 Hey, it's Monday night. Yes, it is once again. I know and made it back from Wolf O'Conn tonight on our show Joe Davis the best webmaster for voice actors in the universe Is here all of them too. Absolutely and and He'll be here to answer your questions and our questions. That's right I've got a few tech stories to talk about why you should buy a Mac mini and why you shouldn't and what else? Talk about Wolf O'Conn. Oh, yeah, and a little bit of preview of the mic shootout We did 24 people in two hours in the booth six mics and yeah, and Apollo 13 And a whole lot more. All right all that and whatever else we can think of coming up now and voice over body shot two men Twin sons from different mothers with a passion for voice over recording technology and the desire to make Recording easy for voice actors everywhere together in one place George Whidham the home studio engineer to the stars a Virginia Tech grad with an unmatched knowledge of all the latest Gear and technology and voiceover today Dan Leonard the home studio master a voice actor with over 30 years experience in broadcasting and recording and a no-holds-barred myth-busting attitude for teaching you how Easy it is together To bring you all the latest technology today's voiceover superstars and Leading the discussion on how to make the most of your voiceover business This is voice over body shop Voice over body shop is brought to you by voice over essentials comm home of Harlan Hogan signature products Source elements remote connections made even easier Vio to go go comm everything you need to be a successful voiceover artist J. Michael Collins demos award-winning demo production voice actor websites comm where your voice over website won't be a pain in the butt and voiceover extra your daily resource for Vio success and Now live from their super-secret multimedia studio in Sherman Oaks, California Here are George Whidham and Dan Leonard Good evening. I'm Dan Leonard, and I'm George Whidham, and this is voiceover body shop or Vio Bs Let's try it again. I was not happy with that right Vio Bs that's more like it. Thank you everybody We have people in our studio take advantage. We got to get that real now. We can sample that and just reuse it every week Yeah, exactly. There they are. All right The camera works. Yeah. Wow. There must be Mercury has gone forward apparently Awesome that that we believe in that astrology stuff or do you Well, okay, so I drove all the way back from Las Vegas this morning and Just got back just two hours ago. Yes, which is why it looks like I haven't shaved and if I start to stink Just push me out of the way But no we we dragged Joe Davis all the way back from Las Vegas along with his assistant Karen Barth Yeah, and we're gonna talk about your websites your voice actor websites from the guy who owns Voice actor websites calm and the right way to build them which should be on there And what shouldn't be which is probably even more important There we go, perfect. No, no, there we go. Is that right? Yeah, that looks that's fairly close Anyway, it's weird gravity where we're you know, it's the fires down in the Santa Monica Mountains that are like It's been a gravity in a weird couple of days I haven't been able to get into Topanga where I live since Friday Yeah, I left my house and a half hour after I left we got the evacuation notice saying we have to leave So when I left I didn't bring anything. I just brought my overnight bag for Vegas. I figured that's good So like I didn't bring any of the food in the freezer and the fridge I didn't touch a thing that they turn up the power and oh, yeah, it was powers off on Friday Well, so it's you know, we're being told to stay out because they want the Basically what they want to be able to fight a fire if a fire comes, right? So we're in the because we're it's so hard to get in and out of there. They cleared us all out No, so the only thing there are coyotes and Deer and a few crazy old men with shotguns and guarding their property. So probably a bit of a barbecue there I guess it's got to be interesting. It's not a good thought. Didn't mean that anyway As long as you're safe and your shed is safe. Yeah, okay L is safe in Santa Monica. That's a good place for okay Let's see we got some tech tonight. Yeah, we got a little tech stuff to talk about all right And we've got your questions and feel free to ask a question anytime in our interactive chat room because Jack Daniel while he's not physically here Although all these attractive women here. You think he would be here, but you missed out jack. Yeah, really Um, but he'll be in there and he'll be relaying those questions to us from our chat room and uh, oh by the way Johnny George's booth. It's class. Yeah, isn't that nice three monitors? No four monitors. No, five monitors Why does he need five monitors because he can? Well, there you go five monitors you win most monitors in a booth. I've seen yet. Okay. Well, guess what it's now time for Voice of a body shop presents the bobs voice over extra news All the information you need for a successful voice over career And it's time for the voice over extra news for november 12th winter vocal warm-up Well, now that mother nature has started wrapping her icy fingers around much of the country except here in southern california It's time to think about good ways to warm up the vocal cords before recording Ask a voice actor for some warm-up tips and you'll find as many techniques as there are voice actors From tongue twisters to singing scales To doing that motorboat Sound with your lips while humming. That's tough with chap lips. It was really dry in vegas Each pro seems to have their own tricks and rituals Well as add to that collection Pro rob marley says he stumbled upon a technique that works well for him and at the same time continues his vio education He calls it hot steam and a cold read As rob explains in a recent voice over extra article He starts the winter mornings with a vix personal steam inhaler It's basically a heating element with a funky plastic cone that directs the steam up and out rob says You pour a few ounces of water in the base turn it on and in about a minute it's steaming You could also do this with a tea kettle Next he brews a mug of hot tea The warm tea is great on the throat I could use some now and the steam helps open the sinuses and clear out congestion Sometimes rob will stand over the boiling tea kettle with a towel over his head Just breathing in the steam while doing the weird noises we were talking about Which is hilarious to his wife and probably his pets too Then he jumps into a cold read over the steam inhaler rob reads out loud for While breathing in the steam for about 15 minutes. And what's the reading material? My voice over books on this tablet, of course So while the steam opens up sinuses and loosens any congestion He's continuing his vio education a cool way to begin winter day Rob details more about this technique in an article at voiceover extra.com Which is your daily resource for voiceover success where you'll find hundreds upon hundreds Of helpful vio articles on voice acting business home studio and more start your vio day there Well, that was very timely actually because people in la Are depending on where they are are going to be suffering or are suffering right now from the The smoke huge amount of smoke. I mean there are areas that are completely off limits because of the smoke But even in Santa Monica on saturday while we are in las vegas My daughter was in in Santa Monica riding bikes with friends at the beach and it was smoky and she got sick And so having something like this to help clear you clean you out and keep you You know clean and lubricated for voiceover is a really good idea. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah for you guys in the northeast where The winter winds are blowing in Now the one one of the big problems going to a voiceover convention is You have to talk with your indoor voice That didn't happen So the problem is not talking with your yeah, because yeah, you go to karaoke and everybody's yelling and stuff That and colds that and it was it was cool at night in vegas too Yeah, that wasn't the hundred degrees at midnight like it was last year. So anyway So what's up in tech this week? Well last week I said don't go any buy any apple computers because there were new there was new stuff coming out the next day And new stuff did come out and and the thing that to me is the most exciting Is the mac mini because I love the mac mini as i use one dan uses one a lot of my clients do They're cool. They're neat. They're small. It looks like a hot plate um But this new one that's come out is the first new one. I think four years So it's it's got a lot of updates to it But I think the thing that stands out the most about it is that it has all the ports You know how annoying it is a lot of the new max do not have if you get a new mac book pro a new mac book air now um Basically any of the mac books you're not going to have any proper usb ports anymore So when you travel or whatever you always have to have dongles and adapters But this mac mini has the full array of ports. It's got everything. It's got two usb ports Four usb c thunderbolt three ports which are basically the uber port That one thing can connect to just about anything And it's got ethernet and it's got hdmi Surprisingly and it has an audio jack which is becoming Increasingly rare in the apple lineup line of a product. So it looks really good on paper Now I've I've read some things. I've seen a couple reviews and by all accounts the thing is the real deal um, it's got really good Cooling so that means it should be quieter than the last mac mini Some people say that they've never had a problem with their mini being noisy. Mine's never been I use mine for editing video and things that shouldn't be doing so mine sounds like a hair dryer So i'm looking forward to seeing how quiet the new one is but you can get it decked out with pretty awesome specs for under two grand I mean loaded with a one terabyte ssd A really fast ssd by the way um 16 gigs of memory uh, and then a Six core i5 processor, which is pretty dang good What's the one weak spot on the mac mini? It's graphics And for us that aren't doing video rendering and doing 3d design and doing video games We don't care But it has a trick of its sleeve nowadays. You can get things called an e gpu Which is like the processor brain the graphics brain right in another box Then you can plug it in and now you can get all the power you want So it it's very modular to me. It's the mac mini pro It's even that charcoal space gray color So i'm excited to be getting one into a studio for one of my clients soon here It should be pretty pretty slick. What you got? What are the what do those go for? Or they start at like 750 bucks for the very very base model even the most base model has the ssd I really like that