The #1 Biggest BLUNDER: Why You're Not Booking VO Gigs

Stop letting "bad luck” steal your bookings. Discover the #1 VO blunder and how to fix it now!

In this video, we reveal the straight truth most voice actors ignore: booking more gigs has less to do with talent or gear. It’s all about mastering the outreach numbers game.

You’ll learn why part-timers stay stuck, the proven habits of VO pros, and a simple 7-day action plan to explode your client list.

Ready to take control?

Download the free 7-Day VO Outreach Challenge Roadmap and join the VO Pro Community for the tools you need to finally go from hoping to booking.

🎯 Get the 7-Day VO Outreach Challenge: https://welcome.vopro.pro/7-day-outreach-challenge-roadmap

Join the VO Pro Community and get dozens of tool, resources, and a community of VO Pros there to help you: https://vopro.pro/vopro

#VoiceOver #VoiceActing #VOKickstart #BookingMoreGigs #VOBusiness #VoiceActorTips #OutreachChallenge #VOPro

Links: (When possible, I use affiliate links and may earn a commission. See disclosure below.)

▶️ Subscribe: https://vopro.pro/youtube

🆓 Free Voice Actor Resources: https://vopro.pro/freesources

📈 Work with Me: https://vopro.pro/workwithme

🎧 The VO Pro Podcast: https://vopro.pro/podcast

🪜 7 Steps to Starting and Developing a Career in Voiceover: https://vopro.pro/7steps

📭 Move Touch Inspire Newsletter for Voice Actors and Creative Pros: https://vopro.pro/mti

🖥️ Facebook: https://vopro.pro/facebook

🛒 The VO Pro Shop: https://vopro.pro/shop

🎙️ My voice over website: https://paulschmidtvoice.com

Tools and Tech:
📑  Create beautiful resources, e-books, and presentations like mine in minutes: https://vopro.pro/typeset
📘 Recommended Book List with Links: https://vopro.pro/booklist
⚙️ Tools I Use with Links: https://vopro.pro/gearlist
🎯 Lead generation and targeting: Apollo.io: https://vopro.pro/apollo
🛒 The world's best checkout cart: SamCart: https://vopro.pro/samcart
🌳 Way Better than Linktree: https://vopro.pro/pillar
🖊️ The best social media publisher I've found: https://vopro.pro/publer

Disclosure: Affiliate marketing is an great way to generate revenue as a content creator. Some links in my video descriptions are affiliate links and I may earn a commission should you make a purchase after clicking them. I only link to items I recommend. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

About (Paul) Schmidt:
Paul Schmidt is a successful voice actor, community builder, and voiceover business coach. 

He's also the creator of the VO Freedom Master Plan, a voiceover marketing program designed to generate consistent opportunities for voice actors to book work, and the VO Pro Community, a private, professional, global community created to meet the needs of voice actors and audiobook narrators who want to take their careers to the next level. 

