 Hey, it's time for a voiceover body shop and our guest this week is the amazing expert on Your websites Joe Davis wave We want your questions. We want your URLs. We want to look at your websites, too So join us now for voiceover body shop From the outer reaches they came Bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record your voice over audio and Together from the center of the VO universe, they bring it to you now George Wittem the engineer to the VO stars a Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build set up and maintain the professional video studios of the biggest names in VO today and you Dan Leonard the voiceover home studio master a professional voice down with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional-sounding home VO studio and Each week they allow you into their world bringing you talks with the biggest names in the voice of a world today Letting you ask your questions and giving you the latest information to make the most of your voice over business welcome to voiceover body shop voiceover body shop is brought to you by voiceover essentials comm home of Harlan Hogan signature products source elements remote studio connections for everyone voice actor websites dot-com where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt VO heroes dot-com become a hero to your clients with a word-winning voiceover training J. Michael Collins demos when quality matters and voiceover extra your daily resource for VO success and now Live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks, California Here are the guys Hey, we're live for those of you watching live I'm Dan Leonard, and I'm George Whidham, and this is voiceover body shop or VO BS All right. Well tonight our guest is Joe Davis. We want to talk about voice actor websites and I'm sure every time Joe's on here It's becoming an annual tradition actually because you guys just drove back from Vegas together Yes from Wovo con which was fabulous. We have sure it was great time It was well organized and the audio-visual stuff was perfect because it was me running around plugging in Everything musical projectors and yeah like that But your voice sounds a little worse a little worse for the wear We'll see that's the thing when you go to a voiceover conference, and we've said this before you got to use your indoor voice Yeah, not easy is it otherwise you're out of business for a couple of days as a voice actor So was there any karaoke ying there was did you sing any I did oh I did my traditional hit me with your rhythm stick Which only fortunately only a few people got to witness oh But but they at least gloried and reveled in it anyway And you're back after a long absence. Well, yeah, I mean absent, but not yeah, yeah We're you were here remote it in two different Shows yeah, that was I came in today. I was like What is different about this place? Oh, I'm here. That's that's what's different. It was we absolutely But it's good to be back in the studio in the flesh and it's much way more fun this way excellent Well, it's time to introduce our guest. I think he actually holds the record for being on our show the most He might he might decide from you and me. He's officially a friend of the show Yes, you know and and a sponsor by the way But that has nothing to do with it the fact of the matter is he is the guru the master of Websites for voice actors and he is the owner of voice actor websites calm and an expert in SEO and all sorts of stuff that you guys Always ask about let's welcome back Joe Davis Gracefully duck under the microphone Duck the mics to the limbo and your hand Welcome back sir. Good to see you after the last 10 minutes. That's true Two days not at all Yeah, I just had to wake him up Sure, I passed out on the couch. Wake up. Alrighty So if you've got questions for Joe about you know your website because boy people just ask lots of questions And you did a great presentation this week. Thank you. It was a lot of fun place was packed everybody's like What do you say? What do you say? Anyway, but how did you get into? The website business Because you're not a voice actor. So that's true. Although I play one sometimes. Okay on the voiceover show So I I started actually Probably when I was I don't know 11 or 12 before that the internet had graphics my father was a professor at the University and I had access to the the computers that nobody else did and so I started tinkering with them and creating stuff that I thought was fun and eventually I created a website which was for back then I I still played video games and I created a website for a video game that I played and I put up the moves and that kind of thing and Eventually it got so popular that the creators of the game came and chatted with their fans on there and I put up some ads and started making money and then people started approaching me and saying hey, can you do our websites and Then I went to college did it on the side and Then finished college worked for a non-profit, which is how we met 15 years ago or so Yeah, and and then you got me involved in the voiceover industry and the rest is history See that was my next question. How'd you get involved in voice acting stuff? That's his fault. Yeah, so neatly Dan told me about this wonderful world of voice actors and warned me never to get involved And I luckily did not take his advice and he trained me himself and I've spent the last close to probably eight years in VO doing websites marketing branding We even do some casting now and that was a happy accident We basically we started getting contacted by companies who said hey you work with a lot of voice actors Do you know someone who could fill in the blank and then we started working with agents and doing their websites? And they said you work with a lot of voice actors Do you know someone who couldn't fill in the blank and so it's just one of those win-wins? Yeah, what a business grows organically out of necessity. That's how mine came together to just people were going nobody's doing this No, okay, I should do that. Yeah, and now it's really important because you have to have a website if you're a voice actor Otherwise, you really can't be one Why is it so important for someone to have a website as a voice? Yeah, why not just Facebook? Yeah You had to throw me an easy question So as a voice actor you need a place for someone to be able to hear you and hire you and If you are using a pay-to-play profile or social media You're essentially sending a potential client to a place where there are thousands or tens of thousands of people that do what you do and Have the opportunity to be distracted at the very least So I think the the reason there is obvious But larger than that a website can serve multiple purposes It can be an extension of a business card where you have some sort of interaction with someone And you're sending them there to listen to your demo to see who your clients are to watch a video that You did the vo4 And whatever else you wanted to inform them of and then ideally engage them either for a job or longer term As someone who's interested in what you write about Paul Strickwater is a great example of that Dave Parvasier also and It's a great way to keep both the industry informed if you're writing things for voice talent and or People who are hiring talent, which is a big issue now, you know People who are hiring talent may never have hired talent before Before the process went through agents and casting directors and production companies And now you have people who are working directly With talent