because that's the big differentiate differentiator and performance between a hard drive And the flash drive the flash drive ssds are so much faster. It boots up like that. Oh, man It's amazing. So i'm very excited like your at computer. Yeah um another couple things that I'm finding that they're you know, there's thunderbolt docks, which seem like this really cool Fix all thing where you can plug one cord into your mac and everything goes into the dock and you're you're on heaven I'm not happy with that. They're not proving to be very reliable. They're proving to be a pain a bit of a pain um, I've had more than one occasion where I've had to have the unit replaced or repaired and um They it's a point of failure So if if you're having issues with systems not running reliably try eliminating the thunderbolt dock Maybe get a usb hub Plug all the usb stuff into that but plug your thunderbolt stuff right into your mac Yeah for reliability. Well, we were having all sorts of problems at woeville con with people are like Oh, i'm gonna do my presentation with their new macbook error that only had Thunderbolt on yeah No, we're stuck in this dongle transitional nightmare right now and apple's not giving us these things for free in the box Like they should be and it's very frustrating The bag or adapters was no help. We were all carrying around sacks of adapters, but Lastly, um before we move on studio bricks. We got to work in one and we're gonna have some video from one later Um, this was the specifically the one plus one plus So they have the the one which is their most base model. This is the one plus So it's basically the plus size model just an extra foot wide That one foot though. It definitely makes a difference. I've set up a lot of Studio bricks booths a lot of the non plus models And the problem we end up having is that big glass door ends up being right next to the mic So here's the mic and here's the glass door right next to this one was about a foot and a half farther down Yeah, it had that extra foot and our half and so the mics could be tucked back away from the door Sounded much much better. So if you're in the market for studio bricks Pony up the little extra for the one plus and it was easy to put together and easy to take apart Really easy to follow the instructions like my mom always says you do have to follow the instructions, but it's uh, It really worked out. Well, I mean we did a mic shoot out. We'll talk about that after the break There were people outside the booth milling around having soft conversation kind of chatting among themselves It never interrupted what was going on in the booth. Right. It was it did a really good job stopping Conversational volume noise. It's excellent and it came down in five minutes Yeah, I mean they do come apart fast That is that is a big advantage of that and it was beautiful beautiful. Yeah, beautiful piece of equipment Who who ended up buying it? Uh jerry mcdaniel jerry mcdaniel and and the part of the deal was is You know mcgallon gearma We're gonna send us one if someone in las vegas or someone who could transport it after the conference would buy it Right and jerry was nice enough to do that. Thank you jerry. Yeah, we would not have had that booth there if not for him So and that booth was really really nice. Yeah, thanks jerry All right for now. We're gonna talk about the mic shoot out and some various other things and your tech questions coming up right after this This is the latin lover narrator from jane the virgin anthony mendez and you're enjoying dan and george on voiceover body shop Yep, this is v obs proven anybody can have a show these days v obs is still on seriously So let me ask you something How do you think about your voiceover career? It kind of frustrated with your lack of success wishing you had more auditions and bookings And making more money. Duh Well, we all have thoughts like I'm not good enough to be doing this professionally. I'm just faking it I need to join the union as soon as I can I'm too old to get booked I can't get started until everything is perfect. I gotta call dan or george I hate auditioning because I never book anything This stuff sound familiar If only you could change your mindset and get rid of these ridiculous rules Well, v o to go goes david h. Lawrence the 17th has just what you need He's completed a 21 day journey with nearly 100 v o and on camera talent just like you. It's called believe 2018 and he recorded every single session meaning you can take this journey now at the pace you want And change the things for all of these things for the better Get the success you deserve by destroying your limiting beliefs and replacing them with powerful productive enabling beliefs and do so on your own schedule Here's the link to get the 25 hours of video and audio the daily chat logs and more and begin your own journey The link is v o to number two go go dot com forward slash believe that's v o to go go dot com Forward slash believe it's ridiculously cheap and it's ridiculously effective. Once again v o to go go dot com forward slash believe 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 They 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 watch your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options Go to voicehactor websites dot com where your v o website shouldn't be a pain in the you know what All right, we're back here on voiceover body shop and uh You know one of the things we did at woe woe con and thanks for the shirt By the way, it was literally the only clean shirt I had to wear today. Yeah Thank you. You didn't bring a whole lot with you. You're only there for one night and an overnight's worth of stuff But uh, you know aside from doing the av duties that I have and assembling the studio bricks and stuff I was also put in charge of the mic shoot out. Yeah, and I decided that perhaps Uh, we all know how I feel about microphones, you know Microphones or microphones till a certain dpa came into your life. Well, that yeah, but that's you know, some megabucks Whole different level. Yeah, it's it's dense. Yes, probably great for filmmaking. Yeah, but anyway Uh, so I took the six microphones that I own Let's see the harlin hogan v o 1a and my foe 87 and the bluebird Uh, or the uh, my blue, uh, uh, baby bottle bottle, baby. Yeah, baby. Yeah, my e 100 s. Yep. Had. Yep. Uh, We added in an 808 75 r. Yep, which is another shot And we had the v o 1a and we I think I mentioned that and we had the v o 1a and we had three of them So good. We had it Same three times. Yeah, so we're going to show you a little video here of three people that took up the test and we had 23 or 24 people that yeah, I found a piece of copy that would not It would it didn't differentiate anybody because it was just It made it I wanted to hear the sound of someone's voice not their performing So we could get a really good idea of how different all these microphones sounded So this is about two and a half minutes long. We all you want to roll that so We need to put words to what we know and think so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment It's for this reason documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were We need to put words to what we know and think so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an Initial assessment. It's for this reason documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking and... We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment. It's for this reason documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment. It's for this reason documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment. It's for this reason documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment. In an initial assessment. It's for this reason documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment. It's for this reason documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment. As for this reason, documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. We need to put words to what we know and think, so others can understand the thinking behind the maltreatment and safety determinations in an initial assessment. As for this reason, documentation in an initial assessment should make clear what the maltreatment and safety determinations were. That was a fun experiment really. It was a bit stressful for a few reasons. Yeah, well, one, we were using a Beringer-Zenick's USB mixer, because we had three inputs. Which half worked great. Yeah. It worked great. Well, it worked great for two whole tests. Right. And then the next test, it was the weirdest thing, the main outputs went out. And which is also the USB output. Right. I can still hear it in my headphones. So it was really screwing me up. And eventually I figured out what it was, patched around it. But we had a whole list of people dying to get in that booth. Right. And we had two hours to do it, so we were under the gun. But we got a lot of people in and out of there. Yeah. If we were in a spaceship with other people, they would be thrilled that you and I were on board, because we could fix any problem before we burn up in the atmosphere. With whatever crap is in front of us. Exactly. We'll just give us a pile of it. But anyway, going back and listening to that video, we didn't say which mic was which. Right. And as far as I'm concerned, no matter what mic you use, if you're in somebody else's studio, that's the mic that's there. Well, yeah. And that's what you're gonna sound like. But each one of those sounded fine. Yeah. None of them sounded bad. No. The only time a mic sounded noticeably worse is if it was literally off. Off-axis. Off, like not aimed right. And we, you know, we were doing this very fast. Dan was swapping. We were doing three. Three mics at three. Three. Three mics. Then taking them out, then putting three more in. Right. That means plugging it out. And sometimes I didn't get the right wire and the right mic, but I didn't care. Yeah. It was quite an arrangement to do that that fast. But it really did show that the mics aren't dramatically different from each other. And that placement is really the majority of the importance of getting the placement and the aim right. That is the key. Right. And that really showed that. Right. Eventually, we'll get those samples out to the folks who record those. Yeah. I'm going to put it on the WoWo website. Okay, great. So people can, it's like 23. It's going to be a little long. But. 23 WAV files. And it's going to show that to me, as I always say, it ain't the mic. I mean, you want to have a good mic like the Harlan Hogan VO1A, which is a fabulous mic, which is why we had it in there. Plus we liked having our call letters on it. Like we do here. People would remember it was us. Okay, we got a couple of tech questions. Yep. Like from the one and only Jack, Mr. Safety Jack Tagoli. Yeah, we know what that means. Yes. I was just, hey guys, wonderful seeing you