Paul has been a voice actor for o

Transcript

0:00

Look, the reason you're not booking more voiceover gigs isn't because of your demo or your gear or some sort of bad luck. It's because you're not talking to enough people. Period. Every frustrated voice actor has been there and felt it. You send out a batch of emails, you fill out a few roster forms, maybe even you go and network at an event or two, and then you wait. Sometimes days pass, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, and the silence gets louder with every refresh of your inbox. And the temptation is to think that, you're missing some sort of secret sauce and that, you know, voiceover success is only for a chosen few. But as somebody who has been a business coach to hundreds of VO pros, I'm here to give you a little tough love. Your struggle isn't because of your lack of talent. It's because of your lack of outreach. Now before I get off on a rant here, I want to let you know we've got another free resource for you. A free source this week, and this week it's the Seven Day Outreach Challenge Roadmap. It's a step-by-step plan that you can execute in one week to jumpstart consistent bookings, even if you're brand new and just starting out. Again, that's a free download and we've got the link in the description and show notes. Go get it now. How many times have you said this to yourself? Well, if I just get that one big gig, everything will change. Maybe you've fantasized about that one recurring e-learning client, that one big commercial, or that audiobook contract that's gonna finally launch your VO career into orbit. Now, let me share a little story with you. Early on in my VO career, I clung to the hopes that the right person at the right time was just gonna pluck my demo from the big huge pile. I spent all my time obsessing over my website, perfecting my auditions and taking endless time tweaking the audio because surely that was the problem, right? Nope. When I look back, I realized at one point that in a given month, I had only reached out to 15 new people, new clients, new prospects. Out of those, only two even got back to me. And both of those were polite rejections. And it finally dawned on me I was fighting a numbers game with at best half-assed effort. Every established full-time voice actor I knew at the time, they all had one thing in common. They were reaching out to people and lots of them and they were doing it every damn day. Let's break down the reality of booking actual paid VO gigs. It's sales. Not the sleazy used car salesman, white shoes, plaid jacket sort of stuff, but the actual hard work of relationship building and intentional connection making. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but voiceover is sales. And sales is and always has been a numbers game. The more people you reach out to, the more people that will reply and the more conversations you will generate. The more demo listens you will drive, the more rosters you'll get on, the more auditions you will be given, and the more gigs you will be offered outright. And the more gigs you will book overall. more you will accumulate, and yes, the more revenue you will ultimately generate. But here's why the vast majority of voice actors get sideways in their careers, because they spend their time and energy and effort on the shit that doesn't matter. Tweaking auditions, obsessing over finding an agent, or throwing money at the P2P platforms. But they never take the time to build serious, consistent pipeline volume. Look, you can't control a client's budget. or a casting director's mood or market trends, but you absolutely can't control how many doors you knock on every day. Most voice actors reach out to a dozen prospects a month, if that. The pros reach out to multiple dozens of people every single day. Let's rewind for a minute and meet two people that we will call Jenny and Mark. two very talented voice actors, but also two very different talent. Now Jenny loves voiceover. She's good at it. She gets positive feedback from peers and from coaches whenever she does workouts. She submits to two casting sites and she reaches out to four or five local clients every few weeks. And occasionally she'll post her demo clips on social media. And when work is slow, she tweets her website. She may be... learns a new DAW plug-in, or she'll massage your branding. Of course, she feels busy, but her business isn't growing, and she's frustrated. And when she puts her head on a pillow at night, she sometimes wonders if she's cut out for this as a career. Now, Mark is objectively talented, but also objectively no more talented than Jenny, but every day he's committed to reaching out to 100 new contacts. He's built multiple lists of leads and he relentlessly, maniacally follows up even with people he hasn't heard from in months. He gets rejected over 97 % of the time. But that means that three out of 100 times somebody reaches back out to Mark and says, hey Mark, love your stuff. We'll reach out the next time we have something for you. Now, over a few weeks, over a few months, that's dozens of conversations, some of which turn into auditions, rosters. and booked gigs. Within a year, Mark's built momentum. He's on his way to building that full-time career he's always dreamed of. By the way, that 100 a day number is very realistic. That's what we coach in the VO Freedom Master Plan and my students do it every day. So let's sort of reset that math for you and your mindset. And yes, reaching out professionally and politely and targeting people. with relevance. That stuff all matters. But the biggest thing holding you back is believing the lie that you can just out quality, out craft the perfect email to make up for the volume of people you're not talking to. Bookings are a math equation guys. If your response rate to your outreach is let's say 1 % which is not uncommon when you're brand new and yes you can inch that up and make it a little bit better. If your response rate is 1 % and you want to get on let's say five rosters, the math says you're going to have to reach out to 500. Most people are reaching out to less than 10. Do you see the disconnect? I had a voice actor just last week tell me they were reaching out to 10 people a quarter. A quarter! That's less than one a week! Which is great if you want to book your next gig in the fall of 2078. Please, sweet baby Jesus, please stop hiding behind crafting each precious snowflake of an email until it's just... Perfect! While you're spending an hour doing that, I've already reached out to a hundred people and I had three people get back to me and say, hey, we love your stuff. We'll send you something next time we have something for you. That's