By the way, here are some of the signs of cell phone addiction:

SIGNS YOU’RE ADDICTED TO YOUR CELLPHONE

Are you addicted to your cellphone or Blackberry? Is it time you hung up that Bluetooth headset? Sure, there’s nothing wrong with checking office voicemail on a Saturday afternoon – we’re all guilty of it now and again. But if you’re guilty of any of these cellphone signs, a little tech-free time in the country would probably do some good: 1. You plan your commute around cellphone signal dead zones.2. This question always comes up on a first date: “Who’s your cellphone provider?” Worse: Depending on the other person’s answer, there might not be a second date. 3. You can’t go to the bathroom without it. 4. You read tech forums. 5. You can send an e-mail or text message behind your back while listening to Bob drone on about how performance is trending upward — all without spelling errors. 6. If you accidentally leave your cellphone at home, it’s a major emergency that requires you turning around and driving through another hour of rush-hour traffic to get it.

The doctor I see about my allergies, is not only a genius, but he shoots it straight.  Don’t go and spend thousands on a fancy Hepa filter, here are the details from his website that I have been using with great success for years.  It’s not pretty, but it sure works.

For a wealth of information head over to Dr Roby.com 

Room air cleaners help with allergies by helping people live in cleaner, healthier environments. By sleeping in a room with an air cleaner, you will breathe much cleaner air all night long. And by also having an air cleaner in your office, or any other room where you spend a lot of time, you will maximize your clean air intake and minimize the allergens you breathe. Even if you have a good filter on your central air conditioning system, a room air cleaner will increase the purity of the air you breathe. You can put together a very effective and inexpensive air cleaner by purchasing two items at most home improvement stores.

1. Buy a 20″ square box fan (under $20) and a 20″ square 3M Ultra Allergen Filtrete 1250 (@$18). It is very important to get this exact filter.
2. Place the filter on the intake side of the fan and flush with the fan with the Air Flow Arrow pointing toward the fan.
3. Attach the filter to the fan with a rubber band or tape.
4. Turn the fan on high. It will draw air through the filter, thus cleaning the air of mold spores, dust, and pollen particles. It will filter particles as small as bacteria.
5. Keep the fan running all the time, 24 hours a day in a closed bedroom. Run it at night at an acceptable noise level for you. Direct the flow of air directly at the patient when the room is occupied. You must close or block any air-conditioning duct. To cool or heat the room, set the fan in the doorway (air blowing into the room), and leave the door open enough to allow the fan to sit there (about 20″). When you are not sleeping in the room, keep it closed up completely with the fan running at high speed.
6. In 1 or 2 months, replace the filter with a new one. Your monthly cost for filters will be about $7-8. A washable, reusable electronic filter can be purchased for about $50, but they are actually less effective than the 3M Ultra Allergen Filtrete 1250. Custom sizes for your home can be ordered directly from 3M Company at 800-388-3458.

Please share this idea with others. Clean air is a great help for people with allergies.

Trying to get voiceover talent jobs on-line is tough. Each day, more and more people enter the field looking for a job in voice overs.  With practically each and every one comes another website with the same focus as yours.  All these personal pages are clambering for the same piece of a very small voiceover pie.
 
In recent years and the foreseeable future search engines are and will be the most widely used internet tool to find sites for products, services or information. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page and it’s just usually just the top three or four listings of that.  Sounds kind of fruitless doesn’t it? The more traffic, the more business, but just how hard is it to make the top ten with voiceover talent?

Let’s give it a try, I’ll type in “voice over” in everyone’s favorite search engine, “Google”, and let’s see what we get.  As of this writing it returned 49,700,000 results.  Sure, some of the results are for other things, but even narrowing the search parameters I still came up with 942,000 results.  One popular keyword research tool predicted that there will only be about 160 searches a day for “voice over”.  One number seems incredibly high and the other incredibly low, even if they are both off by 50,000, your commercial voice over service website has a lot of competition.
 
Ok, “voice over” seems like a tough search engine term to crack, let’s pick another.  Let’s try “voice talent” and we get a whopping 2,310,000 sites as challengers.  Put in “Voice actor” and we get over two million.  If you got these kind of odds in Vegas would you go?  When your odds of being struck by lightning is a measly 576,000 to one, or your odds of dating a supermodel is a sure bet at 88,000 to 1, are you still going to make that voiceover website and hope for the best?  Yep.

We are the people that love to buy lottery tickets—why, because they are fun and there’s always that chance….  Buying a lottery ticket is fine and building a “voice over” website is great, as you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  One website developer who specializes in voice over websites says right their homepage; “I have never heard of anyone getting a VO gig because of someone stumbling onto their website via a generic web search.”  Wow, what’s a voice imaging talent to do?

“The Voice”, Frank Frederick, had great advice in his lecture “How to Define Your Niche Voice Acting Market”.  The days of being all things to all people are numbered.   Take an honest assessment of who and what you are and become the best at doing it.  Once you find your niche, then make sure as many people as possible know about it.  Even if you have a voice over agent or are a member of a voice over directory, self marketing is essential.

Education and hard work are also a better bet for furthering your career than a generic “voice over cheap” website.  Voiceover talent jobs are tough to come by and the good ones are even harder, that’s why it’s so important to stay top of mind and totally prepared.
  