in 3D at WoWoCon 5. An idea came up at one of my twisted wave sessions from Larry Hudson. Okay. What if instead of selecting individual transients and lowering their volume one spike at a time, you used a limiter to bring all transients down below minus three at once? Are there downsides? Two limiters, we're limiters. Yeah. And those would be? The downside of a limiter is misusing it. If you're trying to drive it too hard. Yeah, if it's set wrong, if it's limiting too hard, then it can start to sound a little distorted. And it can also. Even with the limiter. Yeah. Okay. That's really the only downside I can think of. Otherwise, that is what a limiter is for. I mean, the whole point is to speed up your workflow and automate some things. If you're having to manually drop peaks on certain words throughout your script, then that is a good use for a limiter. Right. I mean, that's going to help. As long as you're not over-driving the transients. Right, as long as the initial recording is clean. Right. No clipping, no hitting zero. If that's clean, if there are spikes here and there, you can say, all right, set my limiter to a ceiling of minus three. And then if any spike that's above minus three will be limited down to minus three automatically. Right. If you don't set it correctly, it's going to, everything else is going to get louder as well. Right. And it's going to sound just super loud. Right. So. I use, that's what I use. I mean, if, I mean, if you're, one of the things I've learned is that if you're, and we sort of observed this as we were watching the waveforms as people were recording in the booth. That was fascinating. The real pros, the really good ones, no transients. Everything was nice and even. It was pretty amazing. On their waveform. Yeah. Seeing some of the, some of the waveforms just had very few peaks of any at all. It was just even all the way across. Right. Some people who are newer at it, they tend to try and talk louder at the beginning of each word or each sentence. Or one person, I won't name a name, but just as more of an audiobook person and they have an audiobook style read. Much more dynamic. More dynamic and yeah. So it was really fascinating actually. I liked doing it. I mean, it was intense to get it all done, but I'm sure glad we did it. Yeah. We were retired afterwards. Anyway. Jason Anthony asks, what's the best way to pass cables out of a booth and into another room? Through a hole, generally. Yeah. I mean, there are many ways to do this. The most simple is through, literally through a hole. I like to put a PVC pipe in that hole. So it's easier to guide the wires through. If you just cut a hole in your drywall on each side, you know how much of a pain it is to get wires to go through. They always fall down in the hole. It's a pain. So have something in there. If you don't have PVC. Cardboard tube. A cardboard tube, a toilet paper roll or a paper towel roll. Or something a little heavier duty. Yeah. Something heavier. Like from carpeting or a curtain or something that's rolled up. But honestly, you know, obviously a hole in your booth isn't ideal, but really if you get all your cabling pulled through and then backfill it with fiberglass or a foam or a rag, just basically plug the hole nice and tight, you're gonna be fine. You really don't have to do anything more elaborate than that. Occasionally I've seen people go to the point where they actually have like a mic plate on the wall. So there's one on the inside, one on the outside. And that creates a patch. That's a really fancy way to handle a problem, but generally it's not necessary. But if you're good with soldering. Yeah, I was gonna mention actually, remember when I said with studio bricks, I don't know if you wanna bother with the cable pass through. They redesigned it. They did. It's got a little thingy on it, a little flippy thing on it. They've made it way easier to deal with. The older studio bricks, the cable pass through, since this is the question, had this very clever but overly engineered rubber thing that literally had lubrication as part of the process of assembling it. It was a giant pain. I mean, it took half hour to put the booth together and two hours to put this thing together. They changed that design. Now it really, in essence, is just a pass through. I think the cables make a little, do they make a little S? Or do they just go straight through? Going straight through. Yeah, that's it. Simple. The way it should be. Yeah, hope that helps. Yeah, all righty. Joe Davis is gonna join us. If you've got questions about your website, you know one of the things we could do is we could have people give us their website address. Maybe we could review a few of them if I can get that on. All right, if you're watching it live and you want your website reviewed slash destroyed, just send it on over. We'll give it a look, all right. So stay tuned. No, we're not gonna destroy or we'll give you helpful criticism, only constructive criticism. Yeah, all right. All right, that's coming up right after these messages. So don't go away. Minus, are we at minus four DB? We're at minus four DB on VLBS. Well, this is the time in the show where we thank one of our sponsors at Source Elements, they're the creators of Source Connect. And a lot of other cool stuff, but Source Connect is the thing that you voice actors probably wanna know about because it allows you to connect your studio to other studios around the world and work with them in real time. It's the replacement, really the heir apparent for ISDN audio technology, which is becoming old, unreliable, extremely expensive or impossible to get. It's really the way to go. You're probably missing out on jobs right now if you don't have it. So you can at least get yourself started with a 15-day free trial over at source-elements.com. You don't even have to have a little iLock thingy. It works without it now on Source Connect Standard. Get it on your machine, get it running, learn how to use it. And then when you're ready, you can buy it and start impressing your clients and start booking the big jobs. Go check it out. Thanks so much. And we'll be right back here with Joe and Dan in the studio. Are you confused about how to set up and maintain a professional quality voiceover studio? No wonder. The information out there is mostly mythology. This is the best microphone to use. You'll have to have a preamp. You need a soundproof booth. This software is the best. Your audio must be broadcast quality. Consult with someone who knows the truth. Someone who's been there in the trenches, doing voiceover for over 30 years. Someone with unparalleled experience with voiceover studios who's worked with hundreds of voice actors and designed hundreds of personal studios. He knows how to teach and cares about your success. In one of the harshest environments known to voiceover, your home. Dan Leonard, the home studio master. Separate myth from fact and get a handle on your personal voiceover studio. Contact the home studio master at homevoiceoverstudio.com. Joe Davis is our guest tonight. He is president of voiceactorwebsites.com. He's based out of Orlando, Florida where he and his staff create and maintain website specific to voice talents. He's one of the top experts in all the world on the subject of SEO, search engine optimization. He's here to answer your questions and mine about how to make your website optimized and do its ultimate job, sell you and your voice to those that hire us. Welcome back to voiceover body shop, our good friend, Joe Davis. Thank you, Dan. Always a pleasure to have you on. Always a pleasure to be on. I'm president now. That's pretty cool. I know. I got an upgrade. What exactly is your title there? Owner, founder. President. President. Okay, I like it. That works for me. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from originally? How originally? How far back do you want to go? How far back do you want to go? Because I know you grew up where I grew up in Buffalo. That's true. I wasn't born there though. I don't know if you were there. I was born in LA. I was born in LA in Culver City. But I spent about a year here. Became an expert in web design back in the early 1980s. And then... Your parents must have been really smart, right? And then moved to Buffalo. Lived back and forth between Buffalo and New York City. And then lived in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Canada, and Israel. Okay. And you were homeschooled. Were you not? I was. My entire life up until college. Wow. See, that's the... The one thing people don't know about you, people who've talked with Joe, he's great with adults. Because... Sometimes I even act like one. Occasional. But... So you grew up with a self-education. You also learned how to dance really well. I did. So my parents were very big on experiential learning. Meaning it wasn't, here's a piece of paper, here's a book, memorize it and regurgitate it. Go do it. It was... Yeah, it was... You wanna learn something? Let's go experience it. And so you wanna learn business? My dad took me to business meetings. You wanna learn how to write? He had me help him write grants and contracts. You wanna learn ecology? He took me to Arkansas and we spent three months in the middle of the woods with not a soul around except for plants and animals and I learned everything that we saw. And so I... He was a professor at the University of Buffalo. The biophysicist, wasn't he? He has degrees in biology, zoology, gemology, a PhD in biophysics and molecular genetics. And he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Overachievers, man. Yeah. Somewhat. Something to live up to. So anyway, I grew up on the university campus and I saw all these college kids on computers and I got interested in what they were doing. I would ask them what they were doing. They would show me. And that sort of spawned my interest in what eventually became web development and search engine optimization. Because when I met you back in 2006, 2007, you were studying media. I had already graduated at that point. Oh, that's right. You were just running Hillel for us. Yeah. Yes, so my degree was in video production, well, media with a concentration in video production. And then the university at the time didn't have anything for web development. And so I went to the administration. I said, I want a degree in web development. They said, we don't have one. And I said, can I make one? And they said, OK. That's crazy because I went through the same thing at my school with audio. Yeah. That's so funny. I made up my own degree. I love it. Yeah. Hey, we're made up degree buddy. Should we prick our fingers? And that's cool. Even I did that. Did you really? I did with my master's degree. Wow. Can't see. So all right. So yeah, how did you get into? I mean, you said you understood web development and stuff like that. How did you get started in business once you left