How I Select Freelancers on Fiverr (for Voice-Overs)

At the moment, I’m in the middle of wrapping up an e-learning project for a big client. Specifically, I’m working on translations. 

One of the translation tasks I’m working on is creating French and German voice-overs (dubs) for over 40 separate videos. These videos add up to 2 hours of content, originally recorded in English. 

As I’m no expert in creating voice-overs in either of these languages, I decided to outsource this task. 

Choosing the Right Outsourcing Platform 🐱‍💻  

In most cases, when I need to outsource work, I tend to go for one of three options:

1. Ask for help in my personal network or KREW
2. Open a job posting on Upwork
3. Look for freelancers myself using Fiverr

Since I couldn’t find anyone in my direct network, I went with Fiverr.

The reason why I went with Fiverr over Upwork this time is because on Fiverr it’s very easy to browse between different freelancers and get a sense of their style. And style was important for this project.

Throughout my life, I’ve always felt that the teachers who impacted me most did so because of their enthusiasm for the subject matter. That’s why my goal for the learning experiences I create is to get people excited about learning more. And to do that, I try to create a certain style that’s equally creative, uplifting and engaging without feeling too rehearsed to increase the potential for connecting with our students.

So no, I wasn’t looking for a typical, bland voice-over someone might use in a news broadcast. I was looking for something a bit more fun.

Making a selection of freelancers 🐱🐱🐱

Once on Fiverr, I simply start searching using keywords that make sense.

In this case, it was anything from “French dubs” to “male voice”. It sometimes helps to write your keywords differently – like, ‘voiceover’ instead of ‘voice over’ to get different results. 

I then start clicking on different freelancers and listen to some examples of their previous work. I usually steer clear of freelancers with just one or two reviews and I’m a little bit weary of people with 500+ reviews. 

It’s just because I like a certain sense of professionalism, but not so much that I feel like just a number because they have a ton of clients already.

Once I made a selection of about 10 freelancers I like (I just keep their pages open in different tabs), I start writing them messages. 

Selecting the winners 🏆

I normally just write one message that I send out to everyone, sometimes changing the first name. This time, my message was something like:

“Hi Max! I’m looking for someone to dub about 2 hours of e-learning content from English to German. There are around 40 short videos, so I’d like as many separate audio files. I like your voice, so I have a couple of questions:

1) Would you be up for this?

2) Can you give a price estimate already?

3) Would you mind dubbing a couple of seconds before we agree to do the full project? Then I can determine whether we’re a good match indeed.

4) When do you think you could deliver at latest? A range of dates is also OK.

I look forward to hearing from you man. Thanks a lot!”

Once they reply, it instantly gives me a lot of information. For example, how well they are able to express themselves in English, whether they actually answer all my four questions and how quick they are with their reply.

If I like their answers, I send them a short sample from the course to work on. It was around 30 seconds this time. Based on their reply and personalised showcase of their work it’s normally very easy to make a decision. 

A bonus of asking a few people on Fiverr is that you have room to compare. Even if you have no idea what a normal price or delivery timeframe is, after reading 10 of these responses you will. 

For this project, I decided to go with Kristian and Nicolas. This is part of the final result:

What do you think? Would you have made the same decision?

Even though their styles are very different, I think they both did a great job. It was a joy to work with them and I can absolutely recommend either one of these for your voice-over projects (they even did the translations). 

Well, I hope this article will help you select your next freelancers on Fiverr and deliver great work. Enjoy your day!