My daily handling of email begins when I get up around noon. I’ll typically receive anywhere from 300-500 per day, and I configure Gmail to do a lot of the work for me with filters and automation.
What’s left is worthy of consideration…and you’d be surprised how much of it is come-ons from the bottomless well of SEO experts, marketing gurus, LinkedIn whizzes, get-rich-quick schemes, and shameless promotions. I welcome them. I sign up for them. They multiply like rabbits. When they cease to amuse me, I purge.
Why do I do this? People and businesses that send that kind of spam represent the worst the internet has to offer. Their pitches are often ludicrous….their claims outrageous. But they also have needs. They recognize chutzpah. Most are surprised when I turn the tables on them. I use the Gmail “canned response” feature to fire off the following return message:
______
It takes me all of 15 seconds to do this.
First of all, it gives me a certain sense of revenge fulfillment. 🙄
Secondly, I get responses from about 1 out of every 25, and finally, reading all those emails gives me a clue of what kind of marketing is trending, working, attempted, and succeeding.
Here’s one example I got the other day from musicradiocreative.com:
Finding the right voice for your jingle is by far THE MOST important thing!
If you would like to look for a voice talent by yourself and conduct your jingle project from start to finish I have some great places where top talent hangs around. Shhhhhh (it is an industry secret!).
Here are my three top pics and go to places for taking on a new voice talent or a production specialist:
1. British Voiceovers
2. Voice-over Pros
3. Voiceover Universe
If after countless emails and voice demos (good and bad) you would rather us take care of things – you know where to find me 🙂
Izabela
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Izabela Russell / Managing Director Music Radio Creative
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I’m sure you can imagine this is one email I could not let pass by. I visited Izabela’s website, and it’s nice-looking. She seems to be a genuine business person, and has a niche operation. I’m not familiar with the first of her 3 recommendations for finding voice talent, but I gave some feedback on the other two.
The link to Voice-Over pros takes you to the FB Group that Terry Daniel and I administer. It’s a closed group, so a voice-seekers is not likely to have much luck THERE. Same with the Voiceover Universe link…Doug Turkel is the admin to the site. And, yeah…it has over 6K members, but again it’s a forum for voice actors to talk… not a place to go searching for voice talent – if you could even get in.
I referred her to the WoVO site: http://www.voiceover.biz. That’s the online directory of professional voice talent gleaned from World-Voices Organization’s vetted members. ‘Haven’t heard back yet.
My message here to you? Those email pests will RECEIVE mail too. They’re actually LOOKING for replies. Start a conversation. You might be surprised of the opportunities that come back.
CourVO
