How Do You Go From Zero to $100K in Voiceover? Exactly How I Did It

Short answer: I went from zero to over six figures in my first year of voiceover with rented gear, couch cushions on the walls, and no coaching for the first three months. The whole thing came down to two decisions: going all in instead of dabbling, and doing 20 to 30 auditions a day until I could not miss. Here is exactly how it happened, month by month, and what you can copy from it.

Since then I have done over 2,000 voiceover jobs, narrated History Channel's Backroad Truckers, and have not made less than six figures in a year. This is where it started.

Why did I start voiceover?

Necessity. I was managing a nightclub and my acting career was going nowhere. Then I got fired with no warning. I had almost no savings, I had just signed a lease on an apartment I could not afford without a paycheck, and I had no plan.

I looked for another nightclub job first. But I knew I needed a side hustle, so I started googling. Voiceover came up right away and it hit me: this was something I had always wanted to do. I went down the rabbit hole of YouTube and blogs, and then I had a choice. Do it casually, or attack it as hard as I could. I chose to attack it.

If you are struggling to get started, it is probably because you have not made that decision yet. You are still deciding whether it is for you. You are worried about spending money on gear and not booking. That is what freezes people. Make the decision first. Everything else follows.

How do you start voiceover with no money?

I could not afford a $200 Rode NT1, let alone a $1,000 mic. So I called the music store I used to rent DJ equipment from for the club, asked if they rented voiceover gear, and rented everything I needed for under $100 a month.

For the space, the expensive apartment turned out to be the one lucky break. It had a home office about twice the size of a walk-in closet. I could not afford acoustic foam or moving blankets, so I took the cushions off the couch and banked them against the walls, pinned my comforter to the wall, hung towels wherever I could, and worked on the carpet. It covered about half the room. It was not good. It was good enough to start, and I started.

Month one: learning on Fiverr for $5

I got on Fiverr, and to be clear, I do not recommend Fiverr as a starting point anymore. Back then you could go apply for jobs and pitch people directly. Now you post and wait. But the reason I got on there was not to make money. It was to learn, because I could not afford coaching.

Everyone else was charging $5 for 25 or 100 words. I charged $5 for 1,000 words. On purpose. I knew it would bring a flood of orders, and a flood of orders would force me to get good at recording and editing long form fast. First month: about ten orders, about $50, and a crash course in editing that I could not have bought.

Month two: the turning point

Orders picked up. I raised my prices. I made about $500, and I spent it on two things: acoustic foam from Amazon so the office finally sounded right, and a membership to Voices.com.

That membership changed everything. I do not work for Voices.com and I do not endorse everything they do, but as a place for a beginner to start I still do not think you can beat it. They send you auditions every day and you never have to invoice a client.

It took me 250 auditions to book my first job. Two hundred and fifty. But that job paid $400 for about 20 minutes of work, and I remember thinking: if I could do ten of these a day, that is $4,000 a day. I have not made a million dollars in voiceover (yet), but that one job proved it was possible, and possible was all I needed.

What made me good so fast?

Reps, with direction. Every Voices.com audition came with the client's notes and usually a link to a commercial they liked the tone of. I saved every one of those to a private playlist, studied them, and took notes. Then I did 20 to 30 auditions a day and applied what I learned. That is a masterclass in what clients actually want, delivered daily, for free.

By month three I had raised my Fiverr rate to around $100 per 200 words and made about $2,000 there, plus about $1,500 in my first month on Voices.com. Somewhere around $3,500 to $4,000 in month three. And it kept climbing.

When did I get coaching?

As soon as I could pay for it with voiceover money. I took a one month class with a commercial VO coach in Vancouver and it changed how I understood the work. I had been doing what I thought voiceover was supposed to sound like: projected, pushed, a copy of other people. He showed me the reads got better when I put my own personality and heart into them. I started booking at a whole new level right after that. First year, over six figures, and I have not dipped below it since.

What should you copy from this?

1. Make the decision. Get the gear, build the space, and decide that no matter how hard it gets you are not quitting. That decision is the whole difference between people who book and people who research forever.

2. Get your reps in. The cheap Fiverr jobs are not the lesson. The auditions with client direction were the lesson. Think of a pitcher in the bullpen or a batter in the cage: they do not get good in a weekly class, they get good by doing the thing thousands of times. Twenty to thirty auditions a day minimum when you are new. Forty to fifty if you can get them. You will be shocked how fast you improve.

When I started, I did not know anything and I was scared. I did not listen to the fear. I started, got the reps in, and made it happen. You can do that too.

Want the shortcut I did not have?

I figured this out alone because I had to. You do not. Inside VoiceOver School you get the road map, live classes, working coaches, and 500 plus voice actors doing their reps alongside you.

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