Social Selling For Voiceover

By Chris Tester - British Male Voiceover Artist

Diversifying your income streams is crucial as a freelancer, and if you've been watching this channel for any amount of time, then you should be aware of the following ones:

1. Working through agents

2. Work through pay-to-play auditions

3. Work through direct marketing

4. Work through SEO

But when it comes to social media, our thinking can become a little muddled. People will tell us that creating content to establish and reaffirm our reputation is incredibly important but being clear about how the process actually works can be very Vega best when it comes to social media. Now I've been experimenting quite a lot over the past six months on a variety of different social media platforms to work out exactly what I should be posting but, even more importantly, why, and what I found most useful to define is that social media works in two clear ways: 

1. In the first place, it's part of your outbound marketing strategy to use social platforms to contact potential leads or clients to make them aware of you and essentially augmenting your direct marketing.

2. The second way is through social selling or inbound marketing, which is all about getting people both inside and outside of your social circle to know, like, and trust you to reaffirm your status as a preeminent professional in your field.

So in this video, I wanted to explain and demystify slightly what my approach is to this latter aspect. Now, of course, I have to confess that in a hopefully quite short video, this is a very superficial impression of what social selling actually is all about. You need to optimize your profiles on social media. So it operates a bit like a website so that you're as clear as possible about what your value, proposition, and services are. And you still need to incorporate essential things like calls to action and have a system of logging that is engaging with your content. So you know how warm a lead could potentially be!

Problems of Direct Marketing

So when we look at direct marketing, there are two very clear problems:

1. Lead Generation

You have to spend time actually identifying the people that it is that you want to reach out to contact.

1. Nature of That Contact

If you're reaching out to someone for the first time with no previous dialogue at all, then it's a cold contact, and therefore it's going to be more likely to bounce off someone than a warm lead.

How to Overcome These Problems?

Now, these factors shouldn't be an excuse not to do direct marketing. It is something that takes time, but it's also the surest way of being able to build relationships with clients that are yours and not platforms. But especially if you're a voice actor who's very familiar with the commercial copy, you'll understand that people don't like being sold to. They like to know, like, and trust the people that they're engaging with, and the selling itself is actually very subtle. And social selling is a way of doing that in marketing terms.

So the concept behind social selling is ostensibly quite simple on paper. The first thing you do is that you create content on your platform of choice so that people get to know, like, and trust you by you entertaining them or educating them, or a combination of the two. And then, through the quality of your content, people get to engage with you. They choose to connect with you, and they begin to know, like, and trust you. And as your network grows organically so the size of your audience will increase on a platform like LinkedIn. For example, when you connect with someone, the people that they are connected with which you did not have a greater chance of actually being able to see your content. Those second and third-degree connections as the platform label them, and you can even do this in a quite specific conscious way.

So, for example, if there's a company that you really want to work with, there's the direct marketing way of approaching that, which is identifying who the decision-maker is and then reaching out to them directly. But an alternative way of doing this would be to connect with multiple people who are not decision-makers and who don't deal with voiceover. For example, people that you can connect with, and then through the process of connecting with these people and then creating content that they engage with then, the people who in that same company do make decisions about voiceover will start to see the content as well.

So they'll begin to hopefully know, like, and trust you. Over a longer period of time, this then essentially becomes a social numbers game. The more people that are in your network, the more people that are engaging with your content, and the more that there's a chance that you will come across the right person at the right by time who may be thinking that they actually might need your service. And the crucial thing is that, unlike direct marketing, you might not even know that these people exist in the first place. The crucial aspect of social selling that I really needed to get my head around is that you really need to think about the social as well as the media.

So the media to start with the end is obviously the content that we create in order to get as many people as possible to engage in your media. Then you have to actively be social on these platforms. In other words, you need to engage. You need to offer a value and rather than just saying,

"Oh, yeah, that's great!" 

And throwing a few likes around, you need to start actually having conversations and bringing value to those interactions instead. And this is not something that's going to result in overnight success and immediate job offers, but it's something that, if done well, can really expand organically a network of people who potentially might be able to use you in the future. 

Some Valuable Recommendations

I recommend looking at the likes of people like Leah Turner or Nick Rayburn, or Ashley Leeds, who all have been able to master ways of creating good engaging content that continues conversations and gets your brand and your skills, your knowledge, your values, all out there. Whether you're saying the right thing or not doesn't really matter so much; instead, what your emphasis is on is proving your worth, showing your tastes, your likes, your dislikes, and your passions, and basically being able to catalyze people's decision-making process about you so that they can identify you as a creative who is worth engaging.

