If you’ve signed up for a premium membership with either Voice123.com or InteractiveVoices.com (soon to be Voices.com), you should check out the comments Brian Roberts has posted in the blog at Voice123.com.
Here are a couple of highlights:
I did more than 600 auditions in the first 6 months with V123 and made maybe $1000. I was working at it full time!! I’d wake up each morning, go down to my computer and start auditioning. I had an amazingly loud alert on my MAC that screamed at me to check my mail whenever a new email from V123 came in. Id did this EVERY day for MONTHS. And was discouraged.
And
For example, for the first 2 months, I didn’t realize that my microphone was missing a battery that made it sound horrible! I auditioned for HUNDREDS of jobs with this bad mike and NO ONE SAID A WORD. Once I figured it out, It was amazing how much my chances increased and my profits.
Especially in this second comment, Brian makes an extremely important point, you have to have professional equipment and it has to be set up correctly if you have any serious chance of making a decent living doing voice-overs…even part-time. Read the whole thing. (By the way, I’m not surprised no one said anything about Brian’s bad microphone. The clients almost certainly just chalked up his auditions as coming from someone who wasn’t a professional. Which means you need to find and fix the problems you have, because no one else is going to do it for you.)
By the way, one guy who does a lot of voice-over training, and who takes the time to make sure his students understand this essential point is Michael Minetree.