three conversations started, three rosters, and God knows how many book jobs down the road. Guys, successful voiceover business owners are not just talented, they're data driven. They use tools like CRM, customer relationship management. to track the KPIs, the key performance indicators that move the needle. Leads contacted, follow-ups sent, positive or repeat responses, roster ads, auditions gained, booked jobs. Because if you're not keeping tabs on your numbers, guys, you're just guessing. Now that you got your head screwed on straight and the proper mindset, you gotta build that sales and marketing machine. Now, you don't need to buy leads or to sign on to every online casting site. Here are just a few kinds of prospects you should be reaching out to. Corporate e-learning and explainer video producers, ad agencies and boutique commercial studios, video game publishers, audiobook publishers, podcast production houses, local businesses with a budget, nonprofits, and universities with ongoing media and audio visual needs. You can use LinkedIn, you can use tools like Apollo, you can use trade directories, or even paid offers like the big book of Veo client avatars to find these buyer types and go after them. Now you're messaging. Best thing I can tell you. Don't overthink it. The client does not want a memo in the history of your journey through voiceover. They want relevant, concise intros from professionals who know how to solve their problem. You don't have to be clever. You just have to be human and direct. And here's the crucial part. Always providing relevance and value. Demonstrate an understanding of their problem, challenges and pain points, and how you solve them. Adapt it. personalize it, send it out over and over and over and over and over. And follow-up is non-negotiable. Sending out that first email and then quitting, that's the big mistake. Polite persistence, and I mean four to six follow-ups over the course of the next several months. That's how you break through, that's how you stay top of mind, and that's how you get the call or the email the next time a project comes up. And yes, each follow-up has to provide relevance. and value. And the third step is to measure and optimize relentlessly. Do not let perfectionism stand in the way of your activity. High performers get their messaging out into the marketplace and they tweak it as they go along. They don't try and make it perfect before they send it. That's what low performers do. Track your numbers, look at what's working. What's getting open? What's getting replies? What's getting you on rosters? Which buyer types are responding and sending you auditions and sending you gigs? And then double down on that stuff and move forward. If you've been doing this for a while and your response rate is below 2%, experiment with your targeting and your messaging. And if your response rate is 4 or 5 % or even higher, double down on that and start sending out more. It's working. But here's the sad part, and here's the part that is uncomfortable for a lot of people because they don't have the patience. They quit before the magic happens, right? They bust their ass for a few months, maybe even a year before that momentum really starts to build. Every conversation compounds over time. Every no brings you closer to a yes and every single connection plants a seed. If you treat your marketing outreach like you might treat a workout plan, consistent, disciplined, non-negotiable, then the clients will come. But this is not a do it for six weeks and see what happens sort of thing, guys. Now let's revisit Jenny and Mark. Six months in, Mark is juggling inbound leads and referrals, and he is now starting to say no to clients that don't fit his rates. Jenny, well, she's still busy, but she's still not booked. Now which one are you gonna be? You're gonna be Mark. or you're gonna be Jenny. Look guys, the transition to growing a full-time career in this business doesn't mean you have to hit some sort of lottery. It doesn't mean you need superhuman performance chops. What it does mean is you have to become a really great voiceover business coach to yourself. Tracking your numbers, improving your messaging over time, and building your own luck through that volume, that scale that we talked about, and through consistency. Now in the open, we mentioned our 7-day VO Outreach Challenge. We've got a free roadmap for you. Again, you can download that with the link in the description and show notes. Here's the actual challenge. First, build a list of 100 contacts. You can use whatever sources you want, whether it's Google, LinkedIn, trade directories. For the purposes of this challenge, it's best, if you can, to make them all the same type of buyer. That way you don't have to work on multiple forms of messaging and your messaging can be fairly consistent. Number two, And you can do this, reach out to all 100 in a week. That's 20 a day with short personalized value and relevance driven messaging. Number three, follow up with everybody who does not reply after a week and then follow up with everyone every three months for a year. Number four, Track every single response, every audition you're offered, every gig you're offered, every roster you get on. You can use a simple spreadsheet or you can use a CRM, a customer relationship management software like HubSpot Free. And number five, and this is the most important part, repeat steps one through four every week. That's where the magic of momentum happens. Keep that up for a quarter and you'll start to see some results. Keep it up for a year and you'll look back on this week as the week that the light bulb went on. Do not let lack of outreach be the reason you don't make it in this business. Stop believing that lie in your head that says, oh, I've got to get everything just perfect before I start marketing. Start now. Start flooding your funnel with new conversations. Start talking to people. Start those conversations. Action crushes anxiety. Volume crushes bad luck and consistency. crushes burnout. If you found this video helpful and you think it might be helpful for someone else, another voice actor, another creative entrepreneur, please share it with them. That would help us a great deal and will help them a great deal. If you're following us on YouTube, give us a like. subscribe to the channel. you're listening to us on the audio podcast, give us a follow. Even better, write us a review. We would be very, very grateful for that. The more we share strategies, tips, ideas, even opinions, whether it's on this channel or in the VO community at large, the better, stronger industry we will have for everyone. Thanks so much. We'll see you back here again real soon.