school? Well, so it started when I was probably 12 years old. OK. I liked playing video games back then. I haven't played video games probably since I was 15 years old. But back then I liked playing a specific video game. And I decided to make a website about it. This was back before the internet had graphics. And so it was all just text. Just text. And so I put up the moose from the game and information about the creators of the game. And it started getting a lot of traffic. And as the internet evolved, the page evolved. And eventually the creators of the website, of the video game, found out about it and came and chatted with their fans on the website. And then I put up ads. And I started making money off of that. And so that was really what was my first extensive web design project. And then through college I did various web development and search engine optimization projects in order to pay for college. And then afterwards I was working at a nonprofit, which is where we really met each other. And I was doing it on the side. And eventually one of the people that I had been doing work for who had his own company said, I really want you to come and join my company. And I said, well, thank you. But I have this nice job working at this nonprofit. I really care about it. And we went back and forth for about three years. And finally he said, OK, if you leave and join me, I'll give you half the company. And I said, OK, you got my attention. And so I did. And that business grew to a point where I didn't need to be involved on a day-to-day basis. And I started looking at other industries that had similar needs, essentially small and medium sized businesses that need to market themselves online. And that's when you said, why don't you come on VoiceOver Body Shop? And I said, OK. Just talking about SEO and stuff. Yeah. And that was the beginning of what has become the most interesting, significant part of my life. And now, really, VoiceOver is my focus. I spent years learning about it, attending conferences, doing some VoiceOver myself. And it's not just the tech side of it, but it's the people that I love. Because you go to something like Wolfocon, which we just got back from. And you see tons of old friends. You make tons of new friends. And it's such a warm, welcoming environment. I think there's this sense of, we're all in this together. Yes, we're all voice actors. Yes, we all have work that overlaps. But there's more than enough work. And if we help each other, if we work together, we come out stronger. And I love it. Very few industries have that feel. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we support each other. And that's something you don't find with screen actors or photographers or plumbers. They're just usually whacking each other with a plumbers wrench. But I actually saw this plumber who was supporting his partner while he was plunging something. You make a duck. Hold on, hold on. Once again, we're talking with Joe Davis, who is owner of and president now. I have promoted you. VoiceActorWebsites.com. Again, if you've got a question for him, throw it in the chat room. And we'll answer that question. And we'll be looking at some websites in a few minutes, too, and see what's right with them and what could be improved. How does that sound? What could be improved? All right. So what makes a good specific VoiceActor website? So I have two answers, because you have the extension of the business card website where you've had some sort of prior interaction with a talent seeker. And you're saying, hey, go here to hear me. And ideally hire me. Right. Excuse me. And then you have the site that brings in traffic, which you haven't had any interaction with before. So an SEO site. And there can be a marriage of the two. Or you can have two different ones. Melissa Axelberth, I think, is a good example of two different ones. So she has a brand site, which is on her business cards. It's very strong on her branding. It has very little text. Everything is just right there on the front screen. And it serves that purpose very well. But then she has a site dedicated to SEO. And that's full of text. It has, I think, 30-something pages, something like 800 words a page, which is one of those golden numbers. When you're building a site, Google looks for a certain amount of text. And that's really the sweet spot, is 800 words a page. But anyway, so this SEO site brings in traffic from people that she hasn't interacted with before. The brand site serves the purpose of continuing her brand and helping her connect with people that she's already had a relationship with. And so on the brand site, I think it's important if you have branding to have continuity of that branding between your business cards, your social media, your website, any imprint stuff that you have. And obviously, your demos. I mean, that's what you're selling. You're selling your voice. And so your demos front and center, above the fold, no extra clicks. Sometimes I see websites where you either have to search down the page for the demos or even go to an internal page. And there's nothing wrong with having internal pages that have demos. In fact, it's good to have a lot of pages with different types of demos. And I'll get into that more when I talk about the SEO side of things. But really in a world of producers and casting directors that are millennials and have very short attention spans, you don't want to... Very short. From what I've seen. You shouldn't make fun of the size of their attention span. Okay. So the demos being front and center is super important. You don't want to have to have them search because they're not just looking at your website. They're looking at five, 10, 15, 20. And any minute that you add to their day is multiplied by that number. So demos front and center and then the ability to contact you. Those are the two most important things. Hear you and hire you. And I'm a big fan of contact forms, phone number and email address. And the reason why is with contact forms, you know where the contact came from. If you have your email address on your website and someone sends you an email, they could have gotten it from anywhere. And then you have to ask them, how did you find me? Well, what did you search for? If you use a contact form, you can actually hook it up to Google Analytics. And again, I'll talk a little bit more about that on the SEO side. But with Google Analytics, you can tell not only that it came from your website and it came through the contact form, but what search term they use to find your website, how long they spent on your website, what they did there. And it gives you a good idea of what are your most effective keywords and what parts of your website are doing what they should and what parts aren't. So on the brand side, that's really the most important things. The elements that I would say would make a robust brand site would be audio demos, video demos, because video tends to engage people for longer. Now it generally can't be downloaded and some producers and casting directors will save your demos and then go back and refer to that folder later. So I wouldn't just do video because it kind of rules out anybody who's gonna take that approach, but audio, video, bio, client testimonials, client logos, voice descriptors, delivery methods. If you have ISDN, IPDTL, source connect, connection open, et cetera, then you might as well put it. And then there's some other things that I think speak to the SEO side, but all those elements, good for a brand site, but at its core, hear you and hire you, demos and contact information. When it comes to SEO, search engine optimization. Which is a science that few understand and it's important to have an expert who knows how to do that kind of stuff. So why is it important and how can someone improve it? Well, it's important because I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there. Every once in a while, I speak to someone who says, oh, I work on my own SEO. I search for myself in Google and I click on it and then I hit back and I click on it again and the idea is that, well, you're clicking on your site and Google sees that and so it makes it more relevant, right? Actually, it has a negative impact for a few reasons. One is that Google recognizes that you're coming from the same IP address and so at best it's just gonna ignore that. Well, you know that trick. Sorry, buddy. But the other thing and this is more significant is there's something called TOS or time on site. And what that is, is Google measures the length of time that someone spends on a site after they click from a Google search. So if I'm looking for a political commercial voiceover and I find your site and I click on it and then I spend seven seconds there and I leave, Google says this site was not relevant to the searcher's intent and so it counts against your site. So you're looking for something that's going to maintain their attention and their activity on your site. Exactly, you wanna engage them as for as long as possible. And so if someone that same search or clicks on your site spends 30 seconds listening to your demo, then watches a video, clicks through to your testimonials to see who you've worked with and then ultimately contacts you and that interaction takes a minute and a half, two minutes, that's fantastic. That's what you wanna do. You wanna have a pipeline and really the goal of the site is not to have someone go there and hope they take the right action, you wanna guide them in that direction. And so you wanna say, all right, first I want them to hear my demos, then I want them to see who I work with, then I want them to contact me. That's just one path, but it's an example. All right, well, we're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna start getting to your questions here and also looking at some people's websites to see how they can be improved or how fantastic they are. So we appreciate you sending in those URLs and we'll get to those and lots more stuff with Joe Davis and all the other things we do here on Voiceover Body Shop right after this. 