Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You)

Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, Griffin McElroy

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062974822
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

From the #1 New York Times bestselling McElroy Brothers, creators of the hit podcasts My Brother, My Brother and Me and The Adventure Zone, comes a helpful and hilarious how-to podcast guide covering everything you need to know to make, produce, edit, and promote a podcast…and get rich* doing it! (*Results not guaranteed.) Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy made their names as "advice giving brothers who have no business giving advice" ( New York Times ) on the hit podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me. But while they may not have the best relationship or workplace advice, they certainly make you laugh, and they do know a thing or two about podcasting.

In fact, the McElroy Brothers have spent the last decade making podcasts, including My Brother, My Brother and Me; The Adventure Zone; Sawbones; and more. From their start, independently producing and releasing the early episodes of My Brother, My Brother and Me, to their eleven currently available podcasts, the McElroys have become experts in creating successful podcasts. And now, they want to share what they've learned with you.

In Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You), the McElroy Brothers will walk you through the process of turning an idea into ear-candy for legions of fans, sharing their expertise on everything from deciding on an effective name (definitely not something like My Brother, My Brother and Me ), what type of microphone to use (definitely not one from the video game Rock Band), to making lots and lots of money (spoiler: you probably won't).

A must-read for anyone interested in podcasting, Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You) shares the keys to success as well as the mistakes to avoid and draws on the vast experiences of three of the funniest and most successful podcasters working today.

Chapter One

Preproduction

What’s Your Podcast About?

WITH JUSTIN MCELROY

In podcasting’s golden era (or at least when we started our first show in 2010), you didn’t 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.

That’s not just me pining for a simpler time, though I’m thirty-nine now, so I do that a lot. But it’s important for you to understand that your favorite show, especially if it’s 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 world’s most charming conversationalist or gifted storyteller, but unless you’re already a big star, you aren’t going to rise above the din without a great concept. You just won’t. 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 you’ll go about it, but it’s important to be able to boil it down to a single-sentence pitch. Remember, the pitch isn’t 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? That’s 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.” There’s your pitch right there (and it’s a good one).

The Big Sentence

You may be tempted to start with that one-sentence pitch, but it’s putting the podcast cart before the podcast horse (his name is Bucko, by the way, and he’s a delight). Instead, let’s 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, you’ll know you’ve gone astray.

If we were launching My Brother, My Brother and Me today . . . well, we wouldn’t. Or at least we wouldn’t in its current state. Let’s try to pitch it.

“Three brothers give bad advice, but it’s funny.”

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

Let’s look at one of our much more recent shows: The McElroy Brothers Will Be in “Trolls 2.” I’d 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 that’s a show for you, maybe it’s not, but you’re at least able to make an instant judgment call about whether you want to listen. My show Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine is . . . well, it’s right there in the subtitle, isn’t it?

So, that’s the big sentence, let’s start building it.

Why Are You Here?

Why do you want to make a podcast? Do you want fame and fortune? Do you want to spread awareness of something? Do you want to contribute to a community? Do you want an excuse to talk with friends? They’re all completely valid reasons to start a podcast, but they will each shape your show differently.

Justin just kinda casually granted you fame and fortune, but let me do a little expectation setting. Podcasting is a long game. I know podcasts that didn’t start getting real attention until they had already produced more than one hundred episodes. Most people don’t start listening to a show until they can binge at least ten episodes. If your show releases biweekly, that’s five months of work before you see any noticeable audience growth. It took us more than eight years of podcasting before we were able to all make it our full-time jobs. What I’m saying is making money is great, but you are probably going to be making your show for free for a while. Maybe for as long as the show exists.

Let’s say you have a great time talking about old movies with your friends and you think, “This is hysterical, we should be recording this!” That’s . . . well, it’s an extremely twenty-first-century impulse, isn’t it? Regardless, it’s not a bad seed for a podcast. But there are an unfathomable number of shows in that vein. Doug Loves Movies, The Flop House, How Did This Get Made? . . . we could go on. It’s dizzying. If it’s the show you wanna make, go for it! But keep in mind that unless you have an incredibly smart hook, it’s gonna be real tough to grow a large audience and stand out from the crowd.

On the flip side, maybe your goal is just to make a massively successful podcast, so you research current trends and analyze the stats and find that “profiles of artisanal yak shavers” is the next big thing. You pay thousands for your promotional art, you book Malcolm Gladwell for your first episode, and then you realize something: you fucking hate yaks. Can’t stand talking about the things. You may have positioned your show for success, but you don’t care about the topic, which is a recipe for disaster in terms of both building an audience and your personal happiness.

