Good morning on this fine Timberwolf gray day! Yes, that’s a shade of gray and it does match the sky. I looked it up…
This is a webinar-tastic week for me. You get not one but two webinars for the price of two! Sounds like a great deal, ay? Ay?
So tomorrow night I teach “Marketing Strategies and Measuring Success” courtesy of my pal John Florian of Voiceover Xtra. Click on this link to check it out.
On Thursday night (12/20) I teach my monthly “Business and Money 201” webinar for Edge Studio. This one is called “Creating a Practical Action Plan”. Click on this link to check it out.
If you’re not sure what the difference is between the two, allow me to explain!
“Marketing Strategies and Measuring Success” is about how & why you should have a marketing plan and how to tackle the ever-elusive world of marketing analytics aka figuring out what’s working and what isn’t.
“Creating a Practical Action Plan” is about setting goals for 2013 and how to implement them. Marketing is just one of many aspects that will be covered and there will be very little, if any, overlap.
Get it? Got it! Good. Moving on!
For those of you who are regular blog followers or students, you’ve heard me often use the phrase “May I suggest community theater?”. First off, I’m shocked I haven’t gotten any blowback from it! I’ve been half-waiting for someone to write or call to admonish me for disparaging the community theater community (see what I did there?). I had a defense all planned out, but since all of you are so hip that you understood what I meant by it, I can’t use it!
Well dammit, I’m gonna use it anyway.
So, what do I mean when I say “May I suggest community theater”? It usually follows “If you can’t or won’t do X…”, X being some sort of obstacle to success in the voiceover industry, or just some non-sexy clerical task like invoicing or crafting an Action Plan.
Voiceovers is a career for professionals and community theater is a hobby for amateurs, I mean that in the nicest sense of the word.
Amateur is French for “lover of” and the term often has a negative connotation. For example, an amateur baseball player is not as good as a professional baseball player, at least most of the time. If you are involved in community theater, chances are you are neither talented nor dedicated enough to be a professional actor, or you are but due to “life circumstances” you cannot pursue it professionally. Or maybe you just like to do it once in a while and it’s as simple as that!
All that aside, there are many who are drawn to the voiceover industry because they think it is “easy” and they don’t have to “work”, or they take shorts cuts with cheap equipment, bottom-feeding bidding practices, or pull the classic ass-clown move “Can I have your client list?” It is to these people that I suggest community theater. They probably won’t do it anyway because community theater doesn’t pay!
TIP OF THE WEEK: Nothing truly worth having is easy to attain. Do what you love and deal with the rest!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ Jack Kerouac
STUFF!: Last week I saw what I regard as the Best Film of 2012. “Ruby Sparks”. It is brilliant!
From Tom Dheere’s apartment, this is Tom Dheere: GKN News…