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 jeans for wearing and there's jeans 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 smartphone, 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 for Rick. This is your knee, Rick. When hope is lost. The I-8 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, huh? I think they speak for themselves. But I will give you my email. It's J.Michael at jmcvoiceover.com. Now, if Dan will stop waxing his mustache for a minute, we'll get back to the show. And we're back. And I wanna talk a little bit about Harlan Hogan and voiceoveressentials.com. And he's been talking about the mixer face. We've been talking about the mixer face. We've been using the mixer face. The mixer face saved our Tuchas on Saturday when we had to use that as a backup interface. Great little thing to have. But this Wednesday, the introductory $20 savings on that is going to end on the voice-optimized headphones. But we'll talk about the mixer face in just a second. But the voice-optimized headphones, he's been running a sale on it. $20 off ends Wednesday. You want the headphones, they're fabulous, get them. The mixer face, however, is perfect for voiceover internet protocol patches. Channel two gives you your callers clear audio, clean and infinitely adjustable volume with zero chance of being recorded. A full proof mix minus no alt three-quarter patch here will change that setting there to root over there. And they've sold quite a few of them. So you can use the mixer face, George, so with a mix minus. And you could, it makes it a lot easier than taking a patch panel and running all those things in it. Try it, it's a great unit. And he's got them over at voiceoveressentials.com along with the Harlan Hogan VO voice optimized headphones which are new and improved. It has a removable cord, instead of being ripped out of the headphones when you stand up and go, hey, what? There go your headphones. It just pops out now. You plug it back in, it works great. Made them more comfortable. All this great stuff over at voiceoveressentials.com. Go over there, voiceoveressentials.com. Click on the link right there. It's at the bottom of our homepage down. Oh, it's down there. Click on the picture of Harlan Hogan and it'll take you right there. Go buy a mixer face, because he's got a few of them left and they're not easy to find and get the headphones while there's still $20 off until Wednesday. That's voiceoveressentials.com. Go there now. Thanks, Harlan. Yeah, hi, this is Carlos Ellis-Rocky, the voice of Rocco and you're watching Voiceover Body Shop. Alrighty, we're back with Joe Davis. We're talking about websites and SEO. And George, we have a couple of questions before we start looking at some websites. Yeah, you wanna go through the questions first? Yeah, let's go do a couple of questions and then we'll look at a couple of websites. This first one comes from Paul Stefano and he says, Joe, what's the single most important factor in boosting SEO for an existing site with three follow-ups? So we'll start with that one. Uh, you may have mentioned that just in the first part of the show, but what do you use the single most important factor? Well, first of all, I just wanna say that Paul took a carrot for me and I'm not gonna go into the story, but if you see him, you should ask about that story. So the SEO is broken up into two overarching, umbrellas. You have on-page and off-page. And so there are things that you can do on your website to make it rank better and then there are things that you can do off your site to make it rank better. The most important thing off-site by far is relevant contextual backlinks, meaning other websites that have something to do with what you're trying to rank well for, voiceover obviously, but then you may wanna get more granular. So something about commercial voiceover, corporate narration, e-learning, et cetera. And if that site links to you, it passes along what they call in the industry link juice. It's the technical term that was made up by, you know, computer geeks, but the link juice, what it does is a website has a certain amount of authority associated with it and it passes on some of that authority. So on a scale of one to 100, a site might be a 10, a 15, an 18, a 20, and it's a logarithmic scale. So the difference between 10 and 20 is not the same as the difference between 50 and 60. And so the most powerful websites on the internet, things like a news website might be an 85 or a 90 or 95 while a voice actor site might be a three or a five or a 10 or 20 even. It probably won't get that much above there. There are some websites that are larger like John Florian, voiceover extra, which have some more built up because it's been around for so long. Lots of content on there, yeah. Tons of content. And so a link from a powerful website that has something to do with what you want to rank well for that links to you is a vote in favor of your website. And the more of those you get, the better. That will have probably the single most important impact of anything you could do. On page, it's really hard to boil it down to one thing, but I'll just go through a few really quickly. Page load speed. Your site takes too long to load that counts against you. Good content, something like 800 words a page, and the more pages the better. One page websites generally do not rank well. And I can go into the reasons why. And there are ways to build one page websites so that each section is actually a separate page, but it's just being pulled into that one long format. But again, you're not gonna get 800 words a page and enough substantial content into that one page for it to really matter. And so if you do a search for virtually anything in voiceover or any industry, you're not gonna find one page websites ranking well in Google. Using H1, H2, H3 tags, those are heading tags. When you're writing the content for your website, think about it like an English essay that you wrote in college. So you wanna have a clear heading, you wanna have subheadings, you wanna have bullet points, you wanna break it down so that it's logical and easy to read. And Google's looking at the same things. And the words that you put in those headings carry more weight than the words that appear in a paragraph. Words that you bold or italicize, those carry more weight than the words that are not. Things that are in a bulleted list can carry more weight. People abuse that and so Google's pretty careful with bulleted lists, but it can make those things stand out. If you put five things in there, that's great. If you put 55 things in there, Google will probably ignore it. So what you're saying, there is no single most important factor. I can't boil it down to one thing on site. Off page is easy. Off page is really easy. On page, there's probably 15 things that I think are the most important factor. And there's probably a thousand that go into the algorithm. We might also wanna say that your assistant, Karen Barth, is with us as well. Absolutely. We're gonna get a shot of Karen there and that camera working. She's got a microphone too, so she can help answer questions if Joe feels it's appropriate for her to do so. Absolutely, and she can just jump in too. That's true. Or if someone has a specific question for Karen, please let us know. She's living on some other time zone though. That's true. She's been in, I think, four countries in the last four days. He also asks, should someone still try doing their own VO site? From a, if they understand the technical side and they have the ability to create something that's aesthetically pleasing, absolutely. I think there are plenty of page builders out there that make the process simpler. From an SEO perspective, I think that's where it gets more challenging. And just an example of that from WovoCon in the session we were doing, we were looking at code, the code that is behind all the prettiness. And one site that had been built by us, it had 500 lines of code, which is not that much. And then one of the girls in the audience volunteered her site, which was built on Wix. And it was very simple. It looked good. She had done a good job with it. It was one page, fairly short. And we looked at the code and it was 5,800 lines of code. And so when you get that bloat in there, all of that extra code, it slows down the site. And perhaps more importantly or equally important, Google has to look through all of that code. And so it's generally not helpful for SEO. In there. Yeah. Our own website was on Wix for a long time because it was a DIY site. And it's throwing more terms in. It's a WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. So with the WYSIWYG editors, they leave behind gobs of extraneous code, right? I mean, tons. That would be an interesting dating site called WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. And you have to post real pictures of me. Actual pictures. Yeah. Yeah, so it's tough, but it can be done, but you want to have the right tools when you build it. So this may be Dev sales into the next question. Who is the best hosting site in terms of speed and security? Do you have a preference? For hosting? Yeah. I do. So to me, the factors that are important from a host are speed, security, professionalism and customer support. And for a long time, I really didn't have a host that I could recommend. There were hosts that had really good servers. Their customer support was okay. Their pricing was good. Their servers didn't work so well. Their customer support was awesome. They charged $100 a month for something that should have cost, you know, 20. Yeah, pick two. You only get to pick two out of three. Right, exactly. And then I discovered Brad Newman, who runs upper level hosting. And he checks off all of those boxes in spades. I can reach him anytime I need and get what I need taken care of. His servers are fast, secure. He gives free SSL certificates. And he charges something like 10 bucks a month. So that's really the only host that I would recommend at this point that checks off all of those boxes. Nice, man. Very cool. Because this is Paul's last one, but it's still a really good question. How often do you think you should refresh your website? Content, I guess. From a technology perspective or from an SEO perspective? Because there's a different answer. Well, let's assume SEO at this point. There are probably at least four fairly major algorithm updates a year from Google. And so if your site doesn't go against one of those updates, if you kind of, there are things you can do to somewhat future-proof it. And if you know what those red lines are and you don't cross them, I'd say it can last for a few years. But sometimes there are unexpected things that come out. For example, Google started taking into account SSL certificates and it didn't in the past. So that wasn't a huge change. You can just get an SSL certificate. But that wasn't predicted five years ago. Things like the page load speed have started to play more of a role. But I'd say in the last couple of years that the really big one was responsive websites. So up until a few years ago, everybody had websites that just looked the same on all devices or they had a separate website, which the m.domainname.com was their mobile site. And then responsive web design started becoming a thing which means that your website responds to the screen size so it works well on a 30-inch monitor, on a 10-inch tiny laptop, on a tablet, on a cell phone. And what Google did is last year, towards the end of the year it announced that it was moving towards a mobile first index and it was gonna be implemented in between January and July. And July was the cutoff when it was gonna go fully that. And what that means is it used to be your