Actor Website Secrets 5 Features That Can Get More Auditions

Hey, in this video I'm going to be sharing with you actor's website secrets. 5 features that can get you more auditions. And stick around to the end because I have a great bonus video for you. Are acting network events horrible? Try this instead. Okay, let's get started. Hi, I'm Aaron Marcus and welcome to the Acting and Modeling Quick Tips channel in the Actor Career Center. I'm asked quite often, do actors really need to have a website? And the honest answer is no, you don't need to have a website and you can still have real success. Now, does having a really good website— could that be helpful to your career? Absolutely, it can be helpful. And so that's what I want to be sharing with you today, how to go about putting together a really good marketable website that can help get you more auditions and hopefully jobs as well. So very first thing, you have to have a name for your website. And what I decided to do— and, and by the way, I wanted to let you know I have a new website. It's howtoactandmodel.com. I'm going to list it in the description section here on the channel. And I'm really happy with it. It took literally— it was a couple of years in the making. I'm not a programmer, so I had somebody do it for me, but there are a lot of different things that I needed done. And just so you know, so my website's a little bit different. It's not just a straight acting website for me. It's the Actor Career Center, and it's a place that you can go to where I offer, you know, my book, private sessions, workshops. I have programs, things like that. So it is a little bit different, but please go there. And if you haven't done this yet, by the way, if you just fill out your information, you'll be on my special mailing list. And of course, it's all free. And then I'll send you really helpful information. And I even have a bonus, which is something that I highly recommend that you have on your website. And so that way you can build up a fan base. You can let people know, you know, what's going on in your life, you know, if you have a job, if you had something that's showing, if you have a play that's coming up, and, you know, have people fill out their information so you can be on their list. So for mine, actually, it's 6 Ways of Shooting a Great Home Audition, and that's a Little thank you note for people who sign up to be on my mailing list. So definitely check that out. So what I have is, even though the, the link that you see is howtoactandmodel.com, if I'm filling out a form for acting, it's just a straight acting type of job, the address is aaronrobertmarcus.com. And that's my legal stage name with SAG-AFTRA, Aaron Robert Marcus. That's my middle name. And basically type in aaronrobertmarcus.com and it gets pointed right to howtoactandmodel.com. So just to try to make it simple and easy for people, if you can use your name, maybe there's an initial you can put in there, and I would definitely do that when you are naming your website. Some of the other things you definitely want on your website, so you can also have Uh, and about you, and you can have something written in there, uh, where you're sharing some personal information. Now, when I say personal information, you know, maybe where, where you got started, the kinds of jobs that you've had, what kind of work that you do. When I say personal, I do not mean put a home address. You never want to do that. Um, and, and I've never seen anybody put a Social Security number in there, but I have seen people do that on resumes. Which you should absolutely never do. In the About section, you can also have a downloadable resume, and I would make sure that's a PDF file so it stays intact. Also make sure it's updated. You can have your headshot that's downloadable, which would also be really helpful for people if they want to present you to, you know, the director or the casting director, or if somebody wants to submit you to an agent, that kind of information is really helpful to have. You also have to have contact information. How can people either reach you, reach your agent, reach your manager? But I— look, unless you don't want to deal with people and your agent and/or manager are handling everything for you, you might want to have some way of people to be able to reach out to you as well. You know, even just an email address. Something else that would also be helpful is to have all your social media contacts. So when you go to my website, you'll see in the upper right-hand corner there are, there's, you know, social media icons you can click on. Now, just as a little bit of a warning, You want to make sure that if you are sharing social media information that it's, it's not stuff that you don't want people in the industry to see. Like, I realize some people do different things on social media, and you just want to make sure that it looks professional. You're not doing crazy stuff in there. That's not going to be very helpful to you. Let me just take a look and see if, if there are some other things. Oh, if you are in the union, absolutely, you know, you can put, you know, whether you're in, you know, SAG-AFTRA or whatever union it might be. If you're not in the union, then you don't have to put non-union on the website. I would make sure your name is out there, big letters, so that people immediately see who you are. And the other things too, If you happen to have, you know, if you're fortunate enough to have reels, whether it's voiceover narration, TV commercials, training films, you know, whether it's film and TV reels, whatever you have, make sure that is there as well. So that way, if people are doing a search and your website pops up for them, or they're trying to find you, they can learn more about Let me just take a quick peek here because I think I've got pretty much, pretty much everything that I wanted to talk about. Hey, if there are some specific aspects to a website that you think should be on an actor's website, please share it here so that we can learn from you. If you haven't done this yet, don't forget, subscribe, click the notification bell so that you always know when a new video has been uploaded. If you like it, give it a thumbs up. That's always helpful. But also, don't forget, you know, go, go back to howtoactandmodel.com if you haven't done this yet and get onto my mailing list because I will send out information about videos. But also, if I ever hear about auditions or jobs in different areas, I always share it with people on my email list. So you definitely want to get onto the list. I did promise a bonus video right up here. That you can see. And yeah, if you're doing network events and they're hard— and they can be hard and they can be very uncomfortable— try these things. And I think this will be really helpful to you. I'm Aaron Marcus, and I can't wait to talk with you again soon. See ya.