Below is an overview of how much I’ve made so far, and how you can do it too.
As long time followers of this blog will know, I started cloning my voice with ElevenLabs in the first 24 hours of it’s release. I thought I would write a quick update to this easy side hustle. Once you set this up, it is completely passive — but it doesn’t make you millions!
I’ve had many people reach out to say how well they are doing on the platform, and I am very happy to hear it.
My updated numbers at the end of the article, but the process is as follows:
How to Make Money with Voice Cloning:
- Sign up to ElevenLabs: Create an account and select the creator program. (After cloning your voice, you can cancel. Your initial investment will likely be earned back within a week or two.)
- Head to “Professional Voice Cloning”: Upload 30 minutes of your voice. The more you upload the better. Remember, eliminate any background noise for best results.
- Enable sharing and Discovery in Voice Library: This makes your voice available to others. Experiment with labels to improve your search ranking.
- Sit back and relax: All you need to do is set up a Stripe account to receive payments. You don’t even need to log back into the platform unless you want to.
The Potential
The opportunity here is exciting! Some users have had over 500 million characters used — that translates to about $13,000 USD! Elevenlabs is set to scale over the next few years, so you can ride their coat-tails as the volume increases.
Established voices are likely to make the most of the long-run. Currently 700 users have my voice saved, if I can get that number into the thousands and have a trickle of incoming stream in perpetuity that’d be brilliant.
Here My Results on 22nd July 2024:
I’m being paid around $10 per month still, although this fluctuates greatly.
You will see that numbers are starting to plateau after an initially steep spike when I first uploaded my voice. More competition has come in. I think the truly great voices will capture most of the upside here, but newcomers can definitely make a positive ROI.
I suspect branding and name of voice within the platform will have a bigger impact in the future. Picking a particular language, for example, that is not prevalent on the platform could lead to a big advantage.
Similar to YouTube quality will rise to the top. My voice is nothing impressive so I don’t think I will ever make $1000s per month, but enough of these income streams can add up to some serious cash.
If you have a unique voice (even if you think it might be weird) try and put it on elevenlabs and increase the price. Play around with the dials and see how much you can make.
There seems to be a lack of female voices at the moment, so if that’s you perhaps consider it!