So when it comes to your personal voiceover talent website, you need to think of it more as your electronic business card.  Instead of focusing on the generic term “voice over” or “voice talent” make it “voice overs by your name” or “your name voice talent”.  Better yet, make sure your site is your name and your niche.  Oh yeah, and remember, market yourself every chance you get, because as we have seen, if they don’t know you they probably won’t find you.

This is the time of the year that we spend a lot of time inside.  You can’t open a window (if you have a window in your voice over studio) to let in some fresh air, because the air quality outside is not a whole lot better.  So what’s a voice to do?  Is indoor air quality an issue in your vo studio?  The NBC affliate here in town did an investigative report and here’s what we learned:

From KXAN TV.

When you go to work, do your allergies all of sudden appear? Do you start sneezing and coughing? If so, you may have a dirty workplace.

If you see dust on the vents, that’s a sign the air flow system in your building may not be working properly, and that’s just one thing.
 
Alex O’Neal relies on his voice to everyday behind the microphone.

“The minute I hit the door, my sinuses will all of a sudden clog up,” O’Neal said.

So is O’Neal allergic to talking into the mic or the building?

“What really made me think that the building is dirty is that it doesn’t happen to me on the days that I don’t come in,” O’Neal said.

To answer our question, we brought in building scientist Doug Garrett.

“I apply a series of tests to the air quality, the air conditioning and heating, filtration, moisture to find out what is wrong with the building as a system,” Garrett said.

The first stop is the vents.

“This is all just dirt. This is dust that’s built up on the grill here,” Garrett said.

It’s dirt that’s being blown into the air. Down the hall, Garrett notices an old water leak on some ceiling tiles.

“This pattern is mold, rolling around here, and I’ll bet it’s even worse on the other side of it if we flip that tile over,” Garrett said. “It’s quite amazing how well-tuned the human nose is to detecting mold in homes. If you smell a musty odor, it is not to be ignored. It is real, and it is a sign that somewhere, you have a moisture issue.”

It’s a problem that needs to be addressed. In another room, a ceiling tile has a water mark.

“That’s where water has been running down from the roof of the building, dripping off of the tile right there,” Garrett said.

On the roof, Garrett finds the air conditioning units are too big for the building.

“Vastly oversized air conditioners lead directly to poor indoor air quality, high utility bills and poor comfort,” Garrett said.

It’s a problem that can be fixed.

“Generally, these things can be addressed while you continue to use the home of the building,” Garrett said.

The majority of the problems in that building were caused by the air conditioning unit not cooling the building properly, leading to condensation which caused wet ceiling tiles and mold, likely leading to everyone sneezing and coughing.

So what can you do at home to combat potential air problems?

Try putting in a new air filter. Garrett suggests a 3m.
 
Control the humidity. Try buying a $15 gauge to see what the level is in your home an adjust your A/C to control it.

Also, get rid of any water leaks. Those lead to mold.

You can have the best voice in the world, the best delivery, the best voice over equipment, but what if no one can find you? Are you depending on web traffic to supplement your voice over income? Web searches are important to us all. You can have the fanciest voice over website ever created, but its wasted money if your site doesn’t show up on search engines.

It takes hard work to maintain a popular site; it also takes money to make money. BUT, it doesn’t take a ton of dollars to generate website traffic for your site.

Some voice over talents get big hits on their sites and not every one of them is a Don LaFontaine or Joe Cipriano. A lot of the big hit voice talents are spending money on Google ads or banner ads, some of them even have an entire marketing plan implemented. If you have a ton of money and hire the right people this is definitely easier. This is, of course expensive and not necessarily the best way to go about it.

Then there are the other voice talents out there that get lots of traffic to their voice over websites by using SEO techniques. SEO, stands for search engine optimization. Do a Google search on SEO and 183 million sites pop-up. There is a complete industry out there dedicated to what you can do for little or no cost. Is SEO worth it? You bet, and if you have the money to spend go for it. Otherwise, let’s get to work on some easy things you can do.

Here are some words and concepts you should know:
Title tags – These are the words that appear in the upper left of your browser. Make sure they are short, sweet and to the point and more importantly, keyword rich. When your site appears on a web search this is what is displayed. The closer this is to what people are searching for, the better your chances for being found.

Keywords – Keyword and keyword density should be top priorities. Keywords are the things people type into the various search engines to find relevant web pages. Take the time to figure-out the words you think people would use to find your page. Keyword density is making sure your page uses these particular words in its content.

Sitemaps – Sitemaps are not only a good idea to help people navigate your site, but it also tells the search engines which pages to index. The more search engine indexing, the better the chance your site will pop up on a search.

Content – Search engines LOVE content, the more the better. Make sure you update the content often. Search engines want to provide the most relevant pages for their users, that’s why they give higher priority to sites that are active and informational. Maybe you are good at one area of voice over work or you have great technical knowledge. Blogs and podcasts are special favorites of search engines—start one today.

Links – Do whatever you can to get people to link to your site. The higher ranking a site has that links to you, the higher your rank becomes. Search engines feel that if other people are linking to your site your site must be important. Do whatever you can to build links and the closer on topic the referring site is to your keywords the more they are worth their weight in gold.

I barely scratched the surface on this topic and most of the value to you might be simply making you aware that SEO exists. A college course could be given on each one of the items, but the good news is there are countless resources on the web.

Next post I’ll try to write a little bit about “off-site” voice over website optimization.