Hi, I am Nikki
The short version
I spent ten years as a working voice actor. Now I do the marketing and search side for other voice actors, because it turns out that is the part nobody teaches and almost everybody needs.
The longer version
My kid was born in October 2022, and it turns out you cannot record clean audio in a booth with a baby in the house. So I started helping other voice talent with the digital side of the business while I figured out my next move.
One of them asked me to optimize her Voice123 profile. I said yes before I knew what that meant. Then I spent an absurd number of hours in that platform, running searches, logging where she landed, changing one thing, and running the searches again. Eventually I could see the shape of how it worked.
The manual version of that job is miserable, so I taught myself to build tools. ChatGPT had just come out, and when I asked it how to automate what I was doing, it told me to learn Python. So I learned Python. Then VS Code, then GitHub, then scrapers. That was not the plan. It is the job now, and I like it more than I expected.
What I am not
I am not a voice coach. I will never critique your read, and if you ask me to, I will point you at someone who is genuinely good at it. Your job is to sound great, take direction, and be professional. My job is to make sure the clients searching for a voice like yours can actually find you.
I say no to people fairly often. If someone is not booking yet, optimization will not fix that, and taking their money would be the fastest way to earn my first review that is not five stars.
Why any of this works
Voice123's CEO has said that about half of all voiceover work on the platform comes from clients searching and contacting talent directly, rather than from auditions. Half. Most talent spend all of their energy on the audition half and none on the search half, and the search half is the one that scales.
The other thing worth knowing: on Voice123 the usual way to climb is to pay for a higher tier. The top tier runs close to five thousand dollars a year. Visibility is not really about what you pay. It is about how well the profile is built. Some of my clients pay a fraction of that and outrank people who pay all of it.
Independence
Online Casting Optimizer is my business, run under Curious Nomad LLC. I do not work for Voice123, Voices.com, or V123 Pros, and I am not affiliated with any of them. I am also on the team at Insight Digital Agency, where I do this same work for clients outside of voiceover.
I did go and meet Voice123 early on, because I wanted to be sure they were comfortable with what I do. They were. Voice123 knows exactly what I do and has told me they are glad I am helping people.
V123 Pros are allies, not enemies. They teach people how to use Voice123, which is a real skill and not what I do. They send people my way, I send people theirs, and I buy their course for my VIP clients out of my own pocket.
Miss Tofu
Miss Tofu is the Chief Reminder Officer. She reminds me to stop working, mostly by sitting on the keyboard. Miss Tofu is a cat, and turns 17 this year.