I made nearly $10,000 last month doing freelance voice-over work. I get 90% of my work through Fiverr and work just 5 hours a day — here's how I do it.
By Alice Everdeen, as told to Rose Maura Lorre
Mar 12, 2021, 9:42 AM
Alice Everdeen is a freelancer in Texas.
Alice Everdeen
Alice Everdeen is a 29-year-old voice-over artist in Austin, Texas.
After years working in radio and TV, Everdeen quit her full-time job and now can make thousands a week as a freelancer.
This is what her job is like, as told to freelance writer Rose Maura Lorre.
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I launched my full-time voice-over career just last year, but even as a kid, I was always doing voice work in some way. I would constantly mimic the people I heard in commercials and on the radio and I made tons of prank phone calls, but I never really thought about it as something I could do as a career.
I went to Rutgers University to study journalism and visual arts. After working at MSNBC and a local news station for several years, I moved to Texas in 2016. There, I eventually switched over to a production company where I wrote and produced TV and radio ads.
One day, I was going over a client's script with my colleagues. Just as a joke, I read the script out loud in the most over-the-top radio voice I could think of. They stopped and stared at me; then they said, "Wow, that was really good!"
I started doing voice-overs for the company and realized it was really fun.
I also think it also helped that I'm a very animated person and I enunciate well.
Then around January 2020, right before the pandemic, I was going through a divorce and felt unhappy going to work for nine hours a day. I told myself, "I'm going to quit my job, start freelancing, buy a school bus, and I'm going to travel."
I made my own voice-over demo reel and made a profile on Fiverr and things surprisingly took off.
One of the first clients I got was Fiverr itself. I know they will hire new members to give them some credibility, so I think they just saw that I was new and they liked my demo. Now I book probably 90% of my work through Fiverr, where other companies will find me for their clients. I've done VOs for companies like, Valvoline, Community Coffee, Verizon, Accenture, and Amazon.
I always ask potential clients a few questions before accepting the job.
I ask how long the script is, what's the audience and tone they're going for, and whether or not the recording has to meet certain time requirements. My voice-overs typically run anywhere from 15 seconds to three minutes, but I've done some audio (usually for e-learning projects) that was as long as 20 minutes.
I made nearly $10,000 last month doing freelance voice-over work. I get 90% of my work through Fiverr and work just 5 hours a day — here's how I do it.
By Alice Everdeen, as told to Rose Maura Lorre
Mar 12, 2021, 9:42 AM
Alice Everdeen is a freelancer in Texas.
Alice Everdeen
Alice Everdeen is a 29-year-old voice-over artist in Austin, Texas.
After years working in radio and TV, Everdeen quit her full-time job and now can make thousands a week as a freelancer.
This is what her job is like, as told to freelance writer Rose Maura Lorre.
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I launched my full-time voice-over career just last year, but even as a kid, I was always doing voice work in some way. I would constantly mimic the people I heard in commercials and on the radio and I made tons of prank phone calls, but I never really thought about it as something I could do as a career.
I went to Rutgers University to study journalism and visual arts. After working at MSNBC and a local news station for several years, I moved to Texas in 2016. There, I eventually switched over to a production company where I wrote and produced TV and radio ads.
One day, I was going over a client's script with my colleagues. Just as a joke, I read the script out loud in the most over-the-top radio voice I could think of. They stopped and stared at me; then they said, "Wow, that was really good!"
I started doing voice-overs for the company and realized it was really fun.
Everdeen working from home.
Alice Everdeen
I also think it also helped that I'm a very animated person and I enunciate well.
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Then around January 2020, right before the pandemic, I was going through a divorce and felt unhappy going to work for nine hours a day. I told myself, "I'm going to quit my job, start freelancing, buy a school bus, and I'm going to travel."
I made my own voice-over demo reel and made a profile on Fiverr and things surprisingly took off.
One of the first clients I got was Fiverr itself. I know they will hire new members to give them some credibility, so I think they just saw that I was new and they liked my demo. Now I book probably 90% of my work through Fiverr, where other companies will find me for their clients. I've done VOs for companies like, Valvoline, Community Coffee, Verizon, Accenture, and Amazon.
I always ask potential clients a few questions before accepting the job.
Everdeen says she practices each script several times before recording.
Alice Everdeen
I ask how long the script is, what's the audience and tone they're going for, and whether or not the recording has to meet certain time requirements. My voice-overs typically run anywhere from 15 seconds to three minutes, but I've done some audio (usually for e-learning projects) that was as long as 20 minutes.
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Generally, I practice a script a couple times and record it as many as four times, depending on how comfortable I am with the style and subject. Medical or technical copy can take me way longer. Then comes editing, which takes forever. I usually spend four times as long on editing as I do on recording, because I have to remove breaths, gaps, mess-ups, etc. I spend about 10% of my time practicing scripts, 30% recording them, and 60% editing the recording.
I've spent over $1,000 on equipment to produce the best quality voice-overs.
I work with a Rode NT USB mic, which costs about $170, and then I have a dinky HP laptop that I bought about a year ago. I definitely should have bought a more powerful one, but for now it gets the job done.
I also bought myself an Isovox, which is a soundproofed, square-shaped box you shove your head into. It's super claustrophobic, but it makes my audio sound pretty great. I use a program called Audacity to edit my work.
Because of COVID-19, there are tons of phone-recording jobs.
About 20% of my orders nowadays talk about safety precautions or mention COVID directly. Pretty much every company needs a new outgoing message saying, "Thank you for calling blah-blah. Here are the precautions we're taking" or "We offer pick-ups and deliveries, etc."