Make Money Talking: Voiceover Acting, Singing & Narration Work

Singers, voiceover actors and even everyday people without experience can make extra cash recording their voice as a side hustle. There’s actually a wide variety of types of work that can be done in this industry: anything from voiceover work for a documentary that plays on Netflix to narrating audio books.

Earnings from this type of work can be reasonable for a beginner or extremely lucrative for someone with a well-known voice and a lot of experience. No matter where you might fall in this spectrum, you can still utilize a number of websites online to find paying work in this industry. This guide will teach you about a few of these sites and provide you with some tips to get started.

Why Do Voice Acting?

For some people, doing voiceover work is a no-brainer when you have a spectacular voice that people tend to notice and make comments about. While you could find a lot of high paying work with an amazing voice, it’s actually not necessary to find work as a voiceover actor. Ordinary people will often have unique voices that can be very appealing for certain types of projects, so this may actually be preferred over a spectacular voice in certain cases.

Narration is one of the more common types of voiceover work, but you can also do audio book recordings, translation, singing and more in this industry. In this tutorial, I’m going to talk to you about three different websites. You can join one or all three of them as a freelancer to find work in a variety of audio and voiceover related fields.

A lot of the work you can find on these sites will be based online, so you can work from the comfort of your own home to earn a living. However, some of the more professional voiceover jobs will require you to travel to their location so recordings can be done in a sound studio. Jobs that require travel often pay enough to make it worth your while though.

Voices

Voices is a website for voice over and other audio related work. You can even find work as a singer here. The most common type of work you’ll find is voice over work for a wide variety of purposes. There are actually some major content producers like the Discovery Channel and Hulu that utilize this site to find voice talent. Voice over work could be for documentaries, advertisements on radio and TV, narration, movie trailers, video games and more. Work can also be found here for translation and even audio production projects.

This website operates on a paid membership system. There is a free option that will allow you to use the site and sell your services, but the paid options look to give you more exposure on the site. The big downside here is that the memberships are quite expensive – $500 or $3000 per year. If you’re interested in doing the type of work that is offered on this website and don’t have an existing business doing voice overs, you’ll be much better off if you start with a free membership here.

Starting with the free membership, you can get familiar with the website and browse jobs. This could give you a good peek into this side hustle before you decide to pay for a membership. Try to land a project or two and get paid before you decide to upgrade. You may even be able to pay for the upgrade with your voice over work.

Backstage

Anyone that has ever wanted to be a star can use Backstage as a side hustle to make some extra cash and potentially get cast for a big role that will breakout their career. Backstage lets you apply for auditions for movie roles, tv shows, theater performances, modeling jobs, voiceover acting and more. Big companies like HBO, Netflix and Amazon have all used this site for casting.

It’s free to create a profile on this website. They’re not very clear about costs upfront, but they actually do charge you a membership fee to be able to have a profile that can apply for jobs. However, you may potentially be able to get a free account for six months without providing any credit card information – this seems to be a free promo they often run.

Jobs are often located in a specific geographic location, although some of them can be done online. You’ll be able to do your auditions online though, so you won’t have to worry about traveling unless you’re getting paid.

Once you have an account here, you can browse through listings and apply for the ones that interest you. If you selected to audition for a role, you’ll get invited to a virtual audition that will determine whether you get hired. Payment is then made directly through the Backstage site to your bank account when you complete work for a company.

ACX

Audio books are a lucrative business online, so it can make an excellent side hustle. A company called ACX is the best to use for this purpose. There are actually two different kinds of side hustles you can run on this site. You can sell your own audio books or you can get paid to narrate them.

For authors, this is where you go to get your audio book listed on Audible, Amazon and iTunes. By setting up a listing once here, you’ll be automatically listed on those marketplaces. You can then sit back and earn a passive income from your sales. If you only have ebooks but you want to sell audio book versions of them, you can provide your own narration files on ACX or pay professional narrators to do it for you.

Professional narrators can then use this site to make money by completing those projects for authors. This is actually an interesting system too. Normally you would do this type of work as a freelancer online. You get a project, complete the work, and then you get paid for it. You can find instant pay narration work on ACX, but authors can also choose to offer a revenue share for free narration work. This allows narrators to build up a passive stream of revenue over time instead of always trading their time for money. This is actually quite rare with freelance work, so it could provide some excellent opportunities for high earnings.