The VO Pro Blog

In this first-ever chat with our friend and colleague, we chat with the Queen of LinkedIn for VO, Tracey Lindley about her journey into the voiceover industry, her experiences with LinkedIn, and the importance of community and organization in building a successful career. Tracy shares her unique background, the challenges she faced as a voice actor in a midsize market, and her strategies for networking and marketing herself effectively. We also talk about the the evolution of LinkedIn and its impact on voice actors, as well as the significance of reliability and personal connections in the industry.

The current state of the voice over business is not the problem. Generative AI, the pay-to-plays, the glut of talent, the seemingly endless string of strikes… none of that is the reason you’re not succeeding in voice over.

VO is not the problem.

Today, I’m talking to me as much as I’m talking to you. You think everyone else, especially coaches have it all together all the time and I’m here to tell you I don’t always have it all together. No one does.

Today is a pep talk for both of us.

What makes a great voice over podcast? There is a mess of them out there, but which ones are worth your precious time and attention?

To me, a great VO podcast has to be current – this industry changes at light speed and if your last episode was 4 months ago or you publish when you feel like it, you’re not keeping the community up to date.

A great voiceover podcast has to be educational and insightful and give solid advice on the industry. If it’s full of get rich quick and Fiverr advice, it’s just garbage.

And a great voice over podcast has to be listenable. The host or hosts have to be engaging and interesting. If they feature guests, the guests have to have insights and stories to tell, and the hosts should let the guests talk.

Today, I’m going to give you 14 of the Top Podcasts in Voice Over in no particular order. In my opinion, all 14 meet these criteria, and are super helpful to learn about the industry.

Every Olympian has a goal of winning gold. Every team starts the season with the goal of a championship.

It’s the systems, the habits, that separate elite from very good, very good, from good, good from mediocre, and mediocre from bad.

So today, I’m going to lay out for you the Top 7 Habits of Highly Successful Voice Actors – the seven strategic systems or habits I believe to be the most effective for building a successful career in VO. And stick around because I’ll have a two special free bonus tools for you as we go through these.

There are hundreds of apps out there to help run our voice acting businesses, but finding the right ones can be like finding a needle in a haystack. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve found a set of tools that works for me.

In this video, I’m going to break down why I prefer these specific apps, what the learning curve is like, and how much they’ll set you back.

Welcome to the 21st century – the age of information, misinformation, and disinformation. Even with topics as niche as voice over there’s a ton of information out there about voice acting on YouTube, and like every other topic in the world, a ton of crap out there about voice over on YouTube.

So today I’m going to [WARNING: PRETENTIOUS WHITE PERSON WORD AHEAD] curate for you the Best 9 YouTube Channels for Voice Actors, especially if you’re newer in your voice acting career. I’m going to break them down by category, including Performance and Business, and give you one bonus channel at the end which is especially helpful for newer voice over actors.

Just about everything in the voice over business slows down in June, July, and August.

But I also hear a lot of talk about a more macro slowdown in the voice over industry overall. Is that real? Is that just a chicken little reaction to AI? Are there other forces at play? Is this a perfect storm that means existential crisis for our business?

It doesn’t even matter if there’s a slowdown in the industry or not. If it’s slow for you, it’s slow. And if there is a slowdown in the industry, macro or micro, you can’t do shit about it.

But you can do something with it. You have the choice to not just survive, but thrive.

Today, we’re going to talk about doubling down, leaning into the slowness, and using it to your competitive advantage so that you emerge from the Summer Slowdown, and any slowdown or crisis, even stronger, better, and more successful.

One of the problems with voice over advice on YouTube and in general is that it often comes from successful people. Huh? Well duh, why would we take advice from idiots, Paul?

Stay with me.

Among the things it takes to be successful is time. So, the people that are successful today started years and often decades ago.

And the problem with that is voice over is a very different business than it was 30, 20, 10, even 5 years ago. And so many of the strategies and paths and techniques that made successful voice actors even in the 20-teens don’t apply today, here, now, in the mid 2020’s and beyond.

If you’re just getting into the business today, that’s a problem.

So today I’m going to tell you exactly what I would do if I were a new voice actor. I’ll give you the timeline and how I would spend my time, money, energy, attention. I’ll tell you what tools I would use, gear I would buy, and just as importantly, mistakes I would not make that rookies today make often.

Today, I’m going to break down these Seven Deadly Sins, explain to you why they are gigantic no-nos written across the sky in red neon, and what the consequences are for committing them are.

In fact, let’s get the consequences out of the way. Are these sins deadly as in will they kill your career? Some actually can. But at the very least, they will kill the most important relationships you have in this business, damage your reputation in the industry, and in some cases, will get your ass hauled into court.

In case I haven’t made it clear, NEVER, as in ever-ever-never do these seven things:

Voice actors are petrified of marketing their services. Today, we’re going to get into what those fears are, why they exist, and why they’re complete and utter B.S. We’ll talk about some of the misconceptions around sales and marketing your voice over business, and what sales and marketing really are at their core.

The voice over industry is like a roller coaster on steroids right now, thanks to the generative AI boom, recent SAG-AFTRA and ACTRA strikes, and a bunch of other factors shaking things up.

You’re here because you want to know where to focus your energy and where to maybe pump the brakes a bit. So, let’s dive in and break it all down, no BS, just the facts.