I'm just trying to shed some light on this process if you're spending a lot of time on social media at the moment now, but you don't really know what it is that you should be doing in order to get some results from it. It is a much less direct sales approach to direct marketing and, therefore, can be a much more enjoyable experience. And I'll confess myself I am still very much in the early stages of my journey on social selling, but one of the things that I really enjoy about it is that content creation is a creative act. It's not just thumping out the same emails and giving someone a compliment, and it also doesn't work in isolation. If a particular piece of content that I create gets a lot of traction, then it's something that I can also incorporate into my direct marketing workflow.

So as a follow-up email, for example, rather than just boring people with my availability or what microphone I use, which is all still kind of valid but kind of what people are already doing in the space. Anyway, if your job is essentially to stand out to add value, and to be memorable in some way, then actively participating in content creation is a great way of doing that. Being only five to six months into this process myself, I am seeing results, but I'll admit it completely slowly, but they are happening. For example, a game Dev posted a casting call which I was totally unaware of, but because people within my work knew me and liked and trusted me. They were in a position where they felt that they could recommend me because they thought that I fit the brief, and this resulted without any audition in a day's work on a title with the developer that I very much admired from playing his games when I was a boy, and this was only very possible through this inbound marketing method. It didn't involve me just reaching out at the right time and hoping that I'd be chosen.

Last Words

In a future video, I'm going to try and look at some of the different forms of content that you can make as a freelancer and as a voice-over artist in order to be able to entertain and engage potential audience members. And that's going to both looks at things that I'm doing myself and what I'm seeing that's effectively working that other people in the same space are doing. Thank you so much for watching. If you found this video of any use, then please like, subscribe, and spread the word about this channel. And I look forward to seeing you next time!

The Five Best Voiceover Tips for Beginners

The 5 Best Voiceover Tips for Beginners

By Chris Tester - British Male Voiceover

Since first embarking on my voice-over journey, I've learned quite a few profound lessons about what not to do that you shouldn't waste time. Arguing with people on Facebook groups about which microphone they like that the voice-over rail might not necessarily be the most reputable platform out there and that German dubbing porn might not necessarily be that good for your reputation in general, but apart from these profound takeaways, what other tips might I give myself?

The decision can be debilitating when starting any new career. There can be so much new information out there. It's difficult to know where to begin or what to prioritize, and I know that I definitely wasted a lot of time going along dead ends or making very obvious mistakes that really wasted a lot of time, money, and energy as a result. And I grant that failure is definitely an essential part of the process.

Let’s dig in!

Five Key Lessons for Beginners

As I've already covered in this video here, there are five key lessons that I would definitely go back in time and tell myself if I could when starting out and so in the absence of having a time machine. I'm going to tell you them instead!

Tip #1:

My first tip is a pretty essential performance-related one, and that is always to make sure that you're talking to one specific person regardless of what type of voice-over project you're actually working on. If you make your voice-over delivery specific and rooted in one person's reaction. Then it's going to make it more personal and go alongside that as well. I would say practicing doing voice over with a smile and seeing how that warm quality basically goes from the outside in can be essential in being able to establish a real connection with the listener as with any form of acting, really being specific in who your audience member is and what they want and what kind of um reaction that you want to get from them is incredibly crucial and something that I wish I prioritized more rather than sounding good at the beginning of my career.

Tip #2:

My second tip is also performance-related, and that would always be worked out what the subtext is. So, a car commercial is never really about the car that you're selling. It's about the lifestyle you'll want to portray that gives access to the person who wants to buy it. Go on an adventure of a lifetime on the road to discovery. The same would go if you're working for an explainer video. You're not just imparting information, but it's because you want to make a difference to the person who's listening in terms of their lives, what do they need to know, and why and again, understanding the importance of the subtext; running underneath why? What you're saying is important in the first place is really crucial in terms of giving the best voice-over that you can.

Tip #3:

My third tip would be to work from a place of relaxation, and this really comes down to the fact that when we're starting out especially, we want to get things right, and when we want to get things right in a career, that prizes speech. Generally, we want to speak very clearly, and in a career that focuses on the spoken word, that usually results in us speaking very clearly and sometimes over-enunciating, and I certainly found that coming from stage work where I did a lot of articulation exercises, so there were a lot of plosives going on and everything like that meant.

As a result, I sounded quite ready when I started out because I was pronouncing every single word, which is not what we do in real life and in speech, of course. The other thing coming from a trained actor that's been drummed into me for years is that your best performance comes from a state of relaxation. You have to be prepared. Still, then you need to let everything go and that I think is really the crucial aspect. Do your warm-ups work on technical aspects that you personally need to address but then when it actually comes to stepping up to the performance. You need to try and come from a process of relaxation. So, again focusing on the message, the connection, and the audience is not on your physical your technical execution.

