Chapter Five

Please, Someone, Anyone: Listen

Hosting

WITH JUSTIN MCELROY

Where Most Podcasts Fail

We talk to a lot of young podcasters trying to get their start, and you’d be shocked, shocked, by how many times we have some variation of this conversation:

“Oh, podcasting gurus, I don’t know where I went wrong! I prepared for my podcast, I bought the finest microphones, and I brought on my smartest friends as cohosts. I edited and scored it to perfection and wrapped it all up with the most beautiful album art you’ve ever seen. But I still don’t have a single listener!”

“Well, youngling,” we say with gentle, wizened smiles, “what did you do with the MP3 file after you completed your first episode?”

“Well, I . . . I left it on my desktop for a while and then I deleted it the next day in frustration with my lack of response. What else would I have done with it?”

“Oh, you sweet, sweet summer child,” we coo, as we scoop the amateur podcaster like a tiny infant into our burly arms, “you forgot to upload the file to a hosting service.”

Don’t be like this goofus. We’ve said it a thousand times: if you don’t upload your podcast to a place where it can be downloaded by potential listeners, you’re significantly less likely to succeed.

How Hosting Works

If you’ve been only a podcast consumer rather than a podcast creator to this point, there’s a chance you’ve never interacted with a hosting service. You see, the Apple Podcasts and Pocket Casts of this world aren’t where the podcasts of the world are hosted, they’re more like a phone book that tells you where the podcasts live . . . What’s that? What’s a phone book? Well, it’s sort of like a podcast directory that lists phone numbers and addresses instead of reminding you that Adam Carolla’s podcast will always be more popular than yours.

A hosting service provides the house where all your beautiful little podcast files will live and be accessible to the rest of the world. They’re basically just big servers to upload your data to.

Your host will create an RSS feed, which, for our purposes, can be understood as the directions to your specific house. Those directions can be fed into directories like Apple Podcasts or directly into Pocket Casts. Whenever a new episode is uploaded, the RSS feed will automatically update everyone who has subscribed to your show manually or through a service like Apple Podcasts.

Picking a Provider

We’ve used several different hosts over the years. We had My Brother, My Brother and Me on Libsyn for more than a decade, and you’ll still see a lot of older podcasts using it just because it was so early in the scene. As much as we’ve loved dear old Libsyn, it hasn’t necessarily kept up with a lot of newer services, and the interface is pretty painful. We’ve had shows on services like Audioboom, Anchor, SoundCloud, ART19, and Simplecast, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses (some of which we’re