Learning Designer Presses Play on Voiceover Gig

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

We first explored the world of voiceover work in the very first week of the show, which was, what, more than 900 days ago. That episode, episode number five, was called "How One Man Used a $100 Microphone to Make Over $8,000." You got a lot of feedback about that episode. And since then, we've talked about this industry, voiceover recording, voiceover work, from time to time. It's a big industry with a lot of different opportunities, a lot of little market segments. And in today's story, a working mom presses play on a voiceover gig that allows her to make money, have fun, and spend more time with her kids.

As she goes along, she becomes more successful once she figures out exactly what her little slice of the pie is, her little specific market that she's going to cater to in her voiceover work. So we're calling it learning designer presses play on voiceover gig. Here's a quick shout out to our sponsor. They allow the show to be completely free to you. And then I'll tell you this story.

On the way to work one morning, Carrie Olsen decided that she was going to start listening to a new podcast. Already a lover of side hustles, Carrie was drawn to one about people who did unusual jobs. And by the way, it wasn't ours. She pressed play on the latest episode and started listening to an interview with professional voiceover actress Alison Steele. Alison was a mom just like Carrie. But unlike Carrie, she got to start her day by doing yoga and seeing her kids

before they went to school. After that, she settled into her home recording studio for her day of work. With a newborn at home, the idea of being able to work from her house was music to Carrie's ears. Not only that, but Carrie also had a background in freelance podcast hosting and had narrated several courses for her day job as an e-learning designer. Suddenly, it seemed like voiceover work wasn't just something that she could pursue, it was something she should. So she decided to go straight to the source, booking a few

coaching sessions with Alison. She also spent about $10 to sign up for a monthly membership for a casting website so she could start auditioning. Carrie already had a professional microphone and recording software from her podcast work, so those startup costs were minimal. She scored her first job about a month in. It was a two minute long narration for a Danish company and she was paid $450. With extra cash in her bank account and peppered her step,

Carrie kept her ear to the ground in pursuit of more jobs. After another small gig, her third client brought Carrie a fat paycheck and a newfound sense of confidence. She was hired to record a national radio campaign for the outdoor gear store REI. This gig brought in $2,000. Not only that, but REI wanted to keep doing projects with her in the future. With the promise of more money, Carrie began to wonder how much she could make

if she pursued her hustle full time. As self-proclaimed personal finance nerds, the first step she and her husband took to determine if she could quit her job was to crunch some numbers. When it was all said and done, it looked like leaving her job would be a risk. There was no way around it. So, looking for guidance, Carrie lent an ear to her coach, Alison, who also told her that quitting her job in pursuit of voice acting was not a good idea.

But with her motivation, willingness to take risks, and maybe a dash of naivete, Carrie stopped listening to reason and quit anyways. It just felt right. She began to pursue voice acting full time only four months after she started the hustle. In her first year, she made almost exactly the same amount of money that she made in her old corporate job, which was right around $45,000. She says that the biggest factor that influenced her success was that she didn't do it alone. By learning from the pros,

she was able to make her voice heard. It's not just that. Carrie says that having an excellent demo is an important way to start finding commercial work, especially at the bigger jobs. A good demo typically costs anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000, so it's important to get some experience under your belt before investing money into one. Despite the quick success, after a year of doing voiceover work, Carrie began to feel burned out. The work itself was

fun, but the audition process was hard. After being rejected over and over again, it was easy to feel discouraged. She decided that she needed to find a new way to book work, and her new marketing strategy would be to target a specific audience, the e-learning community. With a strong background in online education, she already had a good feel for what her clients would be looking for. She made a list of dream clients and began to contact them one by one.

Carrie ended up landing jobs with AT&T, Disney, New York University, and Hertz. Since then, she's been steadily increasing her earnings. She designed her own course for voiceover coaching, combining some of her strengths in e-learning and voice acting, and in 2017, she broke six figures. Carrie has made serious sound waves in the industry and already has new ideas for her business growth. She just did a few promos from Netflix in hopes to get into more promotional work in the future. Carrie will also be releasing a new online course all about marketing

for voiceovers. With the help of a side hustle, and then eventually full-time work, Carrie used her voice to hit all the right notes in her search for a better life. So let's say you wanted to do something like this yourself. You're like, "Okay, this is my side hustle, or at least this is something I want to explore. What are your next steps?" One of your most important next steps is to do some more reading on how this industry works.

So every day for the episodes when we have the kind of project that anybody can jump into, on our show notes page, which we have for each episode, you can go and check out some additional resources, just some more information, maybe some tutorials, some guides, some videos. It could be different for any particular episode or story or idea. So you're going to do some more reading, then you'll want to register on one of the directory sites where companies look for voiceover actors. Now there are some industry-specific sites like the one Carrie found. You could also start with something like Fiverr, which I talk about from time to time. And by the way, Fiverr

is now a sponsor of the show, full disclaimer, but I've been talking about Fiverr since pretty much the first week of the show, more than two and a half years ago when they weren't a sponsor. So that's definitely worth checking out, fiverr.com, two hours. Then you want to acquire some basic equipment, which can be really affordable, and then make some kind of demo. Now there are two kinds of demos for work like this. In the episode, I think I mentioned that a professional demo can run between one and two thousand dollars. Now that's the kind of thing you want to do once you're

really convinced you want to go all in with this. You're like, yes, this is absolutely a project I want to do. Maybe you've done some low payment gigs, whatever it is, but you don't need to spend two thousand dollars or much of anything at first to make a demo, because you can make an initial demo with that hundred dollar microphone or whatever you end up using. And something like that is good enough for a site like Fiverr, or maybe even for one of the industry sites. It's the kind of thing where, you know, as you go along, if it turns out to be something that you want to invest in, then you can improve. Then you make that additional demo.

Now last, here's a quick fun fact from Carrie. One of the things this side hustle has allowed her to do, side hustle turned full-time business, is travel. So she spent about nine months doing voiceover work from a travel trailer while she and her husband and one-year-old daughter traveled the United States. She says, "We converted the bathroom into a vocal booth by hanging acoustic blankets when I needed to record. Eventually my father-in-law built me a convertible booth that I could set up and tear down inside the travel trailer. The only difficult part was finding a

quiet enough place to park. A few times I drove to the local cemetery and recorded from our car. So you may have heard a commercial on TV or radio that was recorded from the back seat of a Durango in a cemetery in New Mexico." Just a little bit of behind the scenes for you as we close out the episode. Thanks so much for listening. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Those show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/923. Episode 923. Much more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.