Tip #4:

My fourth tip is a pretty inevitable one which is don't record your demos too soon. I know I certainly did, and I would say probably the first three commercial demos that I recorded in the early-mid-2000s were absolute and utter trash, while most voice actors are a bit more streetwise in doing their due diligence with demo producers. Now it's still something to be mindful of. You really need to focus on your coaching and your mastery of a particular genre first before you go and actually pay the money for a demo because otherwise, you'll be like me, someone who has to constantly re-record their demos because they're not good enough and you can't really salvage much from them.

You need to have a clear understanding of the genre in question. You need to know where your voice fits within that genre, and you need to know the extremes what is your range within that genre, not so that you display range for range's sake but so that you can set very clear parameters about what reads are going to serve you best as marketing too.

Tip #5:

My final tip would be you can do it yourself. When I started out on my voice acting career, I came very much from an actor's perspective that there were certain gatekeepers, i.e., agents and casting directors, that I needed to get on board with in order to properly make progress and to a certain extent that is true but as well as cultivating those very important relationships. There are many other ways that you can actually source voice-over work, and you don't even need to have a demo in order to be able to do that.

Now with things like Fiverr and freelancing websites, there's a way of being able to cultivate and monetize voice-over work from an early stage and actually build yourself up, or alternatively, you can go through the whole pay-to-play route and also, of course, most crucially you can use direct marketing to really create one-to-one relationships with clients that nobody else owns in terms of the relationships. So, they're yours, and it's a relationship that you can build progressively.

Final Thoughts

As a result, obviously, there's a laundry list of different things that I wish I could tell my former self when starting, but these were the five that I think would have probably made the biggest and quickest difference in getting my voice-over career up and running. I hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful. If so, please do like, subscribe, please do comment below if there was something specific that you found particularly useful when starting out or that you wish. You had a time machine to tell yourself when you were starting out in the first place. Thank you for watching so much as ever, and I look forward to seeing you next time!

What To Do When You're Not Booking Voiceover Jobs?

by Chris Tester - British Male Voiceover Artist

So you're auditioning as much as you can. You're marketing; you're connecting with the right people. But you're just not booking the jobs. Apart from panicking, what else can you do? Let's talk about that! 

So much time can be spent fighting for the opportunity to audition for new projects, building relationships, increasing the quantity and quality of the opportunities that we have, and so once we have that opportunity to actually audition for a project after being shortlisted. It can be quite destabilizing if we don't book once, then twice, and then and again, and again, and again, and this is when imposter syndrome can really kick in. You start to question your skills, your ability whether or not all the stuff that you're putting out there to everyone is actually true of yourself. 

You start to doubt yourself, and that, in turn, will start to affect your motivation in actually reaching out in the first place and creating more opportunities. So acknowledging that this cycle is not a good thing for your business and also something that we could all be susceptible to, certainly, in my scenario, I've gone through periods of this. I wanted to go through a checklist of things that we can actionably do to be mindful of when we get stuck in this rut of not being able to book to make sure that we're focusing on the right things. 

Let’s move ahead without further ado!

Tip #1:

My first tip is to let go of needing the job. Obviously, you need to work. Otherwise, you can't call it a business. But you need to be mindful of this process—especially when starting out, making that big jump full-time as a freelancer can be incredibly daunting. Especially if you have no structure or backup when possible, balancing the beginnings of your freelance life with either some form of savings that you've accrued or some type of part-time work means that not so much weight is kind of resting purely on your success ratio in your freelance stuff and this will serve as a buffer during the inevitable fallow periods that plague the beginning of a freelance career.

Tip #2:

Number two is to limit destructive self-talk; as a freelancer, you are your own employee, and you need to treat yourself as such. Suppose you tour strips off another employee every time that they fail to convert or they fail to book a job. Then you'd think that that person was an absolute idiot and certainly not a good boss. You need to apply that same criterion to yourself. Constantly chastising yourself for not being good enough isn't going to help. That doesn't mean that you can't reassess the situation or be self-critical but always make sure that the criticism that you do give yourself is constructive. 

Tip #3:

Number three is don't perpetuate a negative narrative. If you're constantly telling, not just yourself. But also your peers or your existing clients or prospects that you're not booking, then that becomes part of your identity. You're hardwiring a negative narrative that will only disempower. You all this will do are motivating you and also make you less attractive to collaborate with existing leads and clients. 

