Does Your Voice Acting Profile Do Your Talent Justice?

You know that voice you get hired to do from time to time?

If it’s not on your Voices profile, you’re definitely getting less visits to hear your voice!

While the celebrated trio of Commercial, Narration, Character voice over demos provide general representation of your work, they may not do your voice justice in the eyes of the search engine.

Growing Your Online Real Estate

To maximize your efforts, upload separate voice over demos for all of the voices that book you work.

I’ve said it before, and will say it again: Each demo you upload to Voices is like another piece of real estate for your voice online. If you can do five accents but clients can hear only two of them, this is a missed opportunity for you and someone who may want to work with you.

Make sure that you have a demo that showcases abilities you say you have. Many talent, for instance, will include language and accent skills on their profile but not back those claims up with audio files. As they say, the proof in is the pudding!

Not sure where to start? Let’s explore how to succeed.

6 Steps to Identifying & Creating New Demo Opportunities

One way to assess what demos you have and don’t have online is to visit your Voices profile.

1. Take a look at the audio files on your profile that you’ve uploaded so far.
2. How many are there? Do you feel like something you can do is missing?
3. Contrast what’s on your Demos section with the skills you list on your main profile/Bio section.
4. Are there any inconsistencies? For instance, do you say you speak a language that you don’t have a demo for? Maybe there’s a voice age that you don’t have a voice sample for?
5. Write down these newly found opportunities for additional demos.
6. Work toward recording separate voice samples demonstrating your abilities in those areas. This means:
   • Finding or writing voice-over scripts specific to the type of demo
   • Sourcing royalty-free music
   • Arranging your spots
   • Recording your demos
   • Uploading them to your Voices profile
   • Titling, describing and tagging appropriately

What About Working With Demo Producers?

If you’re not keen on producing your own demos, there are many coaches and producers who offer demo production services.

Many talent receive coaching before embarking on a new voice over demo. These talent may also work closely with a local recording studio on the demo. Directed sessions are not unusual when recording a demo, especially if it is one of the three major demo categories mentioned earlier in this article: Commercial, Narration (Industrial) or Character/Animation.

Regardless of how or where you get your demos produced, you will still need to feature them well in order to get them in front of the eyes and ears of prospective customers.

Featuring Your Work by Tagging Your Demos

Are your demos easily found in searches? While having great content is a given, you have to have it structured in a way that search engines can see it.

Here are some tagging Dos and Don’ts

Do:

• Give your demo a unique title and be specific
• Use different words in your Title than you use for your Tags
• Diversify the language you’re using to attract more visitors who are looking for similar things
• Choose words that reflect the content of the demo

Don’t:

• Be broad or generic
• Forget to describe the contents of the audio file (this is a way of previewing what a listener will hear)
• Neglect to tag your demo
• Assign tags or descriptors that misrepresent the content of the demo

Getting Creative With Audio

How do you make the most of what you have?

When you have a demo with multiple spots and capabilities on it, the content becomes less concentrated and harder to consume. People wanting to hear a specific vocal attribute, character, language or accent have little patience for anything other than what they thought they’d hear.

Something you can do to avoid disappointing a listener or losing them after a few seconds is to splice up your files. Make each spot its own demo. This allows you to be a more strategic marketer with the added benefit of presenting a greater volume of content.

By doing this extra bit of work now, you’ll have significantly more demos going forward in the Voices search engine as well as more real estate on Voices that feeds into Google and other search engines.

Showcasing your vocal accent and language skills will put you in a better position to book more of the work you love.

What Demos Are You Going to Add?

Comment now and take action! I’d love to hear what you’ve come up with.

Best wishes,

Stephanie