In order to present yourself as a well-rounded brand, you must establish a widespread online presence that makes it easy for prospective clients to locate you anywhere. On this front, nothing is better than a polished, professional website for your voice over business, that all of your digital properties can lead back to.
The goal of your homepage is both to provide a destination where the entirety of your voice services are clearly stated, and to quickly and convincingly capture your brand story. The benefit of having a website devoted completely to your voice over business involves the fact that it stands on its own, as opposed to a profile that may be lost amid a sea of other distractions and/or candidates for a role—like social media sites, or a voice audition platform.
Although individual personal websites may seem passé, and are no longer the way we navigate and connect with one another on the world wide web, your voice acting website will nonetheless function as the ultimate tool toward staking out your niche, developing your personal brand, and building your business on its own terms. Your voice acting website is entirely under your control.
How to Build a Voice Over Business Website
Before you start building a website for your voice over business, here are a few guidelines and tips that can help you along the way.
Register Your Domain Name
Choosing the perfect domain name for your voice acting website is no cakewalk. On one hand, your domain name predetermines so much about the way your site will be found and subsequently viewed by all of its visitors. On another, a number of domain names have already been claimed. You should be strategic and think like a marketer when you are brainstorming available domain names that can help you to stand out and draw visitors to your voice acting website.
Because a lot of domain names are no longer free for the taking, it’s a good idea to brainstorm multiple options and try to be a bit flexible. Some voice talent choose to incorporate their real name into their domain. Others may choose to go by a stage name, or use their domain to advertise their signature voice, or the type of voice work that they do.
It is essential to remember that a domain name isn’t simply the URL at the top of your browser’s address bar, but has an influence on your site’s header, logo, other visual properties, and the way your site appears on search engines.
You can use a web hosting company like GoDaddy to determine if your domain is available. If it is, you will have to purchase that domain.
Create Content for Your Voice Acting Website
Once you’ve purchased your domain name, then it’s time to begin adding some content to your site. The effectiveness of your voice acting website site won’t be determined by the amount of content that appears on it, but whether you fill it with strong or weak content.
Your first order of business should be to deduce exactly how you want to describe your voice and your vocal services using words. Our Voice Actors Style Tag page may be a helpful resource when it comes to figuring out exactly how you want to describe your sound. Would you say you have an Old Time Radio voice, or would Retro be the better word to describe it? Do you want to come across as Sophisticated, Classy, or Posh—or all three?
The written description of your voice should highlight your strengths, specialties, and unique characteristics in as few words as possible. You’ll also want to summarize your voice over services in a few sentences, or use bullet points to leave the reader wanting more. All of your written content should be composed with the aim to strategically direct your client to your contact information, so they must reach out to you personally to find out more about your voice and what you do.
Don’t give too much away or overcrowd your site with excess blocks of text. All of your written content should be strategically composed to lead your client to your contact info, so that they must reach out to you personally to find out more about your voice and what you do.
Design wise, all pages of your voice acting website should be easy on the eyes and have a smooth, natural flow. While you want to keep the website on most of your pages short and snappy, if you’d like to go full throttle with the text, then we highly recommend that you create a blog.
Consider Adding a Voice Acting Blog
What can a voice actor blog about?
Much like Voices’s blog, you can blog about pretty much any subject with relation to the voice industry and your experiences as a voice actor: from tips for auditioning, to how you achieve different reads for different formats (commercial radio vs. audiobooks)—whatever strikes your fancy. Like all good bloggers, you’ll want to pick an audience and write for them. If you want to use your blog to get more work, write about topics of interest to the clientele you want to attract.
The point of running a consistently updated blog is building an audience, and it causes your brand to become real. You are not simply an empty, robotic domain name, but you are a living, relatable persona and business owner.
A blog will help incorporate you into the larger voice over community. You can comment on other voice actors’ blogs, and in turn, they can leave comments on yours. This also helps puts you in control of your professional image, and the ability to craft your brand story.
Consistently updating your blog isn’t merely beneficial for your committed readers, who are invested in your brand story and journey as a voice actor, but it can also have advantages when it comes to gaining new visits to your site.