Tip #4:

My fourth tip is to hold an action audit keep a diary of daily actions that you were taking to further your career. Is there anything missing? Are there areas that you are neglecting, and if so, why? The sooner that you can get into the habit of adopting an objective perspective on your business, the sooner you can start taking reasoned action. So if you're failing to proceed with essential tasks in your business, you need to identify that and address that as soon as possible.

Tip #5:

Tip 5 is holding a motivation audit. If you find that there are tasks that you know that you should be doing, but you are failing to do them, then you need to ask yourself. Why? What is making you not do the thing, and what can you adjust to solve these problems? If it's simply down to a lack of time, then you need to prioritize, adjust your time scale, or you need to outsource some things. Maybe if you're constantly feeling overwhelmed, then focus on just the one important thing that you can do that day. 

Tip #6:

Tip six is to lean on trusted peers now. This is not your mum, and hello, mum, but people who are going through a similar journey with you. So that you can talk to them frankly about problems, you have to reassure yourself that you're not alone in this. As long as these peers are people you respect, then it's great to be able to hear what other people's solutions might be, whether or not they have any constructive criticism or thoughts or hints or hacks about things that have worked for them and if you don't have any trusted peers yet. Then I think this is a good time to probably get some people who are in a similar stage in their journey. But who is doing good work who is trying to do things in the right way? People whose opinions you can trust and get a proper objective point of view from. 

Tip #7:

Tip 7 is to control the controllable. If you have more time because you're not booking this work, then use that time to update your websites, to make sure that showreels are updated, make sure that your profiles are on casting websites are all up to date that your cv, if you have a voice-over cv or equivalent is also updated how are your social and marketing channels looking are the things that you can update there or refresh there are you still consistently marking to new leads and prospects to make sure that more opportunities are coming in.

Tip #8:

Tip 8 is to adjust the end goal. If your target is not something directly under your control, then make sure that you're focusing on the things that you can aim for relationship building rather than the number of jobs that you converted in a particular month. Yes! An audition ratio over a period of time is a useful metric to measure your level of success and proficiency. But sometimes, you just have a duff run of auditions, and that's nothing to do with you. That's just part of the game. 

Tip #9:

Tip nine is coaching and skill-building. Take this opportunity to check in with the coach to make sure that you're comfortable with your reads and approaches and that you're sensitive to any new trends that might have entered the market. Feel relatively secure in your existing skill base, then look about extending it into other genres to have more opportunities coming in. 

Tip #10:

Finally, number 10, check the market. Double-check that you're targeting the right genre of voice over for your voice, not just the one that you would like to work intake stock of where current trends are where you sit in the market as a comparison and maybe double down on your strengths if there's one particular genre that you always do consistently well in then maybe this is the time to do the opposite of the. Last point and actually narrow down and focus on what your core strength is first and foremost so that you can worry less about putting money on the table and more about just getting a consistent level of work a bit of a chain going.

Wrap Up

So hopefully, I've provided with you a few different tactics to implement if you start to doubt yourself if you start to feel demotivated about the fact that things aren't working for you this month. It's the nature of the business, to a certain degree as a freelancer, that your booking ratio is going to go up and down up and down to a certain degree, so although it's always important to keep an eye on the metrics to see how much better that you are getting. 

But resist the temptation to read too much into it and always be mindful of what action you're taking as ever. Thanks so much for watching. Please do like, subscribe, and spread the word about this channel. I look forward to seeing you next time!

Atomic Habits for Voiceover

Atomic Habits for Voice Over

By Chris Tester - British Male Voiceover Artist

The different elements that make up a voice-over career aren't mystical. You need to obtain a certain level of proficiency on the performance side, the marketing side, and the technical side, like almost any freelancer. But while the initial part of our careers is typically fueled by adrenaline. After a few months, the novelty of the new we can't rely on that alone to execute our daily tasks. 

James Clear, in his book atomic habits, affirms that, 

“Success is the product of daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime transformations." 

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement getting just one percent better every day counts for a lot in the long run. And this is definitely a philosophy that I subscribe to. It's essential to set your goals, as I've covered in these videos already previously. But it's going to be daily consistent actions or habits that will carry you to that destination. Clear goes on to lay out a plan of how you can actually form and construct good habits. So I wanted to look at his four key points and then see how we could apply them to voice-over.

Are you curious to know atomic habits for a voice-over? Let's dig in!

Four Rules to Start Cultivating a Good Habit

The four rules to start cultivating a good habit are: 

1. Make it obvious

2. Make it attractive

3. Make it easy

4. Make it satisfying

So let's take a look at these in turn and see how we could apply them to voice-over? 

