then I want to get into just a couple of actual things you can. Things you can do. But I just want to finish this thought. The thing about taking actionable results, right? If you want to get back. Well, you listen to me. So you, like. You must like some sort of philosophy, but if you step back and you look that.
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Right.
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The whole universe, everything we know about it, at least everything that we believe, right. Comes from the idea of every action, right. Has an equal or lesser reaction.
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Okay?
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So everything that happens, every action we take, there is some sort of equal or lesser reaction to it.
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All right?
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Newton physics, right? But here's the thing. You cannot overstate the importance of you taking the action. First, there's going to be a reaction. The reaction could be bad, it could be good. It could be minimal. It could be barely noticeable. It could be. So. So it could be in a different direction. That's not what I was expecting. All right, it could be, Whoa, I wasn't expecting that. But that's fantastic. Could be. No, no, no. I don't want that to happen. It could be, wow, look at all this wonderful stuff. Or could be. This is exactly what I want to have. There could be. There's all sorts of different types of reactions. But I think what happens is so many people focus on the reactions and not the actions. So planting corn or planting a garden of some kind, planting food, planting flowers, planting grass, everything that you do, everything that we do, we take an action, right? We sow those seeds of action, and through the nurturing of those seeds and through time, through the actions that we take, watering and growing, it grows, it grows. You don't even see a lot of it sometimes. You don't see most of that initial stage, which is where most people quit and give up because they're not seeing anything. They stop taking action. They stop trying to stop nurturing. So the idea here is that you want to push forward, taking action no matter what, because there will be a reaction. Even if you don't see it, there is always a reaction. It might be. I mean, it might be so teeny that you don't like what happened. And that's fine. I totally understand. And we work taking more actions, leveraging our actions, et cetera, for another video. But the idea here is you got to take actions. You have to. There is no reactions unless you take action, nothing will happen. Okay, Now, I didn't say the actions were always going to be easy. A lot of times we don't know what we're doing. And I want to lead then into the actual actions.
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All right?
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Especially geared towards our voiceover business. All right, so let's talk about what actions you actually take. First off, you know, I have, at least in my, you know, Eight years of solely doing voiceover, created or at least went through my journey and as I gathered some success and then I started working with more voice actors and putting together over time.
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Right.
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A process, one path to results.
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Right.
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There's many paths to results, but I put together a path that I've seen work for myself over and over again and for others. So what is that path? Well, first and foremost, taking action. To start by, you need to get a headshot good looking photos of yourself. Can you do it with your cell phone? Of course you can, of course you can. Just don't like do it to where you understand that you need a nice background. You need to make yourself look good for the photo. And you also need someone or at least, I mean you could prop your camera up and do, you know, a lot of them do a countdown. I mean you can do it on your own. It might be a little more difficult, you know, to do it just completely on your own, but you can do it on your own. But you need to make sure you take a portrait, you take a landscape, you are in the picture, at least from the chest up that we can see all of this. Don't do the where it's like you know you're off. There's only part of your face. It's like half of you. Don't do that. You can see your hand out here taking a selfie, you know, like make it look professional. You need to have some sort of demos. You've got to have demos. And as you grow your business, you're gonna need better and better and better and better and better and better and better demos. That is how we share our abilities with people who are looking to hire us.
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Okay.
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When you're first starting, if you. Those were the things that you really first need to start with. And on top of that, get coaching for your voice acting. Now on the meantime, and this is how what I completely did before I had all of that stuff because a lot of that stuff can take some money too. I started auditioning on ACX acx.com I wanted to get going. I didn't know anything else, a voiceover. All I knew is I wanted to be a audiobook narrator because I listened to a lot of audiobooks and man, that would be super cool to be an audiobook narrator. So that's what I did, right? And I started auditioning and I had a $40 microphone and I got work. It wasn't very high paying work at all. Some of it was quite poor work, poorly written books, things like that. But the point is, I got started, I was taking action every night. I was constantly doing auditions, constantly doing auditions. And there were things happening. And you have to understand the actions that are the reactions that are happening. They might not always be what you think the reactions are. Like, for example, you might think that taking the action of doing an audition, right. The reaction that you want to get is that someone hires you. Absolutely. But there are other reactions that are happening that are equally, if not more important, actually.
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Right.
