Everyday VOpreneur® with Marc Scott

A voiceover business can live or die by its habits - the small things you do every day that quietly add up to growth or to money left on the table. In this episode, Marc breaks down five bad habits that are probably costing you income and opportunity right now, and exactly how to fix each one.

First: saying yes to everything. Not the jobs themselves, but the free revisions, the after-hours rush gigs, the "just this one time" asks that quietly become a precedent you can't undo. Marc makes the case for a clear revisions and retake policy up front, and charging a premium for premium service.

Then there's confusing being busy with being productive - the six hours in Canva on a graphic that should take fifteen minutes, the equipment rabbit holes, the week spent scheduling social posts instead of marketing. Every hour on a low-priority task is an hour stolen from something that actually moves the needle.

He also digs into not tracking your business expenses and subscriptions (plus a simple AI trick to find duplication you can cut), leaning too heavily on one client and why you replace them before they leave not after, and the habit that may cost the most of all: not asking enough questions before you quote. Usage, deliverables, revisions, and the single question - "did you have a budget in mind?" - that has added 20, 50, even 100% to Marc's quotes.

Which one hit a little too close to home?

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

00:00 5 Bad Habits Costing Voice Actors Money

Last week's episode on incomplete marketing advice struck a chord, so Marc is back with five more. Same idea: these aren't bad pieces of advice, they're just not the whole story - and acting on half the advice is how voice actors end up spinning their wheels.

First up, "you need to be everywhere." Marc disagrees. Spreading 5% of your effort across ten platforms beats nothing, but one or two platforms you actually show up on - where your buyers are and where you enjoy creating - will always win. Then "let your work speak for itself," which is only half true: do great work, but the work goes quiet the moment a client forgets about you, so the relationship is the other half.

He digs into "find your niche" - powerful until it isn't, as he learned when explainer work shifted and then AI wiped out most of his e-learning business overnight. Niche hard, but never let one become a disproportionate share of your income. On "more connections equal more opportunities," he reframes it around the real question: how many people in your network would recognize your name in their inbox tomorrow?

And the one he saved for last, knowing it's the most controversial: "never work for less than your rate." Marc is a genuine fan of the GVAA, but as David Tobak himself has said, it's a rate guide, not a rate gospel. He makes the case for context - markets, economies, the whole deal - and tells the story of a $14,000 offer he turned down, because sometimes the big paydays are the bad jobs.

Which of the five do you want to push back on? That's the conversation Marc wants to have.

‼️ Did you miss the 5 from last week? Click Here 

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

00:00 More Voice Over Marketing Advice That Needs Context

The VOpreneur Podcast was built to help you grow your voiceover business through marketing, and this week Marc gets back to exactly that. He walks through five pieces of marketing advice voice actors hear all the time - advice that isn't working. Not because it's wrong, but because it's incomplete.

Send more cold emails. Marc runs a 24-25% response rate right now, and he didn't get there by sending more - he got there by sending better. He breaks down the chain to check before you add volume: are you targeting the right companies and job titles, is the email actually personal or does it sound like everyone else, and are your website and demos making the right impression?

Post on social media every day. Consistency matters, but you can post daily for a year and generate nothing if it's the wrong content reaching the wrong audience. The fix is strategic, not just consistent - build the right network and publish content that adds value to the people who actually hire.

Be authentic. Real, but incomplete. Authenticity is the hook; there still has to be a clear value proposition and a reason to choose you. You need a better demo. Sometimes true - and sometimes a crutch that stalls your marketing when the real problem is that nobody's hearing the great demo you already have. And follow up until they respond - good advice, as long as every follow-up carries something of value, because most of Marc's responses come after the third email.

Which one hits home for you?

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

00:00 5 Voice Over Marketing Tips That Aren't Working

After the honest Voice123 data episode struck a nerve, Marc didn't want anyone getting stuck in the frustration. Strong feelings about online casting are easy to carry, and they can quietly infect your whole mindset about the business. So this week he flips the lens: where are his opportunities actually coming from right now?

