There are many practical and rewarding ways to go about gaining experience and prospective clients. When I had a few moments at VOICE 2007 to myself (very rare moments, I assure you), I got thinking about ways that you could create a respectable voice over portfolio without undercutting for work, or worse, giving your voice overs away for free to people who could pay for the service you provided but had chosen to take advantage of you instead. Many beginner voice talent find themselves in a bit of a quandary. They can’t get an agent because they haven’t received any work, and they need an agent (or so some may think) in order to get the work in the first place!

It’s the age old question: What came first? The Chicken or the Egg? I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that the chicken came first. If not, how would the egg have survived? There are many dangers out there for aspiring talent just waiting to take advantage of them. When you think in terms of being the chicken as opposed to the egg, you are given a variety of choices and the ability to pick the best solution for you to carry you through the longterm when building a voice over career. I often say and reiterate frequently that voice over is not an easy business or a cakewalk. It’s a business first of all and one that demands vocal talent as well as technical skills in order to succeed as a work from home or independent studio operation. One of the best ways to gain experience in both the voice over and recording process (that is of no cost to you) is to volunteer and learn from others who can mentor you. Here are some ideas to gain experience in specific voice over niches:

1. Narration and Audio Books

If you’d like to try your hand at recording for audio books or narration pieces, consider starting with some public domain material available at Project Gutenberg. This database contains tens of thousands of works that are in the public domain that you can practice with or record that are royalty-free and no cost to you to download. Another resource available to you in this field is to join the community at LibriVox.org. I happen to have met the founder, Hugh McGuire, at PodCamp in Toronto. Essentially, this is a community of people who are dedicated to producing audio books that are in the public domain. These audio books are accessible for people to download. The service acts as a creative outlet for many, community, and a means for amateur voice talent to record audio books and receive reviews from others on the website.

2. Children’s Books and Voice Acting

Volunteer at local libraries, hospitals, schools, nursing homes, and so on. Oftentimes, these organizations are more than thrilled to accept your offer to volunteer and you have the opportunity to make a direct impact on individual people or a group of people. This is also an excellent way to get comfortable with reading aloud and developing characters. Your audience will let you know how you are doing and you may find yourself feeding off of them, becoming a better storyteller and voice actor for it.

3. Character Voices and Animation Voice Overs

Join a small voice acting or theatre group that performs radio and or audio drama. There are several groups that you can be a part of online if you are looking for international communities and others that are locally based. Elie Hirschman is a member of Darker Projects, a community of voice talent from around the world who produce audio dramas. Elie has mentioned this group before in his Biz segments on the VOX Talk podcast. Dave Johnson runs a voice acting group in San Diego called the Amateur Voice Acting Group. You can build a credit list through roles that you have performed and count it as voice acting experience.

4. PSAs and Commercials

To try your hand at this kind of work, you could volunteer at non profit organizations or charities. You could look at this volunteering as a form of community service or as a donation or gift. A great example of some serious VO donating was shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck. Voice talents including Peter O’Connell lent their voices in PSAs created for the American Red Cross to help spread the message and encourage financial donations to help facilitate rescue and rebuilding efforts.

5. Technical Skills

If you need to hone your technical recording and editing skills, see if you can arrange to be mentored for a brief time by a professional audio engineer or voice over professional who is a proficient audio engineer. A few hours in their presence, watching, learning and applying what you’ve discovered, coupled with study in online forums or books will greatly help you to develop your audio editing skills. Internships or volunteering on a regular basis at actual recording facilities is also a good idea if you have the time and opportunity to do so.

Volunteering your time and talent, although still providing a service without charge, is quite different from giving your voice away for free. When you volunteer, you do it on your own terms and for the good of others, receiving more than you gave in return. Referrals (or treasures) will be more likely to spring for you professionally from the seeds that you had sown when volunteering your time and talent.

Stephanie Ciccarelli is the VP of Marketing with Voices.com, the voice over marketplace hosting more than 10,000 professional voice talents. Stephanie is also the author of The Definitive Guide To Voice-Over Success.

A business plan writer is a person that works closely with an enterperneur in order to develop a plan for the future of the company. This may include making plans for a company that is already running or creating a plan to get a business started in the first place. Hiring a business plan writer has a number of benefits, including helping you to clarify your business expectations and making it easier to find financing and other support for your company.