website, where it ranks was calculated based on the desktop version of your website. Come mobile first indexing, it's now based on the mobile version of your site. And so suddenly websites that had been fine for years were getting hammered in Google because they didn't have a responsive design or some of the most important elements disappeared. Part of responsive web design is that certain elements that don't fit, you get rid of or large blocks of text, you hide them. But now that Google's calculating based on the mobile version, it doesn't have the benefit of seeing those areas. So when things like that come along, then I think you need to change your website right away. And so I don't think there's a set period of time, but I would say a few years, maybe two years is probably a pretty good timeframe unless something like that comes along that's a game changer. And then you have to adjust accordingly. All right, Cecilia Foutness, we'll ask one more question then we'll start looking at some sites and then maybe answer a few more questions. Does your company voiceactorwebsites.com help a voice actor develop a brand? Also, what does the VO, the voice talent, have to provide? Photos, obviously they're demos and things like that. Karen, you want to take that one? Sure, we do do branding. There's lots of other companies that also do that. We have a branding form that you can fill out and the things we need to actually start your website is content. We need your demos. We need your testimonials. Who do you work with? So we can put logos on the site, text, contact information. If you want a picture of yourself, the industry's kind of split in half with that. Do you put your picture on there? Do not. Some people, their faces, the brand, other people. Does your sound match your face? Rarely. So that's something to consider because people prejudge. If you talk to somebody on the phone or when somebody's approaching you, you automatically think, okay, this person looks a certain way or sounds a certain way. Yeah, I mean, if you have an ethnic look, like if you have an ethnic look, and you sound another way, we prejudge that, right? Yeah, that's a good point, Karen. I think there is a debate in the industry about whether you should put your picture on your site and if there's a really good fit between the way you look and the way you sound, by all means, if you want to. But if you're gonna be doing character work and you dress in suits and you're very serious and you have a certain look about you, well, then it may kind of position you to be a good corporate narration guy, but not a character person. And so, or maybe your range is 35 to 65 in terms of your voice, but you have gray hair. So someone's gonna look at that and say, oh, this is not the right voice for that job. And so I think deciding your brand and whether you're gonna use your imagery is gonna be based on that individual situation. So there's no golden rule in that regard. It's gonna vary depending on who it is. Alrighty, you ready to look at some websites? Reading, Willie, and Abel. Okay, who do we got first there, George? First one up is Paul Stefano. Come on down. Oh, wow. Oh, man, who did this? Whoa, get a chill. He's talking about, does it look like the sun? Yeah, right. Okay, well, there is a bottle of hand sanitizer in front of part of the website. You can't see this outside of the studio, but ah, there we go. Thank you, George. That's actually my alcohol, but that's what I'm gonna start with. Alcohol, alcohol. Here's what I like about this. You know what he does, some sense of his personality right off the bat. There's contact information above the fold, a phone number and an email address. His demos are right there. Easy to play, easy to download. And so without really having to take any action, I could hear him and hire him. And so to me, it checks off those boxes. It also has some voice descriptors, so trustworthy, gritty, snarky, seriously. And so I feel like I get a sense for Paul, and I know Paul very well. He's a great guy, but I get a sense for him just by looking at this first frame. If you scroll down a little bit, I don't know if that's possible. So then you've got the opportunity to watch videos. And again, we're trying to take someone on a journey. So we don't wanna put something that they don't want first. We wanna give them those demos, but then we wanna engage them a little bit further. And so if we can engage them with a video, great. And we didn't put a wall of videos for a few reasons. One, we don't wanna overwhelm them with video, but also video can slow down a website's load time. And so that's why you have the View More button. So we've got three, which is enough to engage someone. If they really love it and they wanna watch more, then they can click on that and see more. One suggestion, the heading is videos. And that's not a bad heading. And so it's one of those H2 tags that I was talking about. And so you get that keyword in there, but I think it would be a good idea to work some other keywords into there. So voiceover project video, something like that where you get a little bit more out of it. And then as you scroll down, so here's where you're getting more into the SEO side. And most human beings are not gonna read this text. It should make sense if a human being does, but most people aren't going to. But you see how there's bolded words there? So we're trying to call attention to those words, just like for a human being, it calls attention. For Google, it does as well. That heading up there, Paul Stefano voiceover actor. If Paul wanted to rank well for mail, including that search term or that keyword, then I would probably add that to the heading. And then below that it says choose Paul Stefano for your next voiceover project. So there he's optimizing for Paul Stefano and voiceover project. And the other words are kind of filler and Google just kind of overlooks them. So choose for your and next, probably are not playing a role in that regard. Yes, there's a lot on this panel. I'll just scroll down quickly because we got a bunch more to look at. He's got quotes. Testimonials. Testimonials, happy clients. Quite a lot of content on that front page, but it's all navigable from the top. Yes. So when you click it jumps down the page or is it low to new page? No, it lowers the new page. Is that a better thing to have a new page or one long page scroller page? Is that which way is better to go? From an SEO perspective, internal pages is always better. And that means specifically an internal page is what? That means when you click on one of those menu options, it's going to take you to another page. It's not going to scroll down that page. Gotcha. Slash clients. Right, exactly. So there's from a usability perspective and for a branding site, there's nothing wrong with clicking on one of those buttons and having it slide down. Okay. But if you're trying to rank well in Google, you want to have a website that checks off a bunch of boxes. One of them is relevancy. And it's really hard to make one page relevant to a lot of things. So when you're optimizing, you generally pick one or two primary keywords and one or two secondary keywords and you say, all right, that's what this page is going to rank well for. And then you have a separate one. So think about it this way. Let's say someone's searching for pharmaceutical commercial voiceover. If you have a website about voiceover, is it related? Yeah, could it be more related? Yes. So now then let's say you have a page for each one of the genres that you do. One for corporate narration, one for IVR, one for e-learning and so on and so forth. So you've got a page for commercial now, so it's more relevant, but could it be even more relevant? Yeah. And let's say you take your commercial page and you break it into tertiary pages and so then you have one for pharmaceuticals, one for automotive, et cetera. So now Google looks at that and says, is this the most relevant result on the internet for what this searcher's looking for? And if the answer is yes, you are a lot more likely to rank well. So what I'm gathering here is the majority of your website is really more for Google to look at than it is for the users to look at because the user's gonna see what they need pretty much the first page, they might scroll a little bit, they're gonna hear a demo, they're gonna click contact and move on, right? Probably. Probably. So it's really Google reading more of your website at this point. In fact, on our website, we answer most of the questions that people would have when they're building a website. And in the six or seven years that we've been at this, I've probably had three people that have actually read the content on our website. In fact, the first time it happened, I started explaining things just because I was so used to it and the gentleman said, oh yeah, I know. And I said, oh, that's great. How do you know? And he said, I looked at your website. And I said, really? And he said, yeah, I read all of it. And I said, really? Who said do we have next? We got Fred's voice. Get fredsvoice.com. Fred North. Yes. Okay, cool. So there's actually now a microphone in front of. There's a microphone? In front of the microphone. In front of the microphone. In studio there's a microphone. So what I like about this is that right off the bat, can play the demos, can download them. It's got strong branding. There's a microphone, which is another debate in the industry. Half the sites we do, the people say, whatever you do, I want a microphone on my website. And the other half, the voice actor says, whatever you do, I don't want a microphone on my website. That's the great thing about customizing a site. It's whatever you want. Exactly. We'll say one thing about formatting. So right now, you guys are seeing a portion of the page. What you're not seeing is off the right-hand side. There's a column of information, links, I guess, clickable. They're just on the edge of my screen. They're not even, okay, cool, you scrolled over. But they're way off the edge of the screen. Even on this huge monitor I'm on. So there's some sort of a resizing formatting issue with this page, I noticed, for that reason. Okay, so that's a good point. I couldn't see that from here. But I think contact information would be helpful because, again, you want the talent seeker to be able to take the actions that you want them to take without doing any additional steps. And so getting some contact information up there. Also, the name in the upper left-hand corner, getfredsvoice.com, that looks like a graphic. And just an important detail is that Google can't see graphics, it can't hear audio, and it can't watch video. And some of the AI is getting better, and so there are some exceptions, but largely that's still true. And so if you want Google to know something about your website, including your brand name, then you generally want to have