and don't know how to hire a talent or what a fair rate is and so I think as as talent There's a lot you can do to educate the buyer Yeah, so what are some of the important elements someone needs to have in their website? Well demo, yeah, and and you have to define your goals Right so a website that is the extension of a business card where The question is what is important to have for the talent seeker is Sort of a different question than What do I need for a website that is satisfying a search engine like google and is helping people find me that don't already know me So they're not looking for Joe Davis or Dan Leonard They're looking for a male voice actor of this age that does this type of vo And so I'll answer the the first question first, which makes more sense than answering the second question first Uh, that's the sleep talking or lack thereof So the the extension of the business card the demo is Front and center it has to be um, that's what they're hiring you for right for your voice and you want them to hear you I sometimes get people who approach me and say hey, I need a website And I said great. What type of vo do you do and send me your demo? Let me hear it And they say I don't have a demo and I'm always surprised by that because What are you selling you know and so I at that point we often say all right Why don't you reach out to woe vote a world of voices organization and learn about vio? Why don't you read voice over extra um get involved in the industry start the conversation on facebook of What is voice over and how do I get involved? But you're you're not ready for a website yet? So demo playable and downloadable so so important There are casting directors agents producers who want to save your demo on their computer and listen to it later If they like you or a week later or a month later or save you for that job that they don't have yet But they think you'd be perfect for and if you can't save your demo you might be out of the running for that When you make your demo downloadable Make sure you put your name on it because how do a lot of people label their demo commercial demo dot mp3 Oh boy corporate narration demo dot mp3 great. So it's seven hours later or Three weeks later and who is this person So make sure you put your name in the file name And also in the metadata if you can an email address and website not in the file name, but in the the metadata Make me what do you mean by metadata? Sometimes that just goes Oh good people's good question So I can speak to it But um, you could actually speak to it probably better on how to do it metadata is information That is embedded into the audio file. So when it's opened in a player It actually appears on the screen and so you can put in Various different things. Um the process is different depending on the software you're using like in pro tools In audacity when you save an mp3 it it prompts you yeah in twisted wave You have to you have to actually go into another thing to edit it But yeah, it's going to ask you like name or an artist title all these things that may not be relevant But the more information you put in there the better, right for for a demo Yes, you know to do it. You don't have to do it for auditions, but demos for sure absolutely and um, I often I'm glad you mentioned artists because I I often check this and The demo producers name often ends up in that field when I get the the mp3 and so Because people will get the the demo from the demo producer and somehow it gets because of their software it gets It gets plugged into there. So make sure you're checking those things. Yeah But yeah, so demo super super important and then Contact information the ability to hire you The more the better in my opinion. So phone number email address contact form Contact forms are I think a good idea for a couple reasons one is Many people now don't use outlook or an email program. They use gmail or g-suite Or office 365 where it's a web-based thing. And so when you're you're clicking on an email address on a website What happens it pops open? Sorry, apple mail or whatever. I don't use that right. It's not configured. Please configure X X get me out of here. So annoyance You want to give people the option to email you but you also want to give them a contact form They say, okay, my name is this my emails. This is what I want. Boom. And I was just at a another voiceover conference about a month ago And a casting director said You have three seconds to get my attention Three seconds with the website three seconds with the demo and three seconds with contacting you And if I can't do each of those things in about three seconds, I'm out I don't know if that's industry standard or not, but I think it's an important lesson that You have a very limited window and the more, you know, millennial producers you have probably the Short of the attention span Yes, exactly. So nothing against millennials. No, I'm sort of almost one. No, you're not white. No I um, so we we covered demo and contact and really again, those are the two most important things I think Having a bio gives someone a taste of who you are as a talent Maybe a reason to to connect with you on a personal level. So, oh, they're a dancer. I'm a dancer Oh, they have a background as a teacher. I loved my teacher in middle school Whatever it is, you're giving them a reason to personally identify with you. Uh client logos Uh client list That's kind of like, um, amazon where you're you're buying something and there are five gold stars and positive reviews And you know, you know that this you're actually not the first person who's buying this product or service And so testimonials same thing um on the testimonial side I know some people have had issues with other voice actors going after their contacts and so If if you're concerned about that, I would say just put the first name of the the person and then the last initial And maybe the the company that they're from or just the company and that can prevent against that um having a delivery methods Area, so if you have ISDN IPDTL source connect by all means tell clients that and I guess even if you don't You know, you can buy day passes on some of these things. So you you shouldn't say I have IPDTL or source connect, but you can say available via and then you can buy a day pass, right? Excellent excellent point Now george and iro is talking about you know with your audio The idea is not to sound great. The idea is to not sound bad And i'm sure that the it That rules true with with websites as well because You don't want to look bad. What are some things you do not want to do? with your website Lots of Things on your site that don't have to do with you as a voice actor So I know people that are a lot of people are concerned with creating a brand and legitimately so But a brand should reflect who you are not this Perfect version of you And the same thing is true of audio right if you if you sound different in your auditions than you do in your demos That's going to be a problem. So it should reflect you it should be relevant Uh, and you it shouldn't take over the the website so demos above the fold is I'd say really really important Definitely on the front page making someone hunt for your demos by putting them on an internal page and it's great to have internal pages It's good for seo and we'll talk about that but um Just having no demos on your home page at all. I think is a big mistake So putting lots of imagery things that make the site load fast people will um sometimes put videos in the background And that's auto