In most cases, this type of writer has a solid background in business. As such, he or she has experience with what works and what does not work for a business. Therefore, as you begin to develop your plan, this writer can help guide you through the process and create a plan that is more likely to be a success.

In addition to having basic knowledge that can be beneficial to the development of your business plan, a freelance writer that specializes in this genre of writing has a great deal of experience creating business plans. Therefore, he or she knows how to select the proper wording and create the proper format to make your plan clear and easy to read. They will also know how to use the proper language that will encourage potential partners, financiers, and other supporters.

Creating a professional and attractive business plan is essential to any enterperneur. If you intend to approach a bank for financing, for example, you will need to present a business plan that demonstrates a solid future for your business. Hiring someone whose specialty is writing a business plan will help you to create a plan that will make a bank happy.

If you are hoping to form a partnership with other businesses, a business plan writer can also be beneficial. By sharing your business plan with these businesses, you can demonstrate that your ideas is well thought out and that you have all of the necessary elements in place to make your business and partnership a success. Again, a business plan writer knows how to create a plan that is strong and capable of persuading others to jump on board with your business.

Sometimes, you can find a business plan writer by looking through the directory of your telephone book. Writers may be listed under the writing section or under the business consultation section. Another option is to place an ad for a writer on the Internet at a site such as Guru.Com, Elance.Com or RentAGhostWriter.Com. The most convenient option is usually to post your project on a bid board where the freelancer can place a bid for completing your project. On these boards, you can also read the portfolio that the writer has included on the site and read the feedback of others that have used his or her services. This way, you have a much better chance of finding someone that will help your business become a success.

Find a business plan writer at RentAGhostWriter.Com, where you can outsource projects to ghostwriters. All sorts of writing jobs are accepted including: business writing, proposal writing, academic writing, creative writing and more. Check us out now: http://www.rentaghostwriter.com

The very idea of all of the ads that tell you that they have free grants to offer sounds too good to be true, and the fact is that in some ways it is. The ads claim that you will qualify to receive a grant for your business. They say your application is guaranteed to be accepted, and you never have to repay the money.

There is of course a catch that they don’t mention. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, warns you that money for nothing grant offers often are a scam: the grant isn’t free, it isn’t guaranteed, and often, it isn’t even available to you.

Some people actually market free grants in classified ads, which begin by inviting consumers to call a toll-free number. If you call, a representative of the company will ask you some basic questions to determine if you qualify to receive a grant, and some of these questions include:

1. What’s your address?
2. How long have you lived at this address?
3. Do you have a bank account?
4. Do you have at least $200 in your account at this time?

Next thing you know you are being asked to hold on the line while your eligibility is determined. After she congratulates you on your eligibility, she will ask you to pay a one-time processing fee that can range from anywhere from $100 to $300.

If you question this fee, you will then be reassured that the grant is guaranteed, and that if you’re not COMPLETELY satisfied with your grant, you’ll get a refund. However, she won’t offer to tell you all the conditions for a refund.

The processing fee is said to cover finding a grant source and sending you the appropriate application package in the mail. However, you won’t receive an application or a source. What you will get is a list of agencies and foundations to which you must write and request an application. This information is available for free at any public library or on the Internet.

Most sources of grant money don’t give grants to individuals for personal need. Grants usually are given to serve a community good, such as bringing new jobs to an area, training young people, preserving a bit of history, funding soup kitchens or art museums, or researching medical issues.

If you ask an agency or foundation for money for personal reasons, you probably won’t get it, even if you are financially needy. You are also not likely to get a refund from the grant broker because the conditions for a refund are nearly impossible to meet: you usually have to apply and be denied by each person on the list within 90 days.

If you’re thinking about applying for a business grant, you need to remember that the applications are available to you for free and that anyone who guarantees you a grant is likely to be interested in their own gain, and definitely not yours. If you think you may have been a victim of a grant scam, file a complaint with the FTC.

The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraud, deceptive and unfair business practices in the marketplace and to provide you with information to help you see, stop, and avoid them.

If you want to file a complaint or to get free information on consumer issues, visit www.ftc.gov or call toll-free, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357); TTY: 1-866-653-4261.

The FTC will participate against Internet, telemarketing, identity theft, and other fraud-related complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to hundreds of civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

Dwayne Garrett is the author of several eBooks and popular software applications, he also offers an affordable Government Resource that will help you to make sense of getting free grant money. Visit:

http://www.GrantMoneySecretsRevealed.com