that in text. And or, if you're gonna put it in an image, have something called an alt tag on there. And an alt tag serves two purposes. It was created initially for screen readers, for people who are visually impaired, to be able to know what that graphic was and read it to the person that was visually impaired. Google and the other search engines eventually picked that up and started using it as a way to understand what was in an image, and it is a factor in SEO. So you generally want to be descriptive and have your keywords in that alt tag. All right, let's jump on because we got a couple more to get through. We got four more, including Paula's here. So here's Paula's. Hers was obviously designed with Wix. So she's probably got the trial version of Wix or the free version, because it starts off with a banner advertising Wix. Is that really a bad thing? I think it just, if you were gonna buy any product or service and it says something like that at the top, it sort of says, I'm dabbling. Right. And which is very well maybe true in this case, or Paula might be doing this for years and she's just dabbling and building her own site, but either way, I would say, I think the fee to remove that is maybe five or $10 a month. And if you are going to ultimately show this to talent seekers, I would pay that fee to get that banner removed. There's a chance she may not notice that it's there because if she looks at the site and she's logged in the Wix, it may not show the banner or that bar and she may not even realize it. So Paula, send them the five bucks a month they want and get rid of that bar at the top of your page. Otherwise, it's pretty good otherwise. It's got all the, it's got all the, it checks all the boxes pretty much, wouldn't you say? And it's one of those one page scrolling sites. One page scrolling. So if you click on those buttons, it looks like it scrolls down. Let's see. Contact information. Right. Yes, she's got the Wovo logo on there, which is good. Two quick points that I would say is, one, add a copyright notice at the bottom. Okay. So copyright 2018, the name of your business and the other is add a privacy policy. Oh. And even though you're not collecting and selling anybody's information, if you have a website and definitely if you have a contact form, Google now looks at if you have a privacy policy. There's an acronym, which I'll talk a little bit more about. It's EAT, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And those are the things that Google is going very strong on now that it wants to see on a website. And it considers it not trustworthy if you're not telling your users what you're doing with their data. And so it can actually count against you. And if you're gonna run something like AdWords, or now it's called Google Ads, which is their pay-per-click advertising, they actually require that kind of thing or they won't let you use it. This is a really picky formatting thing, but you'll notice when it scrolls her that kind of the header graphics have a transparent background. And then so they kind of run into each other a little bit, you know. Especially upper left-hand corner, where it says voice actor. Yeah, voice actor runs in the name. It's a tweaky thing, but you know. Yeah, little things. Going on? Yeah, let's take a look at Gary Lewis without the playbook. Without the playbook. Voice actor. So we know who Gary is at least based on his photo. He's right there. That's true. So I don't know if you can resize that window, but I'm just curious what happens as that screen size gets smaller. Well, let me just shrink the browser down. Yeah, exactly. So it hasn't changed yet. Now we're starting to lose the right edge. So I had a feeling that might happen. Yeah. This is an example of why you wanna make sure you have responsive web design, because you don't know what screen size someone's gonna be on, if they are gonna have their browser opened up fully or not, especially when you get into, you know, producers are sitting in a studio and they've got these huge screens and the browser takes up half the window cause they're doing something else on the other half. You wanna make sure that it resizes. Probably because of that very large JPEG, right? Or DNG, whatever the video, or whatever the photo image is, it's probably constraining it, right? It's very possible. And really big graphic. Yeah. And you could do something where it scales, but just based on the look of it, I had a feeling that might happen. I do like that the demo's above the fold. It says website welcome sample, which to me is just a little bit confusing wording. I would probably say, you know, what type of demo it is. Yeah. And it might just be Gary saying welcome to my website, which is cool, but I just, I wasn't quite sure from that. I'm gonna make a judgment on just in his photograph. We know that that's a professional voiceover studio, right? We know that that's gonna probably sound really good, but from the layman, it looks like a blanket fort. And it shouldn't matter whatsoever, but. Nobody needs to see how the sausage is made. From looking professionally, it looks less professional because it's not got fancy, acoustical panels. It's just blankets. Guitar hanging on the wall. And again, we always talk about how nobody cares, but if you do make it front and center on your website, you're basically telling a lot of non-voiceover people that I'm in a blanket fort. Because people not laymen look at that and just see, they just see moving blankets. They don't know that it's probably gonna sound really good. So. Could you do me a favor? Could you click on those three buttons, or the three circles that are on his demo? I'm just curious what those do. Oh, sure. The more, you mean these three on the right? No, no. On his demo. Where it says website welcome sample. Oh, okay. We've got a play button. But then on the right-hand side, there's three circles. That's called a hamburger menu. The hamburger menu. It's the, oh, okay. So that, you have to click to then see a download to get the sample, okay. So I had a feeling that might be the case. And I think using a different icon or having the word download or something there will just make that a little bit clearer. And you don't have to download it, but just a, I think an important point is some people, most people name their demos according to what type of demo it is. And so they'll say commercial demo, corporate narration demo, e-learning demo. And if you don't also put your name on there, then when someone downloads it and goes back an hour later or six days later to listen to it, they're not gonna know who they got it from. And so make sure to put your name on there as well. So Dan Leonard hyphen commercial demo. I'm telling you just guys, just put your name in every darn audio file you make. Unless it's an audio book production where they do not do that specifically, please put your name in every file that you make. Just do it. It's really important. It never hurts. So if we got two more, we can just pop on real fast. Gerard McWire. Yes. Former star of prisoner in cell block age. So I can't tell if this is just the monitor here or not, but the yellow text on the kind of greenish blue background, I can't read from here. And so again, that might just be the monitor here or it might be the juxtaposition of those two different colors, but I changed that. It says at the top, it looks like a menu, but I actually don't think it is. It says Gerard McWire voice and then actor and then cell block age. Are those clickable? Yeah, these are links. When you mouse over, they turn yellow. Okay. And then there's a pop down because it probably can't squeeze all of them on. So it has a little more dropdown that comes down. So I've seen that before. And I would recommend instead of having a more menu, have a website that it shows your full menu. And then once you don't have the screen width to show it anymore, go to the hamburger menu. And that's kind of the industry standard now. So here, more looks to me like you just couldn't figure out what to name the headline and you put more. And so I think that'll help it look more professional. Also, I would get some headings in there because right now you've got all these different blocks. And again, it's partially because I can't read it from here on this monitor, but I'm not sure what's the testimonial, what's a bio. My monitor is not the greatest either, but the yellow on the light blue is not very contrasty. It is definitely not a great combination of colors. So I would definitely change the color combo up a bit. Oh, Karen just brought up a good point. Oh, she's using, oh yeah, okay. Definitely do not use an earth, do not use any ISP provider email address, I think, right? That really reeks of not being professional. Right, it looks much more professional, it looks much better when your email address matches your domain name. Yeah, I mean, the other problem is if you move next year and you don't have Earthlink where you're going or whatever the case is, guess what, they can't find you. One last one? Troy Hudson. Good contrast. Yeah, so in contrast to the contrasting. So everything's readable. It has the menu split on both sides. I'm curious what happens on mobile when you split a menu like that, it can sometimes create an issue on mobile as it goes down. Let's see what it does when we shrink it. So when it gets to a certain point, this is definitely what you call a responsive site, right? Because now it's collapsed the menu into the little mobile menu button. So what I really like about that is it's usable at any screen size. Although it looks like the text goes over Larry's head, the white text, and that's the danger of using a photograph like that next to text. So where it says I deliver each and then all the text is below that. Oh yeah, look at that. And now when you go back out again, it doesn't do that anymore. Okay, yeah, just help him to tweak. Yeah, so you might want to either hide that picture or make it smaller or something. So I like that it's responsive, but as a site gets responsive, you can have those little types of issues. I like the audio and the video right next to each other. Jerry Seinfeld live, just that engages me. I grew up watching Seinfeld and so I would probably click on that just to see what it was. Where's all the clients? The client logo is very clean. The only thing I would say is center the bottom row because you've got an empty space on the right and it looks like you don't have enough clients to fill that one space. I'm sure you do, but you chose those logos because those are the most impressive. But if you just center it, then that won't even be a thought. Got you. All right. Couple more quick questions here. Yeah. Fred North asks, is there a strategy for making your website work well with your social media? Work well? I think it would be helpful if we define what work well means. Yeah. I would say generally, the