playing And that makes a website load so much slower and again with attention spans and On people looking at things on mobile. They're gonna leave quickly Auto playing audio never never do so how many times have you hit a website? And it layered over the speakers or you know, you're waiting in line at the the dmv or the dentist and your phone starts Screaming and you're you're xing out. So never have auto playing audio uh Don't give people the opportunity to Go somewhere else and be distracted and what I mean by that is Let's say you have video on on youtube Don't send them to youtube to watch it embed it on your site because what happens you go to youtube You you watch that video and then it says Oh, you watch this so you must also like x y and z. Yeah the recommendation engine Exactly and then 20 minutes later. You're down the rabbit hole because you watched the funny kitten video Which led you to the stegosaurus costume Uh, which led you to the tyrannosaurus rex fight at uncle roy's barbeque And so some russian disaster with a crane, you know things like that Yeah, right love those videos those are fun Uh, once again, our we're our guest here on voiceover body shop is joe davis Uh, he is the president ceo and lord and master of voice actor websites dot com Which is the only place that really does stuff specifically for voice actors Right, I I have nothing to add to that. That was quite a less. Thank you. All right. Well, there's a lot of I don't understand any of this stuff, which is why you do it And you know and you seem to do it until like two in the morning Pacific time and you're in florida Um, but there's lots of different terminology that I don't understand like, you know like title tags in keywords What's that all about? So title tags when you do a google search for something And there's a blue line that you click on in the results and it says, you know Dan Leonard home studio master And you can click on that it takes you to the website That is the the title tag for that particular page Every page on your website has a distinct title tag meaning it's different and It's also what appears when you bookmark a site and in the very top of the browser above the address bar in that little narrow window But the reason that it's important aside from just that you want to convince a human being to click on your site when they see it in google Is that a search engine generally attributes more weight to the words that appear there? So if you want to rank well for male corporate narration And you don't have that in your title tag. It's not a you know, um, silver bullet where it's going to Solve all of your seo problems. But if you don't have it there There's a darn good chance that you're not going to rank for it If you do and then you follow all the other different things then there's a good chance that you will So it it's a pretty basic thing that you can do to give yourself a nice boost And depending on the platform that you're using Um, it there's a different process for doing it But it's always simple to set a title tag And so if you're using wordpress squarespace wix Any of those platforms you can just google how to set a title tag meta title tag or description And um, there'll be an answer there or you can send me an email. I'm happy to tell you in wordpress I would recommend installing the plugin yost And y o a s t And it gives you all kinds of additional functionality in wordpress including Setting your title tags and descriptions and the description is what appears below that that title tag in a search result So it's the description of that particular page And when you do a search and the the pages come up you'll see That there are words that get bolded in the description and that's what's triggering the result to show So um some basic seo stuff that helps convince humans to click on your site And satisfies some of those keyword requirements from google and the other search engines And just to be clear it shouldn't be a list of keywords So it's not like mail warm conversational blah blah blah It's you want it to to make sense. It should be something that that captures someone's attention. Excuse me And um has the right keywords in there And that goes for the title tag and description. Yeah, I mean that that's the thing though Is you're competing against thousands and thousands of other voice actors Are people going to find you by doing a simple voice actor search? What's going to what's going to get them? You know, what is it in your website that's going to get somebody to find you before somebody else? With a very wide search Good question. Well, if they search just for voice actor, they actually will find us Because voice actor websites comes up on the first page of google for that search, but uh, I would say If you look at the the search landscape as The the broader your go The more searches there are but the more competitive it is And then you start thinking about what is my niche? What do people hire me for what are the the things that people would be searching for? And that's called long tailed search when you're not just saying voice actor, but maybe you're looking for Audio book narrator warm conversational, you know, that's a longer search term and those longer search terms are generally easier to rank for There's much less search for them But if you can own a lot of those or even a few lucrative ones Then it's a a great way to Get started in the seo game So if you've been doing this for a while if you have a lot of great content a large website or a budget to spend on seo Then going after some of those more competitive terms may make sense If not, then those long tailed ones can be um low hanging fruit and actually there's a tool that we use all the time It there's it costs um to use it. There's a monthly fee I think it starts at something like $150 a month and goes up from there But um just this past week they actually released a free version of it And it's it's not the the full version, but it has a lot of the functionality in it it's actually on our site now on the the voiceover body shop page and It's called the the maz domain analysis tool and it will tell you things like your domain authority domain authority is a logarithmic scale from zero to a hundred And the higher your website ranks as a number The more powerful it is So um, but it's also more difficult to go higher the higher the number is so if you're a five It's easier to go to a six than it is from a six to a seven and so on and so forth But um that tool is a great way to to kind of get started Analyzing where your seo is and where there might be opportunity because it'll tell you a list of The keywords that your site ranks in the first five pages of google So most people are not going past the first page, right? But let's say you're on page two or three or four. So you're probably not getting traffic for that keyword But with a little bit of work you might pop to the first page And then be able to start getting traffic from it So um starting with a tool like that seeing where you are now will help you define where the the landscape is and where you may be able to go Fascinating our guest is joe davis once again If you've got a question for joe probably stuff that I wouldn't know to ask Because some of you are real geeky about your websites and stuff and maybe no HTML and all this programming language and stuff But uh, if you've got a question throw it in the chat room either in facebook Or over on our website in our in our chat room there and we will get to that also We'd like your home page your