The Acting Business Boot Camp Podcast

How to Actually Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Voiceover Business

I know. I can already hear you groaning. Mandy, I am an actor, not a business person in a blazer who posts about synergy.

I get it. But here is what I need you to understand before we go any further.

LinkedIn is not a social media platform. It is a business tool. And that distinction matters more than almost anything else I am going to say today.

Instagram is for your personality. TikTok is for your content. LinkedIn is for your clients.

Start With Your Profile

If your profile is not optimized, nothing else I am going to say really matters. Your profile is the first thing a potential client sees when you reach out. It needs to say immediately and clearly, I am a professional, I know what I am doing, and you should hire me.

Your photo needs to be a real professional-looking headshot. Not AI, not a car selfie, not an avatar. We are battling bots left and right and you need to prove who you are. A selfie in your booth ...

The Number Nobody Tells You About Voiceover Marketing

I need to have a real conversation with you. Not a comfortable one. Not a motivational poster kind of conversation.

A lot of you are working really hard and wondering why it is not translating into bookings. You are auditioning, posting, emailing, doing the things, and it feels like nothing is moving. And instead of looking at the actual math and data of this business, you are starting to wonder if maybe you are just not good enough.

You are good enough. That is not the problem. The problem is the number.

Here Is the Number

Industry veterans who have been in this business for decades are now saying that the old standard of 20 marketing touches a day is dead. That number used to be considered ambitious. A serious effort. The bar is now 100.

100 touches a day between auditions and direct marketing outreach if you want to compete at a serious level in today's market.

I know how that sounds. But I would rather you hear it from...

Nobody in this industry ever says this out loud. So I am going to.

Greed is making you a terrible actor.

Not greed in the cartoon villain sense. I am not talking about people twirling their mustaches trying to steal jobs. I am talking about the low-grade background hum of financial anxiety and ambition that most of us are walking around with every single day. The constant calculation. The booking pressure. The way you think about auditions as transactions.

That energy is getting into your work.

Greed Makes Your Audition Sound Desperate

When you need to book, you perform differently. Not better. Differently. In a way that casting directors, clients, and agents can feel even if they cannot name it.

There is a quality that shows up in an audition when the actor is trying to win instead of trying to serve the copy, tell the story. You can hear when someone is pushing for the job instead of just doing the job. And that reaching makes complete sense. Bills are real. The pressure to ...

A student of mine forwarded me an email she got from a voiceover guru. One of those here is the truth nobody tells you posts. And after reading it, she asked me, very sincerely, if she was a terrible voice actor.

I cannot tell you the range of emotions I felt. From heartbreak to anger. Because she is not. She has been working at this for five years. She is talented. She has done a lot of things right. And one post made her question all of it.

That is the damage incomplete information does. And today I want to talk about why.

What the Post Said

The post was about booking ratios. It said working voiceover actors book roughly one out of every 50 auditions. Beginners are closer to one in 400. The framing was motivational. Stay the course. You are on schedule. If you quit at audition 40 you quit ten auditions before the math even gets interesting.

And look, the numbers are not made up. Booking ratios are real. Tracking your auditions matters. Those things are true.

But the post als...

Let me walk you through a scenario.

A voice actor gets an offer. Major food delivery brand. Session fee is $500. Buyout is $10,000. Usage is worldwide, all media, in perpetuity. Broadcast TV, streaming, social media, paid and organic, radio, in stores, stadium, cinema, email marketing, every platform, every country, forever.

Is that a good deal?

Not even close.

Today I'm going to give you the math, the framework, and the language you need to have the buyout conversation without feeling like you're making up numbers or asking too much or too little.

Session Fee vs Usage Fee

These two things are important to distinguish because a lot of voice actors, especially newer ones, bundle them incorrectly.

The session fee is what you get paid for your time in the booth. It compensates you for the recording session itself, your preparation, your studio, your performance. For a typical commercial session, session fees range from a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand depending on t...

Quick question: What's the voice you hear describing what's happening on screen during a movie or a TV show for blind and low vision viewers?

That's audio description. And somebody has to record it for every show, every movie, every piece of streaming content, every educational video on every major platform. Every single one.

That is an enormous amount of work. And most voice actors have no idea how to get it.

What Audio Description Actually Is

AD is narration inserted into the natural pauses in a piece of video content, like dialogue, music, and sound effects, that describes what's happening visually. Character movements, facial expressions, scene changes, text on screen, important visual information that a viewer would otherwise miss if they can't see the picture.

The narration is written in the present tense. It's delivered neutrally. The AD narrator describes. They don't editorialize. They are giving information logically but not characterizing it. And it has to fit precise...

I want to tell you about a little experiment I ran.

I was helping a director find and cast actors for some ADR for a film. I reached out to my network and posted in a very popular voiceover group. It was not a complicated audition. Narration piece, sides were provided, instructions were very clear. Basic.

I got 208 submissions.

And when I sat down to go through them, I am not exaggerating, over half had at least one avoidable error. Not the wrong voice for the role. Not didn't nail the read. Errors that had nothing to do with talent. Errors that happened before the person even opened their mouth.

Today I'm going to tell you exactly what those errors were, why they matter more than you think, and what you can do right now to make sure you're not in the half that gets filtered out before anyone hits play.

The Breakdown

I actually tracked this because data, to me, is everything.

25% of submissions didn't follow directions. Mislabeled files, wrong file formats, ignored tone and a...

Let me start with a number. 400.

That's approximately how many cold emails I used to send per month at one point in my career. 400 a month. Roughly 13 emails a day, every day, to production companies, creative agencies, brand managers, you name it.

Want to guess what my booking rate was?

Zero. For months it was actual zero.

And here's the thing. My list was good. I did my research. These were real companies, real decision-makers, real email addresses. My audio was solid. My website wasn't embarrassing. On paper I was doing everything right. And I had nothing to show for it.

So today we're going to talk about what was actually wrong. Because I promise you, it wasn't my list.

What Most Voice Actors Do When Outreach Isn't Working

They diagnose the problem as one of three things.

The list. I need more contacts, better contacts, contacts in a different vertical. So they buy a bigger list, scrape LinkedIn harder, join another directory, and then do the same thing to a different se...

Everybody wants to talk about the big wins in voiceover. The national spot. The animation series. The dream agent. The viral audition story. But there are operational realities that actually determine whether you stay in this business long term, and those don't make it into anyone's Instagram carousel.

These are the things that quietly make or break your career. Because voiceover is not just a performance career. It is a business, a micro business, and it runs on detail.

Your EIN. Get One. Today.

Most actors I talk to don't even know what this is until someone asks them for a W9 and suddenly they're panic googling at midnight. An EIN is basically a business social security number. It's free from the IRS. Do not get scammed into paying for one by a third party provider. Some will charge $75, $150, $200. Go directly to the IRS website.

Getting one doesn't mean you're suddenly a corporation. But psychologically there's a shift. Once you have an EIN you start thinking like a service...