New Voice over Instant Rate Request available

As I promised in my last post, I’ve removed a barrier to client entry by making my rates available online. This isn’t just a standard rate sheet in .pdf form, this is a tool that asks you no more than 3 questions and tailors the quote to your project. Why did I do this? Because I believe that most people shopping for VO don’t want to wait for their question of “How much will this cost me?” even if the wait is less than 15 minutes to get an email reply. Instant gratification.

It’s also another way of filtering out lowballers and those who are not serious. When someone realizes that a 9000 word narration can’t be done for $50, then neither my time nor that person’s time is wasted by a back and forth exchange.

There’s another benefit. In order to get the rate quote, the requester is asked for their mailing address. Now, certainly I expect that a good portion will give bogus info. But there’s the chance that someone will give me their real info and I can add them to my list of contacts for promotional mailings. Leads, baby.

I’m happy with how the tool turned out. I’m hesitant to encourage readers to try it out, because I get an email everytime someone does, but if you really are curious, then stop by http://JeffreyKafer.com and click the Rate Request form. Put something in the script field indicating you’re just a looky-loo so I don’t follow up with you.

Unless, of course, you really want to hire me. In that case, you know how much your project will be!

Website down

My website has been down for 3 days. And no, I’m none too happy about it. I can’t refer clients to it and I can’t generate any new search engine traffic. Heck, I had a potential client email me to send her my demos because my site was down. How embarrassing! I wonder how many other clients had the same experience as her, but didn’t have the interest in emailing me for my demos. How much business did I lose in the past 3 days?

Today I get a note from my ISP explainging the outtage. It goes on an on about technical things I don’t care one wink about and seems to pass the blame to some other company. I only care about getting my site up and running, not why it isn’t running or who’s to blame. Not to mention, it gives no word on financial remuneration to keep me as a loyal customer. In other words, it’s great that you’re sorry, but why the heck should I stay with you instead of switching over to GoDaddy? Oh, and I noticed that your website hasn’t been down. Isn’t that convenient?

So what can we learn from this? As service oriented people, we always need to be thinking and talking in terms of the customer’s interest. This is one of the principles of the Dale Carnegie program (w00t to fellow alums!). Do you have a problem in your signal chain causing noise? Bummer, but your client doesn’t care. Late delivery? Client doesn’t care that your dog ate 3 boxes of Junior mints and you had to rush him to the vet.

The client cares about himself and we need to understand that. We need to offer exceptional service for mistakes and other things that may delay the customer from achieving their goals, even if the fault is not our own. No one can avoid problems or mistakes that affect others, but we need to know how to handle them to keep our customers happy.

Dear Mr. Kafer,

The web server that your site is hosted on has been offline due to some hardware failures in the RAID setup.

RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” and is a technology that employs the simultaneous use of two or more hard disk drives to achieve greater levels of reliability and performance.

Your website is stored across the RAID system twice over different hard drives, if one of the hard drives fails your web site will continue to run. The failed hard drive is replaced and the data that was on the drive copied again from the other drives within the RAID, this is known as rebuilding the RAID, and normally happens seamlessly without any effect to the web hosting server or your website. This is a daily task performed in our data centers and is standard for large data storage systems such as used in the web hosting environment.

In this instance, we replaced the failed drive with a new drive and the RAID started to rebuild. While this was happening the rebuild process failed, corrupting all the data within the RAID set. This should not happen and we have open tickets with the RAID manufacturer to understand what went wrong in this case and to ensure that they can prevent this for the future.

Our system administrators do not rely on the RAID system as our only source of backup. We run a rolling backup of the live system to external backup servers to ensure that in a case like this we have a restore solution.

After the RAID corruption occurred, our engineers analyzed the situation and found that the only solution left to us was to recover the data from our backup systems. At this point the RAID was reinitialized ready to receive data, this process itself takes several hours to perform.

Currently we are copying and restoring the data from our backup systems to the web hosting server that your site runs from. The restore process takes time and is expected to finish early tomorrow morning. When the data is restored to the server we will then turn on the services that deliver your website to the Internet. A small amount of data loss may occur if you uploaded new files to your web space between the time that the backup was made and the failure occurred.

Since the system problems began we have had a dedicated team of administrators working around the clock to monitor the copy of data from our backups and to ensure that all settings are restored so that your website will run again.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience. We will update you again as soon as there is additional information available.

Sincerely
1&1 Internet Inc.

Wikiaudio – The wikipedia for audio people

Just got clued in to a great new site: http://wikiaudio.com/. If you are looking for a fairly technical definition of something audio-related, look no further. And if you’re an expert, contribute!