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One of those are, you are getting better. I'd say that again. You are getting better. Every time you do something, you are getting a little bit better at it, a little more familiar with it, importantly, a little more confident. Every time you do it, you are getting more confident and better at the whole process, the whole understanding of the business, the editing process, possibly dealing with customers, the customer service process. You. There's a lot of things happening from that action that you're taking. And you don't. Again, you don't see a lot of it because it's underneath the soil. It's underneath. But by doing the action, all of those things are happening. And again, one of those reactions can also be, which what we want is to get work, but there's so much more happening. So taking action. I like ACX because, again, it was one of those things where I didn't need all of those things I just mentioned. I didn't need a super amazing headshot. I didn't need demos because I could put up kind of samples of the work. I could get a book. I could read it, read a passage, put it on there. It was fine. Typically, we're not doing background music with audiobook demos or audiobook samples. So that was fine. Plus, there was plenty of. There was plenty of auditions that I could use as samples, right? And, you know, so. So there wasn't an issue there, right? There wasn't an issue. But as time went on, right, I wanted to get. I got up on Fiverr and I got up on Upwork.
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Okay?
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Then I got up at the time on Buddy Studio. Well, it was Voice Bunny at the time, but now it's Bunny Studios. Then I got myself up on the Voice realm, and I joined voice123 and voice.com and voquent, and I joined all of these platforms, okay. I joined PeoplePerHour, as many platforms as I could. I joined and added demos. I auditioned, I did the things that I needed to do, and my business started to take off. Slowly but surely, audiobooks became a big part of my business. But I started getting them on other platforms, you know what I mean? Because I was taking the action of posting and posting and posting and posting and adding more demos and adding more to my profiles, adding more keywords, switching, finding out, changing around pricing, doing whatever I could to get work. I was constantly taking action. And I'm telling you, the more action that you take, the more results you're going to get again. It might not always be the results that, that you want at that moment, but there are results happening, right? There is again the, the underneath, if you try something out and it doesn't work, something did happen, you learned that that didn't work. That is important. I know we want to, I know we want to start off and just have everything work, but that's just not. I mean, I had to remind myself over and over again myself, because I do the same things. I, I still go through the same things right now. I have all these different things going on that I like to force myself to grow. What happens is that you, I put these things in motion. They're good ideas, but that doesn't mean that I just get them right right off the bat. I mean, no, that's not how things work. You have to work at it now. Getting coaching, getting with the right people can put you on the right path or it can give you, you know, it can take shed years off you having to learn on your own, right? And just the doing all that extra trial and error. But you still have to learn and you still have to try. And you're gonna find a lot of things that don't work. And you have to go through that. We said last week, right, There is no success without the conflict either. There has to be conflict because if there is not conflict, there is no success. Because what is success without being tested and failing success wouldn't be sweet, wouldn't even be a word. It would just be what happens Normal, right? And then what's the. Then there, there's no joy, there's no point in pushing ourselves. So the first phase of what I've laid out, right, is getting started on acx, moving over to getting headshots, getting voiceover demos, getting coaching, starting to get up on, on other freelance platforms like Fiverr Upwork Voquent, which is an intermediary, but still it's free to get on, starting to then join you can Bunny Studios, I think has reopened as well as, you know, a site like PeoplePerHour. I mean, some of these sites are not going to have tons of trout like you're not Going to get tons of jobs like you could possibly get on Fiverr.
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All right?
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But the whole point is, is that the more sites you join, the more stuff you have up everywhere, the more opportunities you have, right? The more opportunities can come to you. So one job from one site a month might not be that big of a deal. However, if you're on 20 different sites and you get one job a month from each of those sites, that's 20 jobs a month. That's a pretty good month. Do you know what I'm saying? So like you have to consider that idea. And we're not even talking about the sites you get on then you audition for, okay? Because those auditions, those are actions, actionable things you can do every single day. From there you're getting on all these platforms. That's really the first phase. And quite honestly, if you're here just starting and trying to kick start your business, that's all you need to focus on. Because that is a crap ton of work that's going to probably take you a couple of years. And I want to, I want to address one more thing before we go today. You guys been awesome. But, and that is, and this is still on this topic, but it's kind of something else. And I'm telling you this, and I say this stuff to you because it happens to me too. I get so frustrated with myself. You are going to see people post things that seem to defy what should be. What I mean by that is you're gonna see that guy or gal who'd be like, this is my first week and I've got five jobs. You're like, what the.
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Alright.