Ensure that Your Website is Optimized for Search Engines
When you’re producing the blog posts for your voice acting website, it is important to strike a fine balance between the use of search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and writing authentic, quality content that reads smoothly and comes straight from the heart. At a basic level, search engine optimization involves thinking about what people are searching (topics or ‘keywords’) for, and how they’re searching for it (i.e. are they asking questions, like ‘where do I find a voice actor?’ or are they looking for information with simple terms like ‘voice actors in my area). SEO can be a complex endeavor, and in fact, many people take years of study to learn how to master it. Writing with SEO in mind can help drive organic traffic to your site: meaning visitors who find your site because it appears to them on Google.
Instead of becoming overwhelmed, you can use SEO tools, like Answer the Public, to learn more about topics people are looking for. You can also simply hop into Google and begin to type in your search query to see what ‘related searches’ come up. Include these insights into your blog posts so that they rank for keywords.
You should also update your blog regularly. The more you update your blog with fresh, rich content, the more search engines like Google will crawl your site and give it an upward boost on the search rankings.
Even if you aren’t churning out streams of SEO-refined, keyword-dense text, then simply having search engines in mind when you’re writing can go a long way toward crafting strong, savvy text. Above all, it is best to write impactful, entertaining, informative content for your human audience, not the search engine.
Adding Multimedia Content to Your Voice Acting Website
If you aren’t a skilled writer or don’t particularly enjoy expressing yourself through writing, it is perfectly fine to make up for that by alternatively filling your site with multimedia content: pictures, video, and, most specifically, audio.
Placing audio on your voice acting website should be a no-brainer. One of the first things a visitor should come across after winding up on your home page should be your voice demo. In a vast majority of the cases, listening to your demos will be the reason the visitor has come to your site in the first place. Include as many demos as possible, but be careful not to overcrowd your site. Just make sure your voice can be found anywhere.
If you’re not so keen on sharing your experiences as a voice actor via a written blog, but you still have a lot to say, you can always consider producing your own voice over podcast. Hosting an original podcast on your site kills two birds with one stone: it demonstrates both your technical capabilities, as well as your ability to sound natural and engaging. Make sure to note that your podcast voice, when you’re just speaking casually, may not reflect your signature voice.
Whenever you post a new demo or other multimedia content on your site, make sure to write a story about it or distribute it across social media!
Sonic Branding and Visual Identity
Because your website is completely built around expressing the brand of your voice over business, it offers the opportunity for you to truly define the sonic and visual identity of your voice. This can be easily achieved by crafting a simple logo, whether you design it yourself or you outsource it to a graphic designer who can help you achieve your vision. And what is your vision? It shouldn’t be too lofty. A clean, simple logo should be as close as possible to a visual portrayal of how your voice sounds. Your logo can be attached to press releases, appear on your homepage, and get used in all of your advertising materials.
More Tips for Building Your Voice Acting Website
- Build your whole website with the needs of prospective casting directors/employers in mind.
- Test your site across multiple browsers, mobile devices, etc.
- Design a specific version of your site for mobile.
- Make sure your demos are easily accessible from every page.
- When describing your services, alter your phrasing to emphasize “benefits,” not “features.” Speak toward clients with their final result in mind.
- Include a photo of yourself on your website. It will help you seem more approachable and transparent.
- Add a page to your site that specifically features testimonials from clients who have worked with you before. This will help prospective clients feel more comfortable working with you.
- Continually update your site with fresh content. Beyond being general good practice, this will work to your advantage when Google performs a ‘crawl’ of your page, notices new content, and updates your site’s search engine ranking accordingly.
- Keep it simple: minimize the need for scrolling and click-through.
- Research competitors’ websites for ideas about what to use on your own site.
- Make sure you have a call to action (CTA) on every page.
The personal website for your voice over business, your profile on an online marketplace like Voices, and your various voice acting social media accounts should all be closely connected. Visit this page to learn how you can additionally deploy your social media channels to promote your voice acting business across the web and beyond.