A Major Shift for Voiceover People on Fiverr (and What to do About it)
A Major SHIFT for Fiverr Voiceovers - Know This!
I’m Dane Scott from thegigdoctor.com, a top-rated Fiverr seller, and author of the book, “Voiceover Mythbusters.” This time, I’m going to talk about a new feature Fiverr has added which shifts the ground under voiceover people a bit. But don’t panic, there’s a way to address it, and that’s what I’ll be talking about here.
What it amounts to is this. Fiverr has changed the way it presents our demos to potential buyers. In the past, a buyer would do a search, see the 50 results as thumbnails, and click the play button to listen to the voiceover demo. To stop listening, they’d click the stop button. If their mouse moved while they were listening, nothing would happen. The demo would keep playing. All good so far. But that’s not how it works anymore.
When a buyer searches now, the 50 thumbnails come up as before, but each person’s demo begins playing as the buyer passes their mouse over it. If the buyer moves their mouse away from the thumbnail, the demo stops playing. This is another classic example of how Fiverr tends to favor the buyer over the seller, because this definitely favors the buyer. It makes it really fast and convenient for them to listen to tiny bits of many voices really fast.
Buyer can very rapidly slide across one voice after another, listening to as little as one second of each one. One second! If the tone of the voice doesn’t suit their fancy instantly, that voiceover person might be skipped over.
The impact of this is pretty enormous. Suddenly, rather than being given a fair shot at being heard doing something substantial enough to really represent what we’re capable of, the buyer might be tempted to just zing through the different talent and not slow down until they happen to hear a tone of voice they like.
I see FIVE significant implications of this. The first is, as I mentioned, is that many buyers may not give us a fair hearing before moving on. The second is that we sure as heck better have our absolutely best, most desirable clip in the first position. The third is that the odds of them listening to our entire demo have just be reduced drastically, meaning only those who click through to our gig are probably going to bother with the whole demo. And the fourth is that we need to make sure those first instances of listening as interesting as possible. to help hold them as long as possible. And fifth, the personal “Hi, I’m Dane and I’d love to do your voiceover” intro approach on gigs is now more impotent than ever.
So what in the world do we do about this? When Fiverr buyers can breeze through search listings this fast, how can we increase our chances of them staying long enough on us to consider us seriously? Here are my thoughts on that.
First, I think we need to either go all in on the intro thing, or completely abandon it. Here’s a lady who is all in, and I want to play a little of this so you can see what she does (see my YouTube video for the example).
This actually works pretty well, for what she’s offering, I think, and it may be that in this case, with her natural on-camera charisma, and the fact that she’s primarily selling herself as the girl-next-door, the full-length intro isn’t a bad approach. I wish she was a whole lot closer to the mic, because it sounds really echoey, but aside from that I think she seems fresh, fun, and like she’d do a nice job. And she has the orders and reviews to prove she’s up to the task. So if you’re someone like her, or our buddy Tyler Hudson (see my YouTube video for the example).
In those situations, doing the intro approach might just play to your advantage. But most people aren’t all that skilled or charismatic on camera, and I count myself among them, we’re way better off hitting them with our best shot, right out of the box. Time to re-evaluate your demo and really think about which clip is going to be really attention-grabbing, show off your abilities well, and if possible, address one of the more commonly needed project types like a sales or corporate video.
The first clip should never have been long. 8-10 seconds is the max I have recommended right along. But now that rule is more important than ever. At most, two sentences per clip, Keep your demo moving, bearing in mind that many people aren’t going to hear more than one clip if that first one is of any significant length. And your second clip should be significantly different than the first one, to demonstrate your versatility as early on in the demo as possible.
This new approach of Fiverr’s also makes it all the more important that our demo be “sticky,” meaning it holds the attention of the listener as long as possible. For that reason, I think a demo video, which I’ve always been in favor of, is also more important than ever. Don’t expect the buyer to just stare at your gig image the whole time they’re listening. Keep the visuals compelling and moving, to help hang onto the buyer long enough to get a better sense of what you can do for them.
On that latter thing, I should mention that I’ve begun helping voiceover people turn their existing audio demos into video demos, and in June, I’m going to be doing a promotion to make that super-inexpensive, so be watching for updates on that.
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