Happy New Year, voice actors! I hope you’ve all celebrated well, rested often, and are ready to jump back into the booth. I’m likely as excited as you are for all the opportunities 2024 will bring. Before I dive into the future, though, I always like to take a look back on the previous year and see how well I’ve followed my voice-over plans and reached the goals I set for myself. Luckily for us both, I’ve written not one but two 2023 goal-setting blog posts that we can use to look back at how far we’ve come!
If you haven’t had a chance to read those, I’ll point you to them now so you can use them in 2024:
Voice Over Goals for 2023
Making a 2023 Business Plan
In that first article, I mentioned four different categories you can organize your yearly voice-over goals into: income, genre-expanding, personal growth, and auditioning output goals. Whether or not you’ve kept detailed track this year, start with these categories and try to put a number on each! You can answer these questions:
Reflect on this past year.
- How much money did I make total this year doing voice-over work?
- How many different types of projects did I do this year? (Did I voice an audiobook? A character in a video game? An e-learning for a business? Was this the first time you’ve ever done something in this genre?)
- What have I done this year to improve my talents? Did I take any classes, develop any new character voices, or get a new demo built?
- How many auditions did I do total (or monthly, weekly, daily)?
- How many gigs did I book?
- How do I feel about the work I did overall this year?
If you feel like you fell short on one of your goals, or if you’re just starting your career as a voice actor and don’t have answers yet for all of these questions, don’t fret! As always, voice-over is all about potential – it’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you can do! Be kind to yourself with this reflection. If there’s certain areas you don’t feel confident in when looking back on your year, then you have a pretty good idea of where to start for 2024. Celebrate your wins, big or small!
For those of you a bit further into your voice-over journeys, you may also want to reflect on your 2023 business plan successes. Take a look back on that second blog post linked above, and answer these questions for yourself:
- How did your business strategy succeed this year? Are there areas that failed? Why?
- Did I reach the targets set for myself in my business description?
- Did I market myself effectively this year?
- Have I narrowed in effectively on my “product” as a voice-over artist? Do I know my sound, and where my talents lie?
- What have I spent time and money on this year to improve my career? Have I seen the return on those investments?
- Again, remember to be positive and kind with yourself as you review these questions. I know there are areas I’ve had great success in, like in booking returning clients – and others where there’s room for improvement, like in marketing myself better. It’s all part of the process!
Reflections like these can make all the difference when it comes to seeing results in the new year. So cheers to 2023, and I’ll check back in with you on these answers next year!
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