voice actor website page. So maybe we can take a look at it and see what joe thinks of it And uh, we would love to hear from you from that so you can give us your your urls Uh, and we will look at those as well. Uh, so You're talking about a lot of stuff When I started in voice acting. I was told there would be no math And I think to a lot of people they're you know, you start talking about well this and this and you're right Can you they're all going? Why better to hire somebody who knows this stuff You know if you have the the ability or the time to do it yourself by all means do it If you don't we certainly can do it or um a trained professional can do it But I I think a lot of it When you take out the technical part it's common sense. And so, um, think about what a searcher's intent is What are they trying to find and how are they trying to find it and then Crafting your site in a logical way to answer that question. So does your title tag match your h1 tag and an h1 tag is a heading tag on your your page Um, does your h1 tag and your your title tag support the content that's below it Does the content link to other content that makes sense or does other content link to that that makes sense Do you have images that support that content and have alt tags and alt tags are a uh I'm trying not to use jargon, but you know, there's there's no other way to say it There's jargon is jargon right so an alt tag stands for alternative text And that is a way of essentially labeling an image so that that text does not appear on the front end The the user doesn't see it, but the engine sees it and says Oh, this is a picture of this exactly what also makes your site accessible That's where why screen reader will read out picture of a flower or something like that It was originally you're absolutely right It was originally created that tag to help people who are visually impaired understand images on a page And so a screen reader would read that out Google who couldn't see images that oh, this is a great opportunity for us to Identify what an image is and so it became a tool in the seo arsenal. Um, what's interesting is that Google's Knowledge of graphics and how to use ocr, which is optical character recognition Basically a way of scanning an image and understanding what's in it has grown Tremendously and that's actually thanks to all of us. So good. There's multiple pictures we post and Or it had to do with the capture thing too. Exactly. It has to do with the capture So click all the squares with a school bus in it, right exactly and now do the ones with bicycles And now the ones with traffic lights Crosswalks, that's one of my favorite crosswalk. I don't see a crosswalk there So what you're doing is you're training google's ai to understand images The only problem with that is if Google doesn't know what those images are you could lie right and then the ai wouldn't work and You're also preventing spam because you're you know, if a robot can't tell what a fire hydrant is or a school bus Then it's not clicking the right images But if you can lie and say what are not the right images then The system wouldn't learn correctly, right? Yeah, so google's smart obviously and They know what two of those images are already But one of them they don't And so if you get the two right they're gonna assume that you got the third one right And they're gonna run it by a hundred other people and if a hundred other people confirm what you did or 97 of them do Then they're gonna say okay. This is also a fire hydrant So that's how the system works and they crowdsource their training They could hire people to do this But then they'd have to pay people to sit there literally all day and click images instead They have all of us do it So their their ai on images has gotten a lot better. Yeah, so there's not somebody they're monitoring it. It's Big brother is doing this. Yep. And and interestingly enough it's sort of the same thing with audio so um the Speech to text systems out there and the speech recognition systems out there Most of them are not as good at Actually understanding the text or the the audio as google's and that's because of tools like google voice Which I actually recommend voice actors use because we're all small businesses, right? And as a small business it may be cost prohibitive to have an extra line or um Just a pain in the neck to have to pay for another cell phone And so what you can do is you can go to google.com slash voice and sign up for a free phone number And it'll basically forward to whatever you want your landline your cell phone or something else And you can have a custom voicemail for it And this way you can put a phone number on your website on your business card and you're not giving out your personal cell phone number but You should be aware that google is recording all of those conversations and so Again, they could pay people like there's a company called dragon Which was one of the leading speech recognition technology companies And they had to pay people to train their system and the systems get better the more voices that they hear So you can pay 10,000 people to train your system or you can release release a product for free like google voice And have millions of people train your system for free. Wow. And so Um, you know, if you're having classified conversations, I probably wouldn't use it But for everyday voiceover business, it's a good tool Fascinating. Well, George, you're looking like a operator at a telethon over there Uh, I I have a feeling we're getting a lot of questions from our vast audience. Are we not? There are we've gotten so far one, uh, link for a website All right, evaluation. Come on. Don't be a chicken one brave soul so far Um, that's coming. I I had just a question because it's been buzzing in my head. What does markdown mean? Markdown markdown mark up or markdown. Wasn't there a markdown for doing web coding? Markdown or markup markup. Oh, it's markup Like like with regular graphics. Yeah. Yeah, I tell you it stumped me It's a markup. What is what is markup? Um, so there Well, I'm wondering if there is a markdown that I just don't know about in the context I always see it like when I'm on square space. It says you can view this as Uh, you can view it as a whizzy wig. You can view it as You are as web as you are on what I'm hdml or you can view it as markup or markdown I can't remember which one it is. Okay. So well whizzy wig is what um, what you see is what you get It's a visual drag and drop. It's mostly what I use. Yeah html markup is generally the code And so I think that's what you're referring to. Yeah, that's what I mean So there's the code, right? So that's basically looking at the actual code of how something's created Many website builders out there create the code for you. So you you drag you click you do and then the code's written On the back end. You never have to look at it. You never have to do the math But if you want to if you want to make some sort of custom edit and you know how you can look at the html markup It's possible that there's a markup down now that I'm just not aware of. Okay. I will google that later. All right All right, we'll tell you what we're gonna get to your questions in just a minute and take a look at your websites Come on. Send us your urls. We want to see those Uh, but we're gonna take a break right now. So stay tuned. We'll be right back with joe davis from voice actor websites I think I heard the voice of a body shop. I did I did hear the voice of a body shop little body shop Well, hello there