Voiceovers are the kind of work I keep telling my husband he needs to try to get into. He always gets people commenting on what a great voice he has. He did radio in college. Maybe one of these days he really will check it out and give it a try. It strikes me as a nice potential side income.

Skills Required

The big thing you need is a great voice. Something that people want to listen to. You also need to speak clearly.

You can come from a variety of backgrounds and do well in voiceover work. Your best way to get started may well be to simply try. However, there may also be classes or coaching available in your area to help you get started right. How you get things going can depend on how professional you want to start out. If you’re aiming at television, movie or radio voiceovers, you can expect to be dealing with people who require a higher degree of professionalism than if you do voiceovers for people who are working from their own homes. That doesn’t mean you can sound bad, of course.

You will need to create sample voiceovers for potential employers so that they know if yours is the voice for their project.

Depending on the kind of work you want to do, you may want to consider joining a union. This is not at all a requirement, and many voiceover actors are not members of any union. This type of work is primarily freelance.

Voiceover actors may work on commercials, read for audio books, television, movies, podcasts, video games – anything that requires just your voice. You may have to sound like a particular person, sound cheerful, talk quickly yet clearly, and so forth.

Common Expenses

To get started you may just get some basic equipment to record with at home, such as a voiceover microphone, then improve your home voiceover studio as you go. You may need software to edit the MP3 files you produce or the client may prefer to do that themselves.

Possible Income Streams

Voiceover work at home may be found through sites such as:

Voices.com
Voice123

You will need to consider how you charge for your work. Flat rate or by how widely your work will be used? Would you charge the same to do a television commercial as you would for a multimedia presentation? Will you be doing post production work?

Related Scams

The basic voiceover scam is rather like the standard modeling scam. You find an ad saying that you can get voiceover work without experience. You respond, only to find that you need to buy the equipment they recommend and pay for the production and distribution of demo tapes. They won’t really work with you on practicing before you record a demo, or anything like that.

A good rule of thumb is to not pay up front for anything. A legitimate agent won’t charge you upfront.

Recommended Reading

Voice for Hire: Launch and Maintain a Lucrative Career in Voice-Overs
Step Up to the Mic: A Positive Approach to Succeeding in Voice-Overs
The Art of Voice Acting, Third Edition: The Craft and Business of Performing for Voice-Over

Some home business ideas are made much simpler if you use software to pull in offerings for your customers. That doesn’t mean you should just slap up dozens of sites with no effort to make your sites unique, but it can be a faster way to build a site that can pull in some affiliate income.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is a solution that I’ve had some good luck with. It’s a tool to build sites that feature eBay auctions. The program costs $97 and is fairly easy to use. Customizing your template can take some work, as can researching good niches to build a site around.

The biggest challenge with BANS is making a decent quality site. Yes, you can just throw up a site and not add anything of your own to it. I do not recommend that. They don’t last.

The disadvantage to a BANS site is that they can be deindexed by the search engines for poor quality even if you have put some effort into them. I haven’t had that happen, but others have. To me that makes it not necessarily an ideal home business, but not the worst one either. The few BANS sites I run have paid for the software at least 10 times over. That’s not much really, but considering what I do with the sites after I set it up, not too bad either.

Skills Required

Your first step with a BANS site is to research the niche you want to use. You want to find things that sell well through eBay. Tight niches are a good thing. “Jewelry” is too broad. Antique jewelry of a particular era or Middle Eastern jewelry would be better. eBay has a Popular Products section that can make for some interesting reading.

You will also need to know how to customize the templates. The BANS software separates things out and offers you a few extremely basic templates to start things out. If you have the skills to do more than change the header, it’s a good idea to really work with your template. Change the colors, work with the layout, keep the site from looking like an out of the box BANS site.

You should also have some skills at writing copy. Even for the pages BANS generates automatically for the categories you choose you should be adding a good amount of your own copy. This is a big part of how you keep your site from being thrown out of the search engines.

You’ll probably also want to do article writing. The software makes it easy for you to post your articles to your site.

Common Expenses

The BANS software is the big upfront expense, of course. But you will also need a domain name for each site and hosting. Fortunately a good hosting account will let you host quite a number of BANS sites, so that cost should not increase too much with each site built.

Note that it may take you several tries to come up with a niche that will pay well. I have a couple BANS sites that hardly do anything at all. Two make up the bulk of what I have earned. I mentioned that this isn’t a completely easy home business solution, right?

Possible Income Streams

eBay commissions are not your only source of income on a BANS site. You can add in AdSense and other affiliate links. The templates make it very easy to put banner ads in.

Recommended Reading

Read in the BANS forums after purchase. You’ll get a link and be allowed to join once you’ve bought it. Lots of great tips from active users.

Do you have the skills to create and maintain technical documentation? A technical writer can write online help for programs, write scripts for instructional videos and prepare technical information for the end user.

Skills Required

A tech writer not only has to be an excellent writer, but must be capable of understanding the topics they write about. You may have to get technical information across to a non-technical audience. The information must be precise and complete.

Common Expenses

To start out a technical writing business, your main need may be a computer. A machine dedicated to your business has advantages, especially if other family members will be wanting to use a computer while you work.

You may need specialized software, depending on the requirements of the job. Some will require fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office. You may also need Project, Visio, RoboHelp, Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat and familiarity with some scripting languages.

A domain name and hosting can be useful for your online portfolio.

There may be expenses associated with finding clients. You will want to print business cards. You might look for work on boards that will have either an upfront cost or take a percentage of your earnings from projects found there. You might try pay per click advertising.

Possible Income Streams

Hopefully you can attract clients over time through your site. However, sites such as Shelancers, Elance or Guru are also good places to search for work.

Related Scams

When you’re running your own business dealing with clients, your main concern may well be getting paid by your clients. Sometimes this will be really difficult. But there are fewer flat out scams out there when you have your own business. They do exist, however.

Fake job boards, for example. Any time you pay for membership you should first research to be sure that you will be getting something for your money, or at least have the chance to. Sometimes a legitimate source just won’t have a match for you. Other times there may be deliberate deception about the possibilities present on a site.

Recommended Reading

Technical Writing 101: A Real-World Guide to Planning and Writing Technical Documentation, Second Edition
Technical Writing Basics: A Guide to Style and Form (3rd Edition)
Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications