Speaker 1: Well, hey there. I'm Jay. Welcome to my booth, Voices.com. It's one of the top two pay-to-play websites on the whole of the internet. So, if and or when you decide it's time to throw my hat in the ring, how the heck does Voices work? What are your best practices and how can you set yourself up for success right out of the gate? Well, I'm going to cover all that for you right now. I just want to lay down a quick disclaimer. I am not personally affiliated with Voices.com outside of being a talent on their platform. So, everything you're about to hear is from my personal experience as well as the resources Voices provides to their talent to help with their success. But I'm not speaking for Voices in any way. Just an important disclaimer, I think. Let's dive in. So, Voices.com, as I mentioned, is a pay-to-play website. Meaning, they ask a membership fee, in their case, $499 annually. And in exchange for that membership fee, you get a profile. That profile on this site then gives you access to any job that flows through their doors that fits your profile. And that is determined by their algorithm, which I'll talk about in a moment. In addition to that annual membership fee, Voices asks a 20% commission on any job that you book through the site. And that 20% commission goes towards sort of their liaison service, almost. So, Voices.com acts as essentially a matchmaker and middleman between you, the talent, and the client, whoever you're working with. And so they streamline all of the contract negotiations, any licensing things that need to go through, as well as the rate setting, budgets. They give you access to an escrow service, where the client will essentially prepay once you've been hired. So, you know, they're not going to dine and dash. The money is safe. And then once the client gives the thumbs up, the funds are automatically released to you on periodic interval or payment periods. And then at the end of it all, if in the rare and unfortunate instance, something does go sideways and you're having a bad experience with a client for whatever reason, provided that you're comporting yourself well and you're a all around decent human being and are behaving under the guidelines that Voices sets up, they'll go to bat for you, which is really lovely. Because, and I mentioned all of this in terms of the 20% commission fee, because as a voiceover talent, probably 90% of the time, it's a one person show. You're the talent, you're the audio engineer, you're the business manager, your customer service. It's all down to you. And so having somebody at your back that's supporting you, even if it is for a 20% commission fee, is worth it in some cases. And so I appreciate that purely for the peace of mind with respect to Voices.com. So that's all of the money nitty gritty and stuff like that. When you're on the site, how does Voices determine what jobs to send you? That is determined by their algorithm and then by the demos that you upload to your site or to your profile. So if you look here at all the jobs that I have been sent, there's a voice match percentage next to them. 100%, 100%, blah, blah, blah. And that is how well I match this particular job based off of the demos that I have on my profile. So if we look at my demos, I've got all these different demos set up and each one is representative of a little snippet of something that I know is in my wheelhouse. Something I'm good at, something I know that I could get hired for or I have been hired for and could do again easily. The thing with demos is you want them to be specific and generally like kind of short. You don't want big collages of things. You just want one little snippet because when people are looking stuff up on this site, they want this specific thing for this specific voice. Enter. And if you match it perfectly, you'll come up in the search engine. But as far as the algorithm goes, that's based off of these tagging and category snippets that Voices has set up for you here. So as an example, when a client comes on the site, say Microsoft, and they have a product launch video that they need a narration for, they'll be creating their job and or their job posting and click category video narration. So then every demo with a video narration on the site gets a little bump in their voice match score to that job. So I've got one here bump for me. Then down here with the tags. Oh, they want a North American accent. Another bump for Jay. My voice match score goes up. They want a confident, conversational, friendly style of narration. Again, my voice match score rises and it does so for any tag that I have represented in my demos that matches with this job. And that's how your voice match score is dictated and ultimately how the site determines which jobs to send you. So then when you're sent a job, how does the client receive your audition? And this is important to know in terms of determining when it may not be worth your while to submit. So the first I like to think of it as sort of a stack of papers in terms of the submissions. And when the client gets their stack of papers sent to them at the top of the stack is all of the 100 percent voice match scores. Below that is all the 90 percent, then 80, 70, etc. So they're sort of categorized and lumped together by voice match. And then within each of those brackets, it's a first come first serve. So if you're the first person to submit with a 100 percent voice match, you're going to be at the top of the top of the pile. If you're the first person to submit out of anybody else, but you have a 60 percent voice match score. It doesn't matter that you were the first one in the gate because 70 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent, 100 percent is all going to be on top of you no matter how early you get it in. So all of that is important to recognize. If you get a job that says 60 percent voice match, you're going to be pretty low in the pile. Doesn't mean you shouldn't submit. It's just an important consideration, I think, especially when you're starting out. So those are all of the mechanics that go on behind the scenes on Voices.com. Now, just a couple of words of advice for folks getting the ball rolling here on the site. If you're starting out, audition for everything. That's my number one tip of advice. Audition for everything and for a few reasons. One, you might book something and there's no better way to learn than on your feet in the flames with the potential of actually earning some money. The next is it's great practice. You are coming up, showing up every day and you're going to get better. You're going to get better very, very quickly if you show up with intention and focus and you audition a lot. Each audition is an opportunity to practice. And then the last thing, you're building a catalog of work for yourself. Whether or not you get booked, each audition can be a potential demo for you. If it felt particularly good, throw it on the website, make it a demo. As long as there's no NDA attached or they tell you not to. But it's a great way to build out your repertoire and your catalog and get more work down the line. Next, when you're starting to submit proposals, don't undersell yourself. Don't submit the lowest bid with the hopes that it's going to get you in the door faster because it's just not the case. Voices.com has said that the majority of folks who end up winning jobs, who end up getting chosen, are bidding towards the top end of the range. I think it was in the top 30% to 25% of the budget range. So if we look at some of these jobs like this one here, $250 to $499. Folks that are bidding $425 to $500 on this job are getting it more often, statistically speaking, on the site. And the reason why is if you're buying something and someone is offering like a hyper discounted rate, it has an aura to it. People want to buy something that's premium, something that's of value, something that they know is like high level professional quality. So bid for yourself fairly, but don't underbid because folks see that as a sign of professionalism. And that admittedly is probably the most difficult thing that I still struggle with to this day. But just don't underbid yourself. And the last little bit of advice I'll leave you with, it kind of ties into the other two things. But if you find you're on this site and you're not booking anything, it's important to understand, one, that a metric that Voices puts out themselves says for every 100 jobs that you submit, for every 100 auditions that you throw out there, if you book one of those, that is a 1% booking rate, you are in a successful voiceover bracket. That's a lot of work for a little bit of payoff. And it's just emblematic. It's a numbers game when you're starting off. So don't feel discouraged and just show up and use it as practice. Think of it as an investment in yourself to learn on your feet in a real world scenario and just get a bunch of practice. Now, that said, Voices also has this really lovely window here where you can see when people have listened to your job and when they've shortlisted it, which gives you this beautiful dopamine release of a green thumbs up. And check those out. When you get a green thumbs up, listen to it and be like, OK, so what was I doing in that one that seems to work? And you can sort of reverse engineer and hone your skills even more quickly. So I hope this was helpful for you in demystifying a bit about Voices.com. I know I didn't cover half of what you could cover on this site. So if you have more questions, please drop them down below and I'd be happy to answer them in additional videos. And until then, be well and I will see you there. Toodles. .