I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voice announcer guy on your new orientation training for snapchat. Were you? This is virgin radio Well, okay. We're not that innocent. There's genes for wearing and there's genes for working Dickies because I ain't here to look pretty. She's a champion of progressive values A leader for california and a voice for america. It's smart. It's a phone. It's a smart phone But it's so much more it's a the files are ready. Don't forget to pick up the eggs. What time is hockey practice? Check out this song It's the end of the road When hope is lost the i8 from bmw Who said saving the planet couldn't be stylish Hey, it's j michael collins. Bet you think i'm gonna try and sell you a demo now, uh I think they speak for themselves, but I will give you my email. It's j michael at jmc voiceover dot com Now if they will stop waxing this mustache for a minute, we'll get back to the show Hey What question do we get most often far and away? It's how do I even get started in voiceover? And we have a great answer to that question take vo heroes Free getting started in vo class. You heard right. It's free. It's available online 24 7 at getting started in vo dot com That's getting started in vo dot com If you've been watching our show and thinking that you need to get in gear and start your own voiceover career This is the class you should start with you'll learn about the vocal skills You need the storytelling skills you need the equipment you need and the business skills you need All in one single comprehensive online class taught by voiceover heroes david h laurence the 17th This class won the backstage readers choice award Four years in a row and again, there's no charge. It's absolutely free want to take it Sure, you do getting started in vo dot com. That's getting started in vo dot com As a voice talent you have to have a website But what a hassle getting someone to do it for you and when they finally do a break or don't look right on mobile devices They're not built for marketing and seo. They're expensive You have limited or no control and it takes forever to get one built and go live So what's the best way to get you online in no time go to voice actor websites dot com Like our name implies voice actor websites dot com just does websites for voice actors We believe in creating fast mobile friendly responsive highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use You have full control no need to hire someone every time you want to make a change And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time You can get your voice over website going for as little as 700 dollars So if you want your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options Go to voicehactor websites dot com where your vo website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what This is the latin lover narrator from jane the virgin anthony mendez and you're enjoying dan and george on the voice of our buddy scha Thank you anthony mendez. Yes, we're back with joe davis and we got lots of questions Guys just guys eat this stuff up. Maybe we should just make you like here every week I'd be happy to do that Maybe you need to do your own show that might be something to do with uh with more career success With all my free time. Yes Anyway, george, who has questions here? All right, starting with questions. Um, this will go to the second one here a little ways ago. Yeah, this one here Yeah, that one there from greg tom Uh, here's a question for joe given how much money vdc 123 and all the other big online casting sites spend on seo How many hundreds of vo talent use the keyword voiceover on their websites? And and considering how many people are using that on their websites Is it really possible for small entrepreneurs who don't have huge seo budgets to post on the first page of google? It's uh, how do you do that? So it's an excellent question And I I have a a few things to say Um before I even answer the question one is I see that it was written as voiceover one word There's actually between 10 to 40 times the amount of search for with a space as opposed to without a space So if you're doing a your optimization, I would do it for voiceover with a space and not without a space So just a a little trick for you never a hyphen Um, and there's there's not nearly as much for a hyphen So the there's more search for with a space with than without a space then Um, I think without a space then with a space and then hyphenated So that makes sense because we think of voiceover we if to us it's it's just It's jargon like it's voiceover. Mm-hmm. So we've run it together, but we just go to the hill most of the yeah To the layman two words voice over probably makes more sense. I mean, that's maybe that's my theory. I don't know Well, and I think that goes back to understanding what the talent seeker is looking for You know getting inside their head talking to the people that hire you and saying What are you searching for and how are you searching and and this way you're you're targeting the right things? Yeah, um now to the to the meat of the question So yes, they have large budgets But they also I think have the the challenges of being huge marketplaces Which are their generalists, right? Exactly. They're looking for every single possible search. Yeah, and you can target Yeah, bingo. So the the more Focused you can be on a specific thing the the better the chances if you have a website about voiceover And someone's searching for automotive commercial voiceover Is it related? Yeah, but could it be more specific more related? Absolutely So then let's say you have a page Dedicated or section dedicated to each one of the types of voiceover that you do So a page for commercial a page for narration a page for e-learning and so on Which you would recommend which I would recommend separate pages for each genre. Yes, absolutely And and you want text on those pages So it's kind of counterintuitive for a voice actor because You want people to listen to your voice or watch a video with your voice on there, right? But you need text SEO is all about good quality text content That's what google is basing a huge amount of its Um ranking off of say no to flash websites kids. Oh gosh, that's Flash if you still have a flash website, you you better uh change it into flash Yes comes in sideways or yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Nothing in the in the flash can be seen by google So that's probably the single worst thing you could do to um have a site in flash Not only from an SEO perspective anymore But because a lot of modern phones and browsers just won't play it they'll block it So you're gonna get a big empty square or rectangle and that's an important thing too is It's got to be mobile friendly as well It's like essential because I think google is like that's what they're looking for more now. Yes Yep, and I'll jump to that after I finish this question. Yeah so If you have a page for each one of the genres that you do So you have that commercial page and google looks at and this says, okay, it's about voice over the site. It's about um commercial But this person specifically looking for automotive Now you have that you a tertiary level that you add to your website Which has won for pharmaceutical commercials tertiary. Yes. I didn't say tushy. I said tertiary So you have the um the pharmaceutical commercial page and the kids commercial page and the automotive commercial page google looks at that and says Wow, it's about voice over it's about commercial and it's about