The answer is a lot of places - because he's been marketing his butt off and tracking every bit of it. He walks through the channels one by one, and some of them might surprise you.

The one that caught him off guard: more opportunity in the last two weeks from Voice123 off the platform than on it - buyers who found him in search, then came straight to his website. He gets into optimizing for LLMs and AI search (now 54% of all searching), daily engagement on LinkedIn, working his CRM with targeted follow-ups, and a new-lead outreach approach that's running a 24% conversation rate because every email is genuinely personalized.

He also talks about the DocuShort content getting him indexed in ChatGPT, the agent relationship that's had its best year in a decade, and why - sitting here in October - he feels more optimistic than he did in January, including the clients coming back to human voiceover after the AI-everything phase.

The challenge he leaves you with: how many streams of opportunity does your business really have, and could you add just one or two more?

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

00:00 Why Voice Actors Need More Opportunities

One year ago, Marc rejoined Voice123 after nearly a decade away. Not to prove a point - he's never been the anti-online-casting guy - but because he wanted to speak about the platform intelligently again, from real, current experience. So he tracked everything for a year. This episode is the honest, data-driven report.

He's upfront that this isn't an opinion piece. These are the numbers from his spreadsheet: a year mostly at the $2,200 tier, an 80% listen rate, a one-in-five shortlist rate, a one-in-21 booking rate - and 11 of 12 months stuck in the 50th percentile, unable to get access to enough auditions to even climb out.

Marc walks through what that actually looked like day to day: auditions arriving between 1am and 4am and expiring before he got into the studio, consistently being invited in the fourth or fifth group of talent, and a fully optimized profile that still pulled invitations for a male Cuban American voice, audiobooks, and TTS work he never listed. Then the part he flags as speculation: the inexplicable jump to the top 10% three weeks before his membership was due to renew.

He closes with the comparison that would have shocked anyone who knew him ten years ago - why, three months into his Voices.com experiment, he's already submitted twice the auditions and made more money than in a full year on Voice123, and why he won't be re-upping.

Take the data as you will. Here's exactly what a year cost and what it returned.

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

00:00 Why I Returned to Voice123 After Nearly a Decade

A couple of days ago, Marc shared the trailer for his first docuseries - and he calls it the number one highlight of his career. In this episode, he tells the whole story behind it, because the win isn't the point. The timeline is.

Marc has always been open about chasing documentary narration, right down to the vision he shared on a recent episode: family movie night, pizza in the basement, and pushing play on a show his kids don't know he narrated. Putting that goal out in the open was terrifying - because public goals mean public failure if they don't come true.

So he walks through the years most people never see. Signing with his agent in 2016. Starting coaching in 2020. An award-nominated demo in 2022. Then 2022, 2023, 2024 - no bookings. The doubt. The decision to start creating DocuShorts and commit to a full year no matter the metrics. The workshop he fought to get into. And finally, in 2026, the booking.

The lesson isn't "look what I did." It's that you might be closer than you think - and most people quit one swing too soon. Marc breaks down how he reverse-engineered the goal step by step, and the emotional connection to the vision he believes finally shifted everything.

If you've been grinding toward a goal that hasn't landed yet, this is the one to sit with.

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

CHAPTERS

Marc and his 14-year-old daughter just finished the latest season of Battle on the Beach. What does a home renovation show have to do with voiceover? More than you'd think.

Three teams, the same room, the same brief, seven weeks - and every single week they produce three completely different results. Any one of them could win on any given day, and which one does comes down entirely to what the judges happen to respond to. It's fully subjective. And Marc realized it sounds exactly like casting.

In this solo episode, he gets honest about becoming "the king of the shortlist" - averaging a strong one-in-six shortlist rate on the casting sites, but not seeing the bookings to match. He talks about how easy it is to start questioning everything: your reads, your interpretation, whether your version of conversational is their version of conversational.

Then he reframes it. He shares the job he booked this week with the take he almost didn't submit - the one that didn't even follow the specs - and why that's the whole point. Casting is subjective. You can't control which read lands. What you can control is your creativity, your effort, the coaches you lean on, and the mindset you bring into the booth.