goal should be to drive people from your social media to your website because you're ultimately trying to get them to hear you and hire you. Now, maybe you're trying to build a social media following because you want to be able to re-engage with them and educate them about what you do. So in that case, you might want to do it in the other direction, but if he could clarify what he means by that, then I'll be happy to answer it. Can he reach you somehow directly offline at some point? Sure. How would he reach you? Send me an email joe at voiceactorwebsites.com or you can just hop on the website, voiceactorwebsites.com and send a contact form or you can come to Dan's house and ask him where I live and then you can come fly with me. Well, there's a question about contact forms. Right, yeah. Should we get that in there? Yeah, Bill says, I understand everything you just said about contact forms, but what about the person who just wants to click on your email address and send a message using their own email client without filling out a form? Too bad. That's what I say. So, two responses to that. And it's a good question, Bill. I'm glad you asked it. One is I say, always put your email address also. So, people have that option and put it near the contact form so they can do either one. But the other is I don't use Outlook anymore. And so, when I click on one of those email addresses on a website, which I often do if it's just an email address without thinking when I want to contact someone, what happens? It pops up on your mail, your mail client that you never use. For me, it's Apple mail. There you go. It opens Apple mail and I'm like, quit, you know, and then, right. And mine hasn't been set up on the new computer. So, what happens is it says Office, blah, blah, blah, and then it loads and then Outlook comes up and it says, would you like to configure and then you click cancel and then you just get so frustrated you turn the whole thing off. And so, I wouldn't take away any mail address because then you're limiting a way that someone can contact you, but I wouldn't take away the contact form either. They both serve a purpose. Awesome. Last one from, let's see, which one here? Cartoon version? How about Debox? Debox. What are three or four things that make a website worse? What are things to avoid here? Yeah. If a user can't do what you want them to do, that's, I'd say that the number one thing, anything that would cause that to happen. The website not actually working correctly, not loading fast, things that are, you wanna add something? I thought you said something. Things that would frustrate a user. So, a demo that they have to search for, as I mentioned before. Poor contrast. Poor, yeah. Except you can't read. Not being able to read. Basically, anything that would frustrate your user or not allow them to take the action that you want them to take would be a problem. Having your text as a picture. Sometimes I see people who have a bunch of text as a picture, and that creates all kinds of problems. It's bad for SEO as the screen goes down, even if your site is responsive, it makes the image smaller, which makes the text smaller, which means you can't read it. So, a lot of the browsers have blocked this, but some haven't. So, if you have a demo that's autoplaying or a video that's autoplaying, you don't know what situation somebody's in, if they're in a library, if they're at an office setting, where they're at, and if it's autoplaying, I don't even know where the pause button is. I'm just shutting down the website, because, you know. You're gonna panic. I gotta close this tab. Yeah, that's right. Excellent point. Alrighty. Joe, Karen, it's great having you with us. Thank you for having me. Great hanging with you this weekend, too, at WoWoCon, and it's fun to watch you educate people about this stuff, so. I love doing it. There's so much to know. And I think it's one of those things that if you enjoy learning, you can start learning and never stop, because it's always changing. And I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to about different resources online where they can learn about this stuff. Outstanding. All right. Well, we'll have you on again next year when we get back from WoWoCon, wherever that's gonna be. Sounds like a plan. Alrighty. Well, George and I will be right back after these messages to wrap things up. Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead. Now there's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer. That place is voiceoverextra.com. Whether you're just exploring a voiceover 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. VoiceOver 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 voiceover success. Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports and get 14 bonus reports on how to ace the voiceover audition. It's all here at voiceoverextra.com. That's voiceoverextra.com. Loving the voiceover body shot, folks. All right, we're back. Move the camera over just a little more, or we just lean in. Yeah, all right. So anyway, we need to tell people what's coming up. We do. Next week on this show, we've got Samantha Parris, who is a voice acting coach who's written a real interesting book and she's got lots of interesting ideas about voice acting. Good. So we'll have lots of cool stuff to talk about. That's why we want her. Roy Samuelson, who's a very well known voice actor here in LA, will be joining us on the 26th. And then on December 3rd, Jonathan Tilley. We'll talk about all the cool stuff that he does. Who are our donors of the week? Let's go take a look, shall we? I can click on my handy-dandy donor button. We've got donations from Maria Mackis, Tracy H. Reynolds, Andrew Kaufman, Eric Aragoni. A lot of names you guys have heard before. That's because they're all subscribers. They send money in regularly, which is really cool. Well, you appreciate that. We say your name a lot. Brian Rausch, we've also got Joseph Harrison. It's kind of a newer name to me. Jack DeGolia, Christy Burns, fantastic. Seeing several new names here and so on and so forth. Then we're looping back to the previous week. Those are some of the new donations we've gotten, and if you want to subscribe to the show or just send a little bit of money because you found the particular guest helpful tonight, send it in, we'd really appreciate it. It just gives us a little extra boost from time to time when we need it. All right. All right, what do we need to look at next year? Well, we need to, of course, thank our, well, we got to update our mailing list. We people have been signing up for our mailing list. What do we do with the mailing list anyway? They get told about what's going on. Maybe I should subscribe. You could do that. I don't know, I don't know what's on. I never see it. Yeah, we've got about 450 people on our mailing list. We'd like to get it up to 500 and then 10,000 and then, you know, the entire, to the moon. And then the entire population of Benin. We're getting booths sent to us. Who was tonight's again? Johnny George. Johnny George. Down in Arizona, just north of Phoenix. Awesome. It's a beautiful studio. It was great seeing him this weekend. We can send yours in. We can send it to the guys at VOBS.TV, put my booth or something in the subject so we know what it is. Right. Let's see. Now you, you, you help people with their home studio. Yeah, you know, we didn't plug tonight. So now's our chance. We had so much material. We did. I'm at georgethetech.com. That's where you can find me to get help with your studio from sound checks to studio designing to talking off the ledge, whatever you need with your studio, I'm there for you Dan. We get a lot of that. Yeah, you can find me over at homevoiceoverstudio.com where we'll analyze your audio. We'll teach you from soup to nuts. If you really don't know how it is to set up a home voiceover studio, we can get you started on that. Let's see here. You've got a... We're on Instagram. I'm on Instagram. Aren't you? You're all on Instagram now. Instagram? Instagram. I'm on Instagram at georgethetech.vio. VoiceOverBodyShop at VoiceOverBodyShop is on Instagram. We're gonna kind of reinvigorate that account. Dan, are you IG-ing yet? I'm learning. After your interview with Tilly, you're probably going to have to... I have to do the Instaglam Trance Challenge. I think that's what it's called here. I also have a geeky audio podcast called the Pro Audio Suite with a few others from around the world. If you'd like to really dive deep into some of that stuff and also listen to some interviews, go check that out. The Pro Audio Suite, S-U-I-T-E. And speaking of podcasts, if you missed the show last week with the Amidors and Sully Kanto, we listened to it on the way home from Vegas today. This is a show to listen to. The music was fabulous. The mixing of the audio was fabulous. I wonder who did that? Oh, you did that. And it was really a great show. And the music was really good. Let's see here, the show logs. YouTube just does it now. And it doesn't translate well from Spanish, but what are you gonna do? We're here every Monday night at 6 p.m. Pacific, gets 9 p.m. Eastern time. Eastern time. I forgot what time zone that was. It's been so long. If you'd like to be in the studio, like these lovely young ladies are tonight. We have a room full tonight. We have a room full of people. And if you write to us at the, no, not you, Joe. The guys at VOBS.tv and say, audience. We'll give you the secret handshake and let you in here. Let's see here. We need to thank our sponsors. Why don't you take the first one first? First one is Harlan Hogan's voiceover essentials, cause he was the first sponsor ever of our show, right? Voiceover Extra. Source Elements. Vio to Go Go. Voice Actor websites. That can. And J. Michael Collins demos. We also need to thank the Dan and Marcy Leonard Foundation for the betterment of webcasting. It rolls right off the tongue. It does. Our producer, Catherine Curran, for getting us great guests like Joe Davis and Jack Daniel on chat room duty and on YouTube. And of course, Sue Merlino, our amazing technical director who was flawless tonight. She nailed it. All right. Also, we need to thank Lee Penny for simply being. Lee Penny. All right. We'll be back next week with, who was it? It's Samantha Parris. It's been a long day. It's been a long four days. Driving all the way there. Driving all the way back from Vegas, which is a beautiful drive, by the way. It is, it is. But we'll be here next week. You know, this is a hard business. You know, there's lots of business things you need to learn. We're here to help you with the technical stuff and we're here every Monday night. And we're here to tell you that if it sounds good. It is good. Alrighty. Well, I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whidham. And this is voiceover. Body shot. Or VO. B.S. All right. Have a great week, everybody. We'll see you next time.