Free subscription to Website magazine

If you have a website, as most of you do, then you may qualify for a free subscription Website magazine. Keep in mind this is a trade journal, so they’re going to have uber-exciting things that don’t apply to voice-over like affiliate marketing and online advertising. But some of it might be useful such as design tips and Search engine optimization.

Fill out the form here!

My phone is not waterproof

I discovered this the hard way this weekend. It was a sunny 65 degrees here in the Seattle area so the kids and I decided to go wash the cars. After an hour or 3 we finished up and poured out the bucket of dirty water. And there at the bottom was my phone, belt holster and all. So I didn’t just drop my phone in the water. It had been there for hours. I friggin’ marinated the damn thing.

So if anyone is trying to call me, don’t bother, I can’t answer until I get a new phone. I don’t often use my phone for business, but Murphy’s law says that the gig of a lifetime will try to call while my phone is out of commission.

Bobbin’s booth

The lovely and talented Bobbin Beam has posted pics of her portable sound booth. Certainly we’ve seen this type of booth before, but Bobbin has pics of how this compacts so nicely into a plastic bag for on-the-go recording. Nice work, Bobbin!

Microphone Data

Need to find the specs for a specific microphone? Then sign up for a free account at http://www.microphone-data.com and search away. Includes all the manufacturer specs including polar patterns and response curves.

I’m paperless!

I’m not exactly an environmentalist, but I don’t believe in waste. I recycle as much as possible and compost yard and kitchen waste into an organic garden

But for the past year, I’ve been printing out all of my auditions and gigs. The reason for this was simple: I didn’t have a monitor in my booth. So when I cleaned up the paper and realized that I had printed almost an entire ream of paper for VO work, I needed to change.

Unfortunately, I had no way of getting a monitor in the booth. The logistics of it would have been wires and cables everywhere. My wife did not approve of the concept. She did, however, say I could have the closet that shares a wall with the booth….

IF I built shelves in the garage to store the stuff in the closet.

So I built the shelves, cleaned out the closet and put the main computer CPU in there. I drilled a hole in the wall that it shares with the booth and ran the necessary cables.

Now I have a monitor, mixer, keyboard and mouse in my booth. And with no CPU noise. And there are no wires anywhere since the whole thing is contained. I can do work without printing. And most importantly, I can SEE my levels in Audition as I record them.

I feel like I can deliver much more professional results in a shorter period of time.

BlogRush

If you haven’t heard by now, BlogRush is looking to be a very promising way of driving traffic to your blog. Plus if you refer others, you can get additional views on your blog. My referral link is http://www.blogrush.com/r13500306 so if you plan to sign up, I’d appreciate the credit. I’ll post later on what my findings are. Keep in mind that my stats will be really skewed because I can’t post javascript on my blog.

First Phone patch session

Last Friday night, I had my first phone patch session. And not only did it go off without a hitch, it gave me pause to wonder why other voice-over people use expensive equipment to achieve results I got for virtually no extra cost.

After researching phone patches, I heard the JK Audio phone patch is pretty good, but requires a mixer. I don’t have a mixer, nor do I want to add one more piece of gear into my signal chain. The more pieces you have in your chain, the more room to introduce noise or signal degradation. The Symetrix is an old workhorse, but is nearly impossible to find. The Telos One is very reliable, but runs upwards of $700. So what to do?

I had a long chat with my new friend Frank Frederick over the phone on Friday morning (not only is a he a wonderful voice talent, but a super nice guy). I was considering a software alterative such as Skype, but he recommended a certain low-tech solution: A hands-free set. Yeah, the same hands-free set that comes with every single cell phone. The client isn’t going to ask what kind of phone patch you have. So don’t invest in something expensive to impress the client.

So Friday night rolled around and I attached my hands-free set to my cordless phone, clipped it onto my belt and put my regular headphones over top. I had the client in my left ear and the recording audio in my right. As I recorded the audio on my end through my studio mic, the client could also hear me through the mic on the hands-free set. It worked flawlessly, the client was able to direct me and it never came up as to how I was doing it. And in the unlikely chance the client will ask me to play back the recording over the phone? I’ll put the receiver of another phone next to the speakers.

To paraphrase Frank: There is no reason to invest in expensive equipment to solve a problem that has a low-tech solution. The client cares about the end result, not the process by which you get there.

To top it off, a possibility of a recurring gig came about from my agent at Big Fish. But I need a phone patch to be able to do it. After a few days of emailing back and forth, I was little nervous. What kind of phone patch are they going to require? The answer? Many of my agent’s talents use a speakerphone in the studios. And these are established pros using low tech solutions.

Who knew?