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So there’s been a bit of chat out there in voiceover land about my creating a new page on my audio’connell.com voiceover web site that features professional female voiceover talent (femalevoicetalents.com).

The biggest question so far has been –
• What made you think of doing that?

The answers to that question are service and laziness.

Many years ago, after I started the audio’connell web site, I thought there would be value for my voiceover clients to have some female voice talents (who I knew and / or had worked with) featured on my site. So I did that and it went well.

Sometime later, there was a 3rd party problem with the content of one female talent’s demo (nothing to do with me) that led me having to shut the demos down for what I thought would be a short while. The problem was resolved but then I got lazy and never set them back up again.

Some years after that, I began MVO: The Voiceover Guys, which is a unique website featuring 20 popular male voice talents (including me). That’s been going for about 10 years now and while that was starting, I thought maybe I’d start one for the ladies. So I bought femalevoicetalents.com.

And I, lazily, never did anything with that domain until now.

To be clear, femalevoicetalents.com is not nearly has extensive and involved as MVO is – and that’s by design. Femalevoicetalents.com is a very simple and not exclusive web page that allows media producers who are visiting my page to pick from a bunch of female voice talents that I have worked with and /or have known for years.

Three demos, a link to the female voice actor’s email and web address and that’s it. Producers contact the female voice actors directly. The page will not be heavily marketed at this point and clients, via this new website, will enjoy another tool that I have provided for them.

We’ll see how it goes.

Tags: commentary, female voice talent, voice talent, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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It was going to be a cold day in hell when I got a national voiceover agent, based in Chicago, IL.

It was and I did.

February is generally a cold month in Chicago (which isn’t really hell except for those few days I’m about to tell you about) but in 2019, February in Chicago was setting all time cold temperature records.

And of course, I happened to be there at that time when I voiceover client contacted me for a recording.

Fortunately I was in downtown when the request came in. So in my search, I came across the Chicago Recording Company. It was pretty close to my hotel so I walked over (‘the cold never bothered me anyway’). Great studio, nice people, they liked my work and they recommended that I reach out to Chicago-based voice talent agency Big Mouth Talent.

I’ve been doing whatever my agent there, Kelly Wilkening, tells me to do ever since.

Please feel free to reach out to Kelly about working with me on your next voiceover project.

ABOUT BIG MOUTH TALENT

Big Mouth Talent is a full service talent agency that has been representing Chicago actors for over 20 years. We represent exclusive talent only and keep the amount of actors we represent to a minimum, giving each actor the personal attention they need and deserve.

We are a proud member of the ATA (Association of Talent Agents http://www.agentassociation.com).

Our clients can be seen on Broadway, movies, tv shows, commercials, voice overs and print ads. We invite you to take a look.

Tags: agents, commentary, voice talent, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Occasionally I will share some of my insights, experiences and (mostly) mistakes 🙂 about marketing my voiceover business so you can do as I say, not as I do.

In other words, my mistakes show you what not to do – your mileage may vary.

Today’s topic is the oft discussed (here, at least, if not elsewhere) email signature.

The topic is important to voice talents because so many of the daily emails we send out to clients, prospects and even vendors give voice actors an opportunity (via our email signature) to share our business with them, even in the most mundane email communications. People can and do check out email signature links sometimes – we’ve all done it.

Note that I mentioned the email signature as part of daily emails.This would be different from an eblast or mail newsletter which serve a very different purpose and sometimes are produced via 3rd party providers, like MailChimp, etc.

Nope, I’m just talking about daily emails.

So what are the options?

Well there are tons of email signature options and I won’t be drilling down into all of them. I’ll give a real top line look at the most popular options and then discuss what I have done.

Some voiceover folks use a very simple, do-it-yourself email signature that just uses the font of their email, it includes their name, company, website and maybe a phone number. Simple, clean and super free.

