It may seem elementary to mention it, but if you only dedicate 10 minutes toward your career in ten months time it’s unlikely you’ll succeed at all at anything let alone a voice over career. Yet, week after week, most talent invest the bare minimum of their efforts and expect a promising outcome.
Simply having the training and a demo doesn’t drive the world to your doorstep. That’s YOUR job. We suggest you begin by viewing your job as a professional talent as your “part-time job”. Part-time for any other business would be about 20 hours a week, and if you commit no less than 20 hours a week toward establishing and furthering your career– then it stands to reason you’ll have a far greater chance to be successful in this field.
The fact is no less than five hours a week committed to our exclusive Vocal Warm Up is necessary, regardless of your skill or experience level, if you hope to be at your best and considered a valuable talent. It’s imperative you can confidently rely on your vocal agility and well-pronounced speech at a moments notice. Developing the best possible articulation and vocal stamina is at least a third of what will always be required of you regardless of the medium you may find yourself in, voice-over, film, TV or stage. Dedicating an hour a day, five days a week to our exclusive Vocal Warm Up allows even the greatest talent with exceptional natural ability to compete consistently and confidently at a superior level. Commerce is confidence. If you aren’t confident, you aren’t as reliable as you should be. If you aren’t reliable, your future success rate will be compromised.
The next five to ten hours out of (no less than) 20 hours a week, can and should be committed to:
- a) Coaching
- b) Practice Auditions
- c) Actual auditions, and/or…
- d) Studying! Reviewing your past (recorded) coaching sessions with us, to discover a greater level of comprehension of our exclusive game changing concepts and performance techniques that are not immediately intuitive. These skills must constantly be cultivated and conditioned, regardless of your experience or skill level.
Additionally, no less than ten to fifteen hours a week should be dedicated to marketing and promotion. Ongoing promotion is necessary whether you’re pursuing representation for the first time, or opening up your reach to talent agents and producers in various markets outside your own region. Your objective is to secure representation, local and otherwise, that will afford you at least 3 to 4 appropriate auditions a week per agency. (All the more reason to pursue additional representation in at least two or three other markets as well.)
Again, this is a numbers game: the more auditions, the more opportunities, the greater your ultimate success rate.
The ten to fifteen hours you’re dedicating toward promotion and building your business, such as:
- Creating your logo
- Completing your voiceover only web page
- Ensuring you’re listed where there are lots of voice talent, including actorsaccess.com, castingnetworks.com, voices.com, and voice123.com as the case may be
- Printing your promotional postcards
- Establishing your home recording set up
- Developing your home recording and editing skills in order to submit an effective audition, possibly with Practice Auditions
- Continually promoting yourself to those most likely to hire you as a voice talent* (This form of promotion never goes away, in fact it should increase with your rate of success, rather than the other way around. It’s known as vertical marketing and quite literally how you make your name known and established as a professional in this or any field. It’s how to continually make yourself accessible to the work.)
Maybe it can go without saying, but the more time you commit to your work, the greater the impact it will ultimately have on your career. You can always sway the numbers in your favor, provided you’re willing to dedicate the time and attention. You have to make the time to make your career happen. Clearly it takes dedication and due diligence on your part. It demands you treat this business like a business and commit no less than 20 hours a week to making it happen.
After all, if it’s true the definition of unhappiness is ’when reality does not meet expectation’, then it’s fair to assess you’ll be happier with yourself and the result of your efforts–provided you honestly understand the realities of creating a career for yourself in this business, and you’re willing to apply yourself to the tasks.
* Contact us directly to learn more at 323.464.0990!
Copyright © 2014 by Kate McClanaghan, All Rights Reserved.