If the shortlist-but-no-booking grind has been messing with your head, this is the reminder you need: on any given day, any one of us can win.

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

00:00 What Does a Home Renovation Show Have to Do With Voice Over?

After a decade of coaching thousands of voice actors, Marc keeps running into the same obstacle above all others: time. Everyone knows what they should be doing to market their business. Almost nobody feels like they have the hours to do it.

In this solo episode, Marc reframes the whole problem with one question: what can you do in 15 minutes?

He makes the case that the real productivity killer isn't a lack of time - it's the all-or-nothing mindset. We tell ourselves that if we can't sit down for a dedicated hour, it isn't worth starting, so we do nothing at all. And those 15-minute pockets we do have get lost to doom scrolling, a quick game, or one more episode.

Marc walks through exactly what he gets done in those small windows - a couple of meaningful LinkedIn comments, one introductory email researched and sent, a single social post, a handful of connection requests, a follow-up with a prospect who went quiet. None of it takes an hour. All of it moves the needle.

If time has always been the thing standing between you and a consistent marketing habit, this is the baby step that actually works.

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

CHAPTERS

The summer series is over, and Marc spent a lot of it away from the office - resetting, thinking, and figuring out where his voiceover business goes from here.

This has been an unusual year. AI hit his business hard, e-learning work he counted on disappeared, and he made a deliberate choice to step back from coaching and get back to voiceover. In this solo episode, he shares the five things he keeps coming back to - the ones he's rebuilding his own business around heading into Q4.

He gets into why you can't measure what you don't track, and the handful of numbers he now keeps in front of him every single week. Then he flips it around: why most voice actors are tracking the wrong metrics entirely, and which ones actually matter.

From there it's AI search - why being found in ChatGPT and Claude may now matter more than being found on Google, and why we're all starting from close to zero. He talks about creating content with real purpose instead of posting for the sake of it, and why the competition left standing is tougher than the crowd that's thinning out.

Plus a bonus he swore he wouldn't admit out loud: the niche he thinks he may have quietly found for himself - and the question of whether you can build a moat of your own.

If you're figuring out how to finish the year strong, this one's for you.

🖱️ Marc Scott on Instagram - https://instagram.com/marcscott

🖱️ Marc Scott on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@MarcScottVO

🖱️ VOpreneur® on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@vopreneur

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

CHAPTERS

Marc spent nearly a decade away from Voices.com. Then, in July, he decided to give the platform another shot.

Six weeks later, he had questions.

In this episode of the Everyday VOpreneur Podcast, Marc is joined by Gina Scarpa, one of the top-booking voice actors on Voices.com, for a deep dive into how the platform actually works and how voice actors can get more from it.

Originally recorded during Free Advice Friday, this conversation covers everything from profile optimization and search results to auditions, shortlists, algorithms, bookings, rates and more.

Gina explains why getting to a 100% VoiceMatch should be one of your first priorities, how clips impact your visibility in search, what actually happens when a client receives your audition, and why you shouldn’t be afraid to submit for opportunities that fit.

They also dig into some of the mistakes voice actors make on the platform, including poorly optimized clips, misunderstanding statistics, archiving completed auditions, and automatically rejecting jobs because of perpetuity language without asking questions first.

Plus, Marc shares what he’s learned during his first six weeks back on Voices.com, how the experience compares with Voice123, and why his opinion of the platform is beginning to change.

If you’re already using Voices.com, thinking about joining, or wondering why you’re paying for a membership but not seeing results, this episode will help you better understand the game you’re playing and how to play it smarter.

Check out Gina's Courses Here - https://courses.ginascarpa.com/ref/marcscott

* Voice Over Marketing Resources

* Get an instant $25 credit when you sign up for VoiceZam

* For voice over services:

* Join the VOpreneur Facebook Group

If you need guidance with your voice over business or learning how to more effectively market, I can help. Book a 15 minute free consultation with me to discuss your specific needs. https://vopreneur.com/free

🎧 Subscribe to the VOpreneur Podcast on your favourite podcast platform - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen - so you never miss an episode.

CHAPTERS