If you wanna make a show that’s just for you and your friends to goof around with, I think that’s great and cool and worthwhile. There are probably large swaths of this book you can skip if you want. That’s fine, you bought the book, do what you want with it. As an independent podcaster, you have the benefit of not having to worry about being canceled by a studio. So you might have an audience of only twenty, but if those twenty people really love your show and you really love making it, who cares? If you’ve made something that brings joy to yourself and to others, even if it’s only a few people, you’re a success.

If audience size isn’t your priority, make peace with that now. If you can free yourself from the burden of worrying about how many people are listening, you’re going to save yourself a lot of stress down the line.

Even though I’m not opposed to the idea of vanity podcasting, for lack of a better term, I would humbly urge you to take a moment and consider if there’s a way you could make your movie chat show something lots of people would want to listen to. You’re putting in the work to inject something into the world—why not try to make it something the world might want?

Whether the show is designed for an audience of one or an audience of millions, there is one constant: it’s not worth making a podcast you don’t really care about. Audiences are savvy and podcasting is an intimate medium; they’re gonna spot someone feigning enthusiasm for yaks a mile away and they’re going to turn the podcast off every single time.

What Do You Obsess About?

If I were to ask you what you cared about, your answer would likely be fairly instinctual. My family. My job. The planet. That’s good! You’re a human being with your priorities well in order.

But I want to know what you obsess about. What headlines are you irresistibly compelled to click on when they pop up on your timeline? What do you find your fingers googling before your brain realizes what’s happening? What do you passionately explain to friends and family despite the fact that they couldn’t give a solitary shit? That’s where your podcast needs to live.

You know something I’m obsessed with? Workplace training videos. I think the first one I saw was made in the mid-1980s and it was called “Wendy’s Grill Skills.” In it, a magical, digital ghost pulls a young man into a TV screen and then raps at him while detailing proper burger-frying technique. How could I not be hooked?

I could talk about workplace training videos endlessly. I show them to friends and family who always reward me with expressions of bemusement. If I could talk to the people who made these weird little examples of non-entertainment, I’d be in heaven. I’m utterly fascinated by them.

My other obsession is cereal, and I already make that podcast. It’s a meditative show about cereal called The Empty Bowl that I host with a cereal blogger named Dan Goubert. I don’t profit off it, and it has a much smaller audience than many of our other shows, but people have told me that it helps them to relax in trying times, and I get to talk about stuff I love, so it’s a success.

Do you have a weird little part of your brain that you devote to that kind of minutiae? I think it’s time you jam a metaphorical microphone up there and make that bit of think meat earn its keep by selling underwear and mattresses to eager listeners. The beauty of living in the internet age is that you don’t have to find a local audience! If .0002 percent of the world population is interested in your topic, you have an audience of 15,600 people! If you need more convincing, look at how many vibrant subreddits and forums there are devoted to obsessively discussing a facet of a sliver of a tiny nugget of pop culture. There’s one called, I kid you not, PicturesOfIanSleeping that is just pictures of some guy named Ian sleeping. It’s got more than forty-four thousand followers. It takes all kinds, folks.

You notice I didn’t say I’m obsessed with YouTube (where most of these videos live) or workplaces in general. I’d argue that those are too broad to justify an obsession. The cool thing about how fragmented the internet is is that you can find success without trying to cover huge topics on a very surface level. If you dive deep into a specific niche, you’ll likely find some willing souls to follow you down. Don’t be Entertainment Tonight, be Self-Produced Beanie Baby–Collecting Tips Videos Tonight.

Who Else Is Here?

Once you have an idea for the topic you want to cover, you’ll want to know how it’s already been done. (And it probably has, I’m sorry to say. Did I mention there are a lot of podcasts?) So, let’s research the competition.

Competition, by the way, is useful shorthand here, but it isn’t a very useful way of thinking about this. If you’re putting the work into coming up with a creative, smart approach to your subject, your show will be an entity unto itself. Just because someone already listens to a Survivor recap show, it doesn’t mean they can’t make room in their heart for yours.

According to a 2019 report from Edison Research, 32 percent of Americans listen to podcasts on a monthly basis. The way I see it, any podcast that makes a big impact and brings new people into the ecosystem is a boon for everyone who makes podcasts.

Let’s stick with Survivor. Search the various podcasting directories like Apple Podcasts or Stitcher for Survivor and see what’s out there. How are other people talking about Survivor? What’s working (and not working) about that approach? For example, the “Survivor” Fans Podcast is a recap that features audio from other viewers of the show. Rob Has a Podcast is hosted by a former contestant (there are more than a few of those). The “Survivor” Historians Podcast is about the highlights of the show’s past.

The Survivor market has been well saturated, but so has pretty much any popular TV show. You may decide that there are to...