Finding Additional Voice-Over Income Streams

Diversify your income from voice-over. If you are involved in the art and industry of voice-over, it certainly pays to have a strategy for different income streams.

 

Cash flow can sometimes be a problem for VO artists in between projects so here are a few things to think about which could potentially generate much-needed income for your business:

 

• Pricing packages – You may have a few clients that you work with on an ad hoc basis. Maybe they are e-learning companies or radio stations. If you want to turn an ad hoc customer into a regular customer consider offering them some packages to incentivise them to use you. For example, discounts on a package of radio adverts or e-learning projects. The more work they give you, the better the discount you can offer. This will give them the incentive to offer you additional work.

• Payment upfront – If you can offer your clients a good discount for payment upfront then everybody wins. The client wins because they need the work doing anyway so to get a discount is good business. You win because you immediately get the cash injection into your business and you don’t have to waste time chasing invoices at a later stage.

• Strategic alliances – Build relationships with local video production companies and digital marketing companies. Content marketing is a hot topic at the moment. Having great content is all about having engaging copy, images, video, audio, social media etc as part of your marketing output. If you can team up with digital marketing companies and video production companies, they can bolt on your services to what they offer and add their own premium to the price. This could potentially lead to regular work for you, and additional revenue for the company you strike the alliance with.

• Upsell – Think about ways you can offer more to existing clients. For example, if you have just worked on a voice over for a company’s corporate video, could you potentially talk to them about providing a podcasting service for them or revamping their current telephone on-hold message to make it more professional. The more you can add value to their business, the more likely they are to use you again and recommend you to others.

 

• Add audio related services – Some companies appreciate to have vendors who can do more than just one task. Beyond providing voice-over, you can offer services such as: transcription, proof-reading, translation, audio editing, voice synched to video (dubbing). Voice-Over is a business and if you have some add-ons, you will be surprised to find work there too.

• Raise your rates – This is a bit more controversial but it is definitely a strategy you should consider. Your regular clients who value your services will most likely accept your rate increase and for the odd client that doesn’t and goes elsewhere, you will be making enough money from those who are prepared to pay to more than compensate for those who don’t.

It’s about working smarter not harder. As VO artists we can sometimes be busy fools. Get paid what you know you are worth and you will end up working with the type of clients that you’ve always wanted to work with.

How do you develop additional income streams for your VO business? Do you have any more tips you could share? It would be great to hear from you.