Justin McElroy - Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You)

Griffin (the Youngest)

Once went viral for eating a banana with the peel on.

Reader, our dad, Clint, once knocked himself unconscious by accidentally dumping bleach onto kitty litter.

Were not the cream of the crop, is what were saying.

Sure, weve glommed on to the actual, tangible talents of our wives, family, and friends whove helped us launch a lot of our most successful shows. You could accuse us of bringing in more entertaining ringers and you wouldnt be wrong. But our oldest podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me, is just us three goobers passing out bad advice. Weve been doing it for more than a decade and a lot of people listen, believe it or not.

So, yes, scientifically speaking, podcasting is easy. So, why do you need a book about it? Well, it may be easy, but you can still do it wrong. Trust us on this, weve been screwing up for more than ten years now, in ways small and massive. Were still screwing up. Well probably screw up today.

Podcasting, at least when youre doing it well, comprises a staggering number of different disciplines. You have to be a host, an organizer, an editor, a marketer, and probably a few other positions were forgetting. While podcasting isnt difficult, there is... a lot of it.

Before you panic, take heart! When taken one at a time, none of the skills that compose good podcasting is particularly difficult to attain. (Again, we did it.) So thats what were going to do. Were going to take our decade of podcasting experience and break it into clear, nonfussy, nontechnical chunks that anyone can absorb and use to make a podcast they can be proud of.

First, were going to help you come up with a show topic and structure. Well advise you on how to pick your cohosts, art, and music for your show and some basic recording techniques. Well talk you through buying equipment, which wont be as expensive as youre imagining, we promise.

Next, its the technical info: the editing, the postproduction, finding a place to host the file. All the nerdlinger stuff we promise is a lot less excruciatingly boring than it sounds.

With your show on its feet, well focus on growing your audience and interacting with listeners. (Short version: Act like a decent human being.) If you want to get really ambitious, we can even talk through ways to make a few bucks off your podcast, like with ad sales, listener support, and selling merchandise.

Finally, well explain how to take all that weve taught you and spend a decade honing your craft, then write a book containing all your knowledge. Only then, once the cycle begins anew, will we be allowed to die and ascend to heaven.

We... should have left that last part out.

Hey, whos ready to start podcasting?

In podcastings golden era (or at least when we started our first show in 2010), you didnt need your podcast to really be about anything. Hell, you barely even needed a microphone. There were fewer podcasts in those days, and listeners were just happy to have something, anything, to fill the terrible silence.

Thats not just me pining for a simpler time, though Im thirty-nine now, so I do that a lot. But its important for you to understand that your favorite show, especially if its been around for a while, is probably not a good model for what a podcast can be about.

As of this writing there are something like 850,000 podcasts out there according to Podcast Insights. You might be the worlds most charming conversationalist or gifted storyteller, but unless youre already a big star, you arent going to rise above the din without a great concept. You just wont. There are just too many podcasts competing for the same oxygen. Ear... oxygen. You get the idea.

First, you need your concept. You can start with a paragraph about what you want to achieve and how exactly youll go about it, but its important to be able to boil it down to a single-sentence pitch. Remember, the pitch isnt just for you. You want your audience to be able to spread the word about your show in a way that is both concise and interesting. Can you sell it in a sentence? Thats your pitch.

Heck, even the big stars have more success when they have a strong pitch. The first line of the Apple Podcasts listing for Anna Faris Is Unqualified is Not-great-relationship advice from completely unqualified Hollywood types. Theres your pitch right there (and its a good one).

You may be tempted to start with that one-sentence pitch, but its putting the podcast cart before the podcast horse (his name is Bucko, by the way, and hes a delight). Instead, lets use that one sentence as a navigational star to guide us through this process. Give yourself the freedom to roam around as you hone your pitch. But if you find you can no longer boil your pitch down to one punchy sentence, youll know youve gone astray.

If we were launching My Brother, My Brother and Me today... well, we wouldnt. Or at least we wouldnt in its current state. Lets try to pitch it.

Three brothers give bad advice, but its funny.

Its short! Thats good! But it falls apart in the last two words: its funny. The listener hears our pitch and rightly replies, Who says its funny? We look at one another furtively and blurt out, Uh, we do? Except were talking to nobody because the listener has already moved on to one of the other half million shows.

Lets look at one of our much more recent shows: The McElroy Brothers Will Be in Trolls 2. Id write the pitch out for you, but the title really says it (more on that later). Three non-celebrities try to con their way into a major motion picture. Now, maybe thats a show for you, maybe its not, but youre at least able to make an instant judgment call about whether you want to listen. My show