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Or my first month, you know, I made $2,000. You're like, I can't even, I don't even know how. I'm not even, I can't even get up anywhere. I'm not even on a platform. I've done one audition maybe, or I can't even get my daw to work right. I don't even know how to hook up my microphone. And you see these people who post these things and they may be true, but you see them post these things that they're having this massive success and then what does that lead to? Inevitably that makes us a lot of times feel inadequate. Now this wasn't the point of the person who was posting it. And we know that, right? And we know that it can also be a great thing to show what's possible out there. But let's be honest, Honestly, a lot of us don't and we Should. I mean, we know we should, and we tell ourselves we should. But a lot of us deep down still feel like I'm not good enough. Why is that person. I'm doing something wrong. Something is not right. Why are they getting all that success? Okay, but I want to say this because I've been around for a while, and I've seen this over and over and over again. That is not reality. There's always going to be a person here or a person there who seems to. Everything they do defies reality. But that's not reality. And I'll tell you why. Because one month, two months, six months, a year, two years. That's not a lifetime. That's not sustainability. I'm interested in people who are successful year after year after year after year after year, who have been able to do it over and over and over and over and over again and over and over. I'm interested in those people. Then I tell you why. Because I've worked with so many people who. Well, let me rephrase. Not so many people. A handful of people who were kind of the people who just defied all of this logic, did all these things, I mean, were very fast, got a lot of results really quickly, and then, poof, they were gone. They just faded out. Nothing happened. I mean, they did these things. They had results and they quit, or they decided they didn't want to do it anymore, or they didn't, you know, it wasn't of interest to them, or it wasn't what they thought it was or something. But some of. For other people, other. Of us, it would have been like, wow, this is amazing. This is incredible. You cannot judge your success or failure based off of someone else's own journey. You cannot. Your journey is unique. You can get help in trying to solve the challenges you have for your journey, but comparing it to other people and then saying, oh, my gosh, something's wrong with me, because that person posted that they made $10,000 this month on Fiverr. I mean, I can't even make. I spent $500. I lost $500 this month. I didn't make it. This person's making $10,000. And I've been on there for months. I'm not making anything. You got to shed that worry, all right, that you're doing something wrong and that these, like, you're so bad. No, no. We are taking our journey and we are figuring out what we need to do ourselves that works for us. Each of us is different and unique. That's why, like, when I Do the mentorship program. And by the way, on a side note, I lowered my prices for the mentorship program because I have some openings back, so I'm available for.
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There I was.
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Period of time. I wasn't. I had a lot of people, but had some people graduate and stuff like that. So I've got some openings there, and I've lowered the prices kind of. You know, I'm looking to take on some more students. So if you guys are interested, check that out as well. But the point is, is that in the. In the mentorship program, you know, I see a lot of that change, right? And that growth. And, you know, that is the point to all of this, because every person is different, and every person I work with, right, they have a different goal. Money is not the goal. Money is the means in which we are. It's one part of what we need to reach our goal. We cannot consider money being the goal, right? Because if you had all the money you wanted, what would you do? Money itself is not what the goal is. The goal is to have the ability to do xyz, to do something, to live a certain way, to have to be able to make a decision and do something to do. Money gives us that. So money's not the goal. Money is part of what. What getting to that goal is. And, and. And again, that's where I think. Now, I know I'm finished this up.
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Because I've gone for a while, but.
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I think that that's where we have to always remember that taking the actions, right? We need to stop talking about it. Take actions. Well, I'm fine with talking about. As long as you're talking and taking the action.
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Right?
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But, you know, for the sake of the title, stop talking, start doing. Okay, but action, action, action. Take the actions. I laid out a whole bunch that you can do, and if you've taken a bunch of them and you're not seeing results, that is a reaction. That means that the actions that you've taken, Great job. They're not producing what it is you're trying to get right now. That's fine. That is a result. That means we know that we've got to do. Here, here's the. Here's the kicker. I always. I work with some people who also do a wonderful job. They take massive action, but then that action isn't getting them the results that they want. And then they're like, well, well, then. I mean, what do I do now? Well, that's. That's the cue. The cue is, is that you've done xyz. It did not give you the result, which means you've got to take a different action. So that could be my demos. I need to try something different. My demos, the ones I currently have, they're not working. They're not getting me work. Am I getting. Do I even know if I'm getting in front of people? Am I getting seen? Maybe I need to do an audit of how many people are actually seeing me. Maybe it's not my demo. Maybe the fact is I can't even get people to see me. So I've got a real. With my marketing, right? I mean, with. With. With being able to get in front of people who are actually looking to hire my auditions. Are my auditions being heard? Maybe I need to take a different tact with my auditioning, right? Just because you're not getting the results you want doesn't mean you're not getting results. Please don't forget that. Use the results to make informed decisions to take more action. Whatever you do, don't stop.
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All right, all right.
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I beat that enough. You guys get it? Thank you so much for watching. Again, we are just. We launched our Memorial Day campaign to really get as many people as we can learning and growing and strengthening the voiceover business in our community.
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All right?
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So please check out Avio's Journey Lead Academy. We'd love to have you. Have a wonderful Monday. See everybody later. Peace.