automotive and it becomes the most relevant result On the internet to that searcher's intent And so as individual talent, I think you have that flexibility that these huge marketplaces don't If you search for female voice over talent So four words and google You'll see probably depending on where you are in the country probably debbie gratton um melissa exelberth jody krangel laura schreiber and um I think one or two other talent on the first page many of them beating the the large marketplaces And I could give other search terms too where you have individual talent that are beating the big play-to-plays In the voice over game Many of them we work with and but you certainly can get there on your own too So I think it it's a legitimate question And it is also certainly possible and the the proof is in the pudding by simply doing those searches and seeing the people that are beating them Now awesome the the mobile responsive question. Yeah, so that's a super big one because last year Google moved to a mobile first index Meaning that it used to be Having a mobile option was nice. Then google said if you don't have a mobile option um, it might hurt your ranking and then they said The calculation of your website's ranking is no longer going to be based on the desktop version It's based on the mobile version. That would be my 10 year old square space five website Is completely invisible I better do something about that Holy crap. So it's it's actually become extremely important and you know, um, I I know people who will say Oh, you know, I'll have a block of text, but then on mobile. I'll hide it because I want it to To be a small succinct website, which is nice But um, that means that google can't uh use that text for ranking because it's not appearing in the mobile version So anything that you are building with seo in mind It needs to be mobile responsive and all that content needs to be visible on mobile And it's just another reason why demos above the fold meaning um that first screen that you hit when you see a site Are so important because on mobile if you have a long scroll and your demos are halfway down the page Then if people are going to bail they're going to say I can't find it I'm going to go If you think about a a person that's hiring talent, they're usually not looking at one person's website, right? They're looking at 10 20 50 100 and if you add a minute to their day by looking at your website multiply that by 50 60 people and you've just added an hour to their day two minutes two hours And so um, their mindset is they want in listen and out. Yeah So yes mobile responsive. I'm so glad you brought that up. Yeah Um, mandy k says do you have good resources for building your brand as a voice actor? I'm struggling with beginning things like describing my voice writing the bio, etc I I think you can so you can certainly hire a professional to do that um, but The professional probably won't know you as well as your family and friends And so you you have a built-in network and I would email them a list of questions say What are three things that you think of when you hear my voice? um, would you describe me as what? When I talk to you What feeling do you get you can you know, you can do things like color or whatever to but crowdsourcing that to The people that know you and are willing to answer that question for free I think we'll go a long way to helping you figure out who you are as a talent And you can do it with your demo. You can just do it with people that have talked to you And so um, that that's certainly part of it Are I think coming out of the the box with too strong a brand as a voice talent Eventually a brand is important, but in the beginning it can position you in a way that is not best for your career So you don't know who you are as a talent yet And I think the only way to really understand that is start seeing what type of work you book and Um see the the the types of spots that the genres and the types of spots that you book And that will help a lot So there's nothing wrong with having a brand in the beginning But worrying about it too much and never launching your career because of it. I think is a a mistake And so I would say focus more on having something that's professional to show to the world And then worry about the brand later because it will the brand will inform you Who you are naturally and you won't have to struggle with it But um, if you want some some tools or some exercises that you can ask friends about by all means email me Joe at voice actor websites.com or just go to the website and click on the contact form And I'll send you some free resources on it But again something from our good buddy paul strickward. Yeah, how about that? Hey paul Um, what should we look for in a web hosting service? Which ones should we actually avoid? Is it okay to put logos of companies on websites or could we get into legal trouble? So a couple questions together there. Yeah, so um I'm I'm glad the spot for nike. Should you put a like a logo on your website? Let me preface this with i'm not a lawyer Um, however, I have spoken to lawyers about it And it's my understanding that there's a form of fair use where as long as you're not Representing yourself as the company you can utilize it on something But if they ask you to take it down you should do it So, um, I don't think any company is gonna give you uh Who's is gonna actually sue you for putting up a logo? They might send you a cease and desist and you if you fought it you might win Is it worth it? No, so if you use it, I think it's fine if they send you a letter take it down And again, just make sure that you're not representing yourself as That company you can say, um, you know worked with happy clients that kind of thing You know, like don't theme your entire website after nike Even the same color scheme as nike and have a giant swoosh logo as the background of your website I disagree just do it He also said which you look for and I what should you look for in a web hosting service Uh, that depends partially on you. So are you looking for Really good customer service Personally, I I do want that. I want to be able to call someone and get what I need super fast Do you um, but some people may not care about that you you want the The service to have fast servers Um, generally be located in the target market that you're going after So if you're going after the u.s. Market, I would go after a I would use a company That's based in the united states if if you're just targeting one market like la or or new york Then I would even recommend having a company that has servers in that place. Wow But um, in general, I would say Definitely be in the country that you want to target Uh ssl so ssl stands um for secure socket layer and it's the https So when you look at a website and it says secure and you get the little lock That is the ssl now. We're not selling anything right? Well, we're selling our voice But you're not making a purchase on the website in general It's a place where they're contacting you sending you an audition you send them an invoice, etc, etc So why is ssl important? It's probably not from a business standpoint except for the fact that now They're scaring people by saying your website's insecure if you don't have it. I'm saying that now But it is important from an seo perspective because google says if you have it It'll help your seo if you don't have it. It'll hurt it. And so Again ssl is not one of those things that can is going to make or break your seo But each one of these checkmarks that you check