Next step up from that are some free services, tricks & tools that allow you to add signatures in gmail and outlook (which are two of the most popular email services). You just have to do a little research to find the specs (ex: the optimal email signature dimensions for gmail are 170 pixels high by 200 pixels wide, etc). Again…it can look fancier, still have links and it’s still free.

But I think sometimes these formats aren’t universally readable on all email platforms – which makes me nervous. I could look unprofessional and not even know it with some of the cheap trick tools.

The next step up from would likely be designing an email signature in Canva. Canva (and other marketing support, design-based web sites) have sized email signature templates. They give you some more artistic control (cool designs) for email templates but links cannot be featured – at least in the designs I saw using free Canva.

And free Canva is the one I have been using for a while now (maybe a year) for my email signature block — it looks great and it conveys information, but you can’t put in links.

The “no links” part had been bothering me for a while. Why?

I really want users to be able to easily and immediately access my email and website information – the faster they get to my website, the faster they have access to all that information.

I want media producers to get to my website so they see all the information I have provided for them to make a smart voiceover talent decision…which would be hiring me, of course.

For some years, I had an email signature with links that I got via Wise Stamp, a company that provides a multitude of plans for email signatures for individuals or companies with scores and scores of  employees. The services for many of these plans can get very involved (think tracking of email opening, lead generation, etc) and with every additional service the cost goes up.

I’ve just used the basic Wise Stamp email signature templates with links, in the past. I liked it because to was always formatted correctly, it worked well with Outlook and GMail on sizing, it didn’t seem to have a problem working on the various email platforms of anyone receiving my emails (they need to be able to read it, after all) and the customization was variable, attractive and easy. It was also of course not free – unless you wanted Wise Stamp branding on your email sig (which was *verboten* in my marketing brain).

Although not free, Wise Stamp usually had a discount price offered so it made it OK. When they dropped the discount over a year ago, I went over to Canva.

The link issue, however (as I mentioned earlier), was becoming something I thought more about. Gnawing at me.

Wise Stamp recently had another discount offering (not as good as in the past)…but it had links. Ok.

So for the next year, I’m going to see if I sleep better with links in my email signature.

Tags: marketing, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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When I first met Erik Sheppard of The Sheppard Agency (originally founded under the name Voice Talent Productions), Erik himself was a voiceover talent.

But clearly the man loved the art of the deal. He’s very good at it.

Don’t hold me to this but I believe I was one of the founding voices of Erik’s voiceover agency (there were dozens of us)…I remember getting the call from him if I would be interested in signing on. I’ve never regretted saying yes.

Please feel free to reach out to Erik about working with me on your next voiceover project.

ABOUT THE SHEPPARD AGENCY

Over the past years the name “Sheppard” has become synonymous with voiceover. Our passion for the craft and the industry is unmatched and our dedication to the service of our talent and our esteemed clients is our primary focus. We are not simply active within the community but are recognized as an authority on this rapidly changing and evolving industry and as tireless advocates for those involved, both talent and buyers. Voiceover is all we do and have done for decades.

The Sheppard Agency connects casting professionals, advertising agencies, directors and producers with the world’s most recognized and in-demand union and non-union voice actors and actresses. We have scoured the globe to find the most outstanding and professional talent and our elite roster collectively represents the absolute best of what the industry has to offer. These are the voices you hear every day on film, television and radio because they represent the pinnacle of the art form.

Tags: agents, voice talent, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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If voiceover talents are honest with themselves, we really aren’t as good as we should be about keep our stores clean, fresh and repainted.

As voiceover talents will tell you, our “stores” are our websites, the heart of our voiceover businesses.

What do we miss?

We forget to update information (outside of voiceover demos, which we are “pretty good” about updating), we forget to update SEO information and stories and/or changing out graphics and on and on. We just get lazy.

Then we voiceover business owners get hit with an idea (like a 2′ x 4′ across the back of our heads) about fixing something on the website and we’re off to the races.

And FYI…alot of the stuff we change is stuff many folks would never ever notice or likely even care about…because you’re living your life, not ours.