1. Make it Obvious

For the first one to make it obvious, you really need to be aware that to be vague about your intention is the enemy. Saying I need to do some marketing or I need to work on my performance skills is deliberately vague. They're amorphous, and they're certainly not smart goals, which I've covered previously in another video here. So we need to be specific so for marketing. I want to send five emails to new leads per day. 

Now we could just set a specific time to execute this task, and again in a separate video, I've touched on how I use time blocking to be able to manage my day-to-day calendar. But another way of doing this is by using habit stacking, where you attach your new habit to a pre-existing one. 

So, for example, if you always start your workday by making coffee and as much as I prize my hydration, I do that more often than not. Then you can say after I make my coffee, I will send my five emails, and then you could start chaining various habits together. So after I finish my recordings for the day, I will learn one new keyboard shortcut on my door, or after I’ve checked my Instagram, I will make sure to comment on three other people’s content. Notice also the benefit of linking these habits by location. 

So if you’re doing one habit on your phone already, then make your other habit also on your phone. If it’s a computer-related task, then link it to a computer-related task and so on. If you’re stuck thinking about what useful habits you want to cultivate in the first place, then think about where you spend your time and where. Therefore, a new habit might suggest itself from that exact location. 

1. Make it Attractive

The second rule is to make your new habit attractive. It is where a technique called temptation bundling comes in. Essentially, as an incentive for doing your new habit, you attach it to another habit that you really want to do. As a personal example, I like playing beat saber for half an hour in the morning because it’s a good cardio workout. 

But to do that, I always have to go and work out with my free weights beforehand. But more specifically, during my workday, I’ve paired doing my work emails with playing FIFA on the Playstation. If I don’t do my emails, I won’t be able to further or bury United’s quest for European domination and that stakes for you. 

1. Make it Easy

The third rule is to make your new habit as easy as possible, what James clear calls a gateway habit, rather than setting a really ambitious goal for you to send a certain number of emails or learn a certain number of keyboard shortcuts. Instead, when you’re first implementing a new habit, only do it for one minute a day. So if we apply that approach to email marketing in one minute, you might have enough time to Google a specific company and maybe identify who it is that you reach out to and maybe log their details and that’s it and when establishing that habit that’s all that you need to do. 

And yes, that is ridiculously simple, but that’s why you also have no excuse not to do it. Of course, we want to extend the amount of time you spend on that habit, but the first most crucial thing is to be consistent. 

1. Make it Satisfying

And the final rule to tie it all together is to make it satisfying now clear affirms that the human brain is evolved to prioritize immediate gratification over delayed satisfaction. So what is immediately rewarded is more likely to be repeated. And as we’ve already seen, temptation bundling is a way of attaching gratification to execution. But another way of getting that immediately successful hit is habit tracking. 

If you’ve ever consistently filled in a journal or if you’ve ever continued to log in your exercise process, or if you’ve ever used one of those language apps that congratulates you on chaining together consecutive days of exercise or practice. Then you’ll have sense the reward that gives you knowing that you’re not breaking the chain. 

Of course, life will interrupt at some point, and all chains will be broken but when that eventuality occurs clear affirms the importance of never missing twice. You get back on the metaphorical horse the very next day, and you reaffirm the identity that you’re trying to cultivate even if the time you actually spend doing the habit is a fraction of your normal time. 

I found this personally myself when doing my weight training. It’s been the bad workouts where I’ve only done it for half my normal period of time, and my form has been bad, and I’ve really felt kind of icky about it, but I’ve still done it. And therefore, I felt that I’m someone who does work out five days a week regardless of how good that quality of workout actually is rather than entering into a spiral of, oh, I’ve missed a workout. Therefore, I’m not my best self so. Consequently, I might as well give up entirely. 

So in voiceover, even if circumstances mean that you have very limited time to get back on the wagon, just getting back to doing even one minute of a vocal warm-up and one minute of marketing still reaffirms your identity as a voice actor who does marketing and warms up vocally every day. 

Now it’s this final point that I personally found most revelatory for my career switching from a voice actor who wants x, y, and z to one who is x y and z. I take huge pride in the identity that my habits have given me, so I’m more motivated to maintain them. Of course, this is a much abbreviated version of what’s covered in James clear’s book, and I do recommend that you read it yourself. 

Conclusion

Hopefully, I’ve demonstrated how you could start applying this to a voice actor’s career, and you’ve got a few new techniques that you can start playing around with. If you found this helpful video, please do like subscribe and share. And I look forward to seeing you next time!