off helps it and cumulatively you can have a quite powerful site So ssl is definitely something Most websites nowadays I'd say are written in a combination of html css php php is actually the programming language That is the backbone of wordpress and you know so many websites that are not one of the do-it-yourself page builders like wix or square space our wordpress Make sure that that company is providing updated php for their servers and that might be you know not listed in their literature or a little bit technical But you can just hop in their chat and say what version of php Is your server running and then do a google search and say what's the most current version of php? so you can see how close that is and companies you'd be surprised sometimes there are several years out of date And so certain software won't run or it will run slowly or there'll be security holes So little things like that are important Something else is space. So are you using that server for storing mp3s if you aren't then having a site that's probably 10 15 pages and some pictures and some audio I think you're fine with a gig of space if You are storing all of your audio files and auditions and everything on your website Then you want something that's a heck of a lot more or unlimited or get a secondary cloud server like google drive and share it from there There's a few Decent hosting companies out there. My favorite by far is uh upper level with brad newman We have hundreds maybe thousands of people hosted with him at this point and he checks off all those boxes for me There are other companies that we've worked with in the past and many of them have been bought up by a company called eig endurance international group And they're one of those. Oh, wow conglomerates where they they own we're going to outlast you all Yes, they own bluehost and ipower and fat cow and all that other stuff. Well Last one real quick. We'll slip in. This is from jdk. What are your thoughts on social media links? Um, should they link to the actual site or an external page? Does that make sense? I think Maybe the question is and you can um ask it again, but I think the question is Should it link out to that person's social media page or just be like a facebook like button where they stay on the page you click Oh, yeah, I think I think that is what he means because that makes that makes sense And so in general your goal is to drive people to the place where they're gonna hire you, right? So you've already got them on your site. I Personally don't want to drive them to social media if your goal is to continually re-engage with them Then yeah, it's important to get them on social media But how many of them are gonna like your page once they actually go to facebook They're gonna see that their grandmother had Knitted a new sweater and then they're gonna click on that. Well, actually, maybe that's a bad example Maybe they're not gonna click on that but they're gonna see something that um distracts them And they're gonna go down that rabbit hole that we talked about before So I would say if you can embed a button that Houses them like your page. They're now connected to you and they never leave it. That's ideal Uh The Alternative is sending them to that page in a another tab. So they still have your website open And they're not gonna get too lost or if they are they're gonna get reminded where they were a little while ago And then I think the the other part of that question was about analytics Yeah And so it'd be a good time to maybe take a look at JD's site because he gave us his url Yeah, all right. Let's do that. Okay. Yeah, great So, oh there it is it's on our gun There's JD. It's v o b y j d dot com Let's just start with that. Is that a good url? It's a slick. Yeah, it's a good. Is that a good url? So if I'm talking to you on the phone and I say, oh great. So um, you can check out my site. It's v o b y j d dot com Um Will you remember that? Yeah, and do you know what all those letters were or do I have to say v as in victor b as in boy Not a j as in joe so I What I look for in a domain name is short memorable easy to spell no obvious misspellings And so it's it checks off the short box for me. It is short six six characters If you said v o by JD dot com I think that is more memorable than v o b y j d dot com So I I think the fact that we read it off the screen as a series of letters is um, a little bit of a bias Against it, right? But if you're talking to someone you say v o by JD that that's a little bit different Yeah v o by JD is I think pretty hard to miss that misinterpret, right? Yeah and the the other factor that I would think about is Our you your brand is um, a certain sound or a certain thought your brand. So how generic do you want to be? Is it, you know A better to invoke a feeling or have your name I I often suggest name v o dot com because it's simple And um, then if someone has a brand like the home studio master, then you incorporate that into the domain Yeah keywords in the domain also do play a role in seo. It used to be more It's a little bit less now But if seo is a primary goal of yours, you know having e learning narrator dot com is going to give you a boost over having your name dot com So let's take a look at the site you can look up here. So what I write off the bat. I see a phone number and email address, which I like um It says voice talent, but that is in an image. So google can't see those words at the top Um, there's a a big image with I think there are social media icons there actually I didn't see that before Yeah, they're kind of cleverly So they're in there they look maybe like uh, yeah, there's there's a twitter a linkedin An instagram and a facebook are going to different pages. So I click on any of them. It's gonna go away Okay, so um, it's it's a cute theme. I If your goal is to drive people to them, I probably wouldn't have noticed it unless I was doing an analysis of the site So it's it's so well themed that I might have missed it Uh, there's a a big image at the top, which is attention grabbing But the the demo I think it's a it's a big monitor And that's why we can see the demo on a smaller screen or on mobile My guess is the demo would be below the fold. So I think I would want to pull it up a little bit um It also doesn't look like there's an h1 tag, which is a primary heading So from an seo perspective you want to have that I I think it's it's pretty clear as you scroll down that your demos are right there. There's a video which I like And then there's some text for google to grab on to And then there's a a client logo of the AAA And so I I like, you know having a client logo, although I generally wouldn't put just one So I would if you don't have a a lot of high profile clients You can use some others or wait till you do but just having one looks like that's You know, I am the AAA guy or I don't have enough to fill in the other And then just at the bottom the other thing that I would point out is There's no privacy policy And so um, what is a privacy policy? It's a generally a page That with a link in the footer by your copyright that says We don't collect personal information or we do this is what we do with it and gdpr Which is that european privacy standard that came into effect a couple years ago That if you don't have a privacy policy you're in violation of that So if you have any european clients it can be a problem But also there's a an acronym that google came up with called eat it stands for expertise Authoritativeness and trust And those are three very strong things