I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon (first non-football Sunday of the year) but my idea for voiceover website renovation struck me on Friday.

I was talking with my web developer then about an a new idea I had (more on that in weeks to come…tee hee) when I noticed something, when looking at one of my demo pages.

From 2016 to 2022, my logo featured a handwritten font with my tagline “Your Friendly, Neighborhood Voiceover Talent” in a Segoe font.

I created a brain fart of logo in 2023 quickly shifting to my current logo at the start of 2024.

But that Segoe tagline font (2016-2023) was the font I used for my 2020-designed voiceover demo page banners.

So what I noticed Friday was that I had NOT updated my voiceover demo page banners to include the new, correct font from my 2024 logo.

EEEK! ARRRGHH! ZOINKS!! Marketing disaster! (Not really).

And I know you don’t care but this is MY story so just read. It’s a blog for goodness sake. 🙂

So this weekend, I set about redesigning (renovating) all the voiceover demo page logo bars for my website:

I wanted to keep the same general design, fix the “Your Friendly, Neighborhood Voiceover Talent” font and then freshen up the font and color design. You can see ALL of the new voiceover demo banners below.

The last page I fixed was my Political Demo page.

While I was looking at that page, I got to thinking that I probably had not been as clear to the political consultants and political commercial producers who visit my Political Commercial demo page about what spots I will do and will not do.

As I have long stated, while I hold no political party affiliation, I will only voice for candidates or political action committees who support the Pro-Life platform.

In an effort to respect the time of those (from any party) looking for a political voice talent, they need to know that about me right away and adjust their attention as needed.

So I decided I need to create a graphic that highlighted my rule that would sit at the top of the page. That has now been added.

There are a couple of other things I may need to add with the web developer’s help but I feel this was a very productive weekend voiceover project that didn’t require any visits to Lowes or Home Depot.

Well done me. 🙂

THE 2020 vs. 2025 BANNER COMPARISON….                                                     

CHARACTER VOICES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMMERCIALS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E-LEARNING

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EXPLAINER VIDEOS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LIVE ANNOUNCER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MESSAGE ON-HOLD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NARRATION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

POLITICAL COMMERCIAL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RADIO IMAGING

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TV PROMO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: blogs, branding, marketing, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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According to the internet, in 1947 a person named H.C. Gipson was the first person to connect the word voice and over in writing to create the word voiceover.

So this Gipson person helped foster a humorous debate in my industry ever since.

Why?

Because if you look at the term in industry documents, books, on-line or even in logos, you’re likely to see variations of the word…so which is right?

• Is the word voice over (two words next to each other)?

• Is it hyphenated (as in voice-over)?

• Or is the correct spelling just the two words smooshed together: voiceover?

Logic would dictate we go back to our friend Gipson and how he (or she) wrote it…except

• The internet didn’t distinguish how the word was written by Gipson (so we lack a bit of clarity there)
• Aside from saying a person named Gipson wrote the word for the first time, an internet search about H.C. Gipson didn’t show any other information about this person (so that adds a lack of credibility there)

So the internet scores an “F” there.

Well there is always the dictionary!

The terms voiceover and voice over have distinctive meanings:

• Voice over is a noun referring to hiring talent for an audio project
• Whereas voiceover can function as an adverb or refer to the final product, like a movie’s narration

Well that settles it…except it doesn’t because when it comes to search engine optimization, you are STILL going to see all 3 spelling versions.

Over the decades, based on various “rules” of the day (bah!), I have written my company name as:

• audio’connell Voice Over Talent
• audio’connell Voice-Over Talent
• audio’connell Voiceover Talent

(The hard and fast “rule” here is that the “a” is always lower case. That’s a rule you can believe in! 😀 )

What’s the solution?

First, we don’t need a solution per se because nobody else but me thinks about this stuff.

Second, if you’re a voice talent with a web site, use all three and let Google figure it out.

Hope that helps but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

And it doesn’t matter. 😉

Tags: audio'connell voice over talent, commentary, silliness, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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