In
this Issue: |
| VO Marketing.............A
Free hamburger? |
| Webmaster Wilco's Tips.........looking
neat and professional. |
| Lowell Christenson on
.........Essentials of an effective radio commercial |
| A
few Bits and Bytes..........Spam and where did
the "L" go? |
A
visitor asks .........I
am putting VO demos on my website. What format and production recording
requirements should I use? |
| Why join CV?.........some
of the benefits are not so obvious. |
| Live Chat
now being tested.........drop by and say Hi |
| |
| VO
Marketing
Have you heard of SEO? It's a new word being bantered about and
means Search Engine Optomization. If you have a web site aimed at
attracting new visitors then this process is a must. It is very
involved and can be costly. One feature SE's (Search Engines) like
are quality links. Links with relevance and associated to sites
in your business are valuable. What better way than to contact them
and offer a "free website welcome"? These are usually
about one minute or less or 150 words or less. The average is about
35words. You ask for a link in return for your services and you
accomplish 2 objectives: You get heard, your voice may be auditioned
for future projects as the client wishes to remain consistent. And,
you install a link to them somewhere on your site and presto, you
have a quality link.
Are you currently the voice for radio/TV commercials for a grocery
or department store? Do they do in-house advertising to customers
regarding specials or generic branding messages? You are the in-house
voice as well, right? If not, contact each store or your main client
and offer the service. A $500. a month retainer from a dozen or
more stores is nice to find in the mailbox.
You have done some narration for large companies and they keep coming
back. You are their telephony voice, right? Go offer. This is the
first opportunity for a sale when their callers contact the business.
It is of major importance and consistency and professionalism is
popular.
Feel free to throw in your thoughts/comments here.
top |
| |
Wilco's
Tips
Wilco Cramer, is webmaster for Commercial
Voices.com and VoicesInternational.com. You are invited to contact
Wilco for any of your web site needs. Discount available for CV
members.
Create a consistent look and feel throughout
the web site. Use a color scheme and layout that is standard across
the site.
Create an About Us section, which has all the information
about you and your business.
Create a bread crumb trail on all the pages. It
is the path from the home page to where you are your. It should
look something like this Home > Section > Sub-Section >
Page.
Don't use pop-up windows, not only are they distracting
but some users have pop-up blockers and therefore can't see them.
Test the site in different browsers and resolutions.
Use common name for your menu options.
Avoid numeric page counters, excessive animated
gif's, busy backgrounds, centered justified blocks of text.
Make descriptive links, so they clearly indicate where they are
linking to, unlike works like click here.
Create custom 404 error pages that shows a main
sections of the web site, so that a bad link does not loose you
visitors.
Wilco@WilcoCramer.com
WilcoCramer.com
top |
| |
Essentials
of an Effective Radio Commercial
As a copywriter, producer and voice talent, I firmly believe that
“copy, production and voice” are equally important in
the creation of successful advertising. If any one of these elements
is inferior, the effectiveness of the creative is weakened. A superb
voice delivery on a poorly written commercial falls short, as is
the case with a powerful message delivered poorly. It is my hope
that these thoughts will be helpful to you as you direct your clients
toward making their creative as effective as it can be.
It all starts with the written word. Unfortunately, many writers
are not voice talents, so when they are timing their copy they
don’t have a good understanding of how few words they should
actually use. Even though I know this to be true, I often find
myself editing my own client approved copy after I sit down and
begin to voice the final product. While the onus is on the writer
to work hard on worthsmithing the message to the bare bones, it’s
up to all of us to educate the client.
Create Space in the Creative. This is every voice talents dream.
Producers love it too. I’d rather reduce the length of the
written commercial by one third and allow the voice talent the
ability to pause and breathe. How does one create space? “The
main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. Develop
the creative around a core message, and throw everything else
away. In a nutshell, an effective commercial is about “one
thing”. Additional verbiage only dilutes the message and
makes the entire presentation less effective. A core message is
the foundation every commercial should be built on. From there,
we can develop a powerful message that motivates the listener,
which leads us into next month’s topic: “Emotion vs
Information”.
Lowell Christensen
President and Founder of
SpotWorks Radio Production
www.radiocreative.com
Lowell is a Platinum Member of Commercial
Voices.com
top
|
| |
| Bits
and Bytes
"Your
email got gobbled by my anti Spam program"........due
to the popularity of many old and new anti Spam programs, and even
"reject words" in configuring good and bad emails, you
will undoubtedly notice that some good emails disappear. We use
"ELLA" here at CV and occasionally she dumps good emails
into her Spam Review box.
One solution is to always make your emails stand out and not have
a generic heading in the subject line or even one that you do not
recognize. For example when I originate an email I
will type in the subject line "Hi Jim.....it's Rick
from CV". Usually this is successful and because it
has this initial sort of Hey Pal......don't delete me type
of greeting it gets quick attention.
Pronunciation......we mentioned recently sort of
tongue in cheek that there is an "L" in "W".
Have you noticed how many times it is forgotten? Here's another
scenario, listen to your favorite TV promo guy or girl and pay attention
to introductions such as "The 11 o'clock News with Sandy Rinaldo"...........notice
how the "ith" in "with" gets lost? The end results
are "The 11 o'clock News wissandy Rinaldo"This happens
often when "with" is followed by any word beginning with
a "S", or "Z".
top |
| |
A
visitor asks..... I am putting
VO demos on my website. What format and production recording requirements
should I use?
MP3 is the most popular format for audio players such as Windows,
and Real Player. The goal for your production attributes may vary
but the smaller the better, keeping in mind that you want to retain
high quality. Most demos are recorded at 128kbps, or lower, in mono.
You may get away with a lower kbps speed, depending if you are using
music or sfx. Compare your production at a few speeds and select
reasonable quality. Remember the goal is for your audio to load
and play quickly and still sound good.
top
|
| |
Your
input
Your questions, concerns and comments are very important to us at
CV. E-mail
us here.
Top |
| |
Why Join
CV?
The owner is in the store and is lingo savvy.
CV has 2 main goals for it's membership, to get heard and to get
hits. 99% of CV's voice over talents maintain their own web site.
Their CV membership is used to attract new Producers who cannot
easily find them and in addition to having pertinent info on their
CV pages they sometimes expand this information on their personal
sites.
You are not restricted to one short demo as a CV member. There
are 2 options and you may use both if you like. CV will host up
to 5MB of demos on our servers if you desire but most voice over
talents ask us to "link" to their demos from their personal
web sites. In this case there are no limits to the amount of links
we can host and they can change their demos at will with no missing
links on CV as long as they do not change the file name.
We have received quite a few inquiries about ISDN/DSL. The confusion
is the DSL part. DSL is simply a high speed internet connection
through either your telephone or cable connection. The benefit
is quicker downloads but more important quicker uploads of your
audio productions as you deliver to your clients. As you know
audio files can be extremely large and will not upload on your
server quickly through a dial up connection.
Top
|
| |
Live
Chat
We are doing a trial run of a Live Chat program. Queries can be addressed
immediately to a CV visitor as long as there is someone available
to respond of course. During the testing phase we have installed it
on our Producers+ page and on our "Join Here" page. Feel
free to drop by and say hello.
Top |
|
|
The
CV Newsletter is distributed monthly to: Subscribers, CV Members,
Producers, Clients and Manufacturers in the Voice-Over Industry.
To unsubscribe click here.
We recognize the importance of your electronic privacy, thus our
privacy policy ensures that your name, address, telephone number,
email address and other personal details that CommercialVoices.com
may have will not be shared with any other third party. Thank you. |