that have an impact on seo And the trust part of it part of that is the website trustworthy is the entity trustworthy What are you doing with my personal information? And so if you don't have a privacy policy, it does not satisfy the the tea in eat So I would I would add a but overall I'd say it's um, definitely one of the better sites that I've looked at Well, we got a lot we got a number of other questions. We were a little short on time I'm sure and of course I want to stuff your inbox with all sorts of questions Again, people want to get in touch with you and they've got these questions Or they're interested in talking to you over voice actor websites. Where do they go? voice actor websites dot com or joe at voice actor websites dot com Makes it easy. All right. Oh, it's a pleasure my friend Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on George. All right, George, and I'll be right back to wrap things up right after this This is Anthony Mendez. You're watching voice over body shop Hey there, you know, my good friend Harlan Hogan has been out sailing The coastline of Maine for the last nine days and has had several political spots to record So with his trusty porta booth a new mic port pro 2l He tackled them in any reasonably quiet spot including a large shower room The audio acts across the board was spectacular No one had any clue he didn't record in his whisper room at his home Or and none of his regular clients even noticed any difference Mark Goodman and Sentrance those guys have got a winner with the new mic port pro If you're a recording professional you already know about the original sentrance mic port That breakthrough audio interface connected any professional microphone to any computer creating professional recordings on the go It quickly became the go-to ad converter for voice actors broadcasters Musicians low casein sound record us and anyone who wanted state-of-the-art incredibly small usb connection To their favorite studio quality mic from u87s and 416s to of course harlan hogan's vo1 a voice over Microphone and now they're thrilled to introduce the next generation the mic port pro 2l This thing is amazing and one of the places you can get it and the place you should get it is voice over essentials Com that's voice over essentials calm go on over there Check out the site best way to get there actually is to go to the bottom of our home page click on the picture of harlan hogan talking into his illustrious porto booth porto booth. He'll kill me now and Go there and buy a mic port pro and all the other great stuff. He has over at voiceover essentials dot com. Thanks harlan Your dynamic voice over career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voice over industry has to offer that place is voice over extra dot com Whether you're just exploring a voice over career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level Stay in touch with market trends coaching products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls Voice over extra has hundreds of articles free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed Learn from the most respected talents coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions Bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books Auditioning casting home studio setup and equipment marketing performance techniques and much more It's time to hit your one-stop daily resource for voice over success Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voice over audition It's all here at voiceover extra dot com. That's voice over x t r a dot com Hey everybody, it's that time of the show. We talk about source elements and they are the creators of source connect Of course, you probably know that but if you don't and don't know what source connect is you should because This is by far the most popular tool at this point that the commercial studios that are the big budget studios are using to Work with voice talent like you all over the world And this is a software package that runs as its own application It does not It does not rely on a version of a browser or It doesn't get broken when a browser randomly updates and all the weird things that happens with those browser Systems, it's an application and runs on windows or mac Uh, if you want to give it a try and get a trial license going you should go do that Go get a demo source dash elements dot com You can just install it on your system and have it ready to go get your iLock account set up Get all of everything sorted out test it out make sure it works And then if a client does ask you hey, do you have source connect? You can say yes, I do and then go ahead and activate the license You can buy it or you can do it in a subscription level basis Which I recommend because you get ongoing support when you do that Anyway, give a try source dash elements dot com We we all use them. We love them and we appreciate their support. We'll be right back to wrap up the show right after this This is ariana rattner and you're listening to voiceover body shop vlbs.tv Right, we're back and our thanks again to joe davis for his amazing insight Look at this stuff that is just so mysterious. He's dripping information about this time. No I'm gonna have to wipe him off a little bit later I was actually sweat. Yeah, okay. That was that one was yeah, that's right Uh next week on the show tech talk number 20 It's coming up number 20 and we're gonna get to that in a few minutes too. So uh, stay tuned for that um But we have donors we get lots of donors like we do and there's some names like christie berns joseph harrison Michelle blinker sarah borges phillips appear Trey speaks for you and Shelly avalena. All right Uh, great seeing shelly this weekend that uh At woevo con and a lot of other great people. We had some great people there Hey, join our mailing list. George is constantly reminding you about that on twitter Uh, okay show us your booths Like this particular booth that that's the actual booth. This is bruce burles booth Bruce burles booth booth and and his and his bedroom is a highly functional booth. It is I especially love the camouflage blanket I know Do up the whole thing in those will you? Yeah, really and then no one will see you But they will hear you and they'll hear you good, which is really kind of cool Uh, yeah, you can send those to the guys at v obs dot tv and landscape Not in portrait not in portrait. All right, and you want to be in our studio Right to us again at the guys at v obs dot tv if you're going to be in the greater los angeles area And we'd love to have you here. Uh, we need to thank our amazing sponsors Like on hogan's voice over essentials voice over extra source elements vo heroes dot com voice actor websites dot com and j michael collins demos Amazing stuff and by the way if you want to find dan on the web to get his tech support on your stuff go to home voiceover studio dot com And if you want to talk to george about your home studio you go to George the dot tech that's where you find me and if you hate that dot tech thing george of the tech dot com works too, that's how I found you Cool. All right Not that I was looking for you. I'm like, well, I wonder how I can find george. Anyway Uh, that's gonna do it for us this week and uh, again, thanks to joe davis And uh, you can get in touch with him over at voice actor websites dot com So do that. Uh, that's gonna do it for now. I'm dan lennard. I'm george widow and this is voice over body shop or vo B s thanks to sue our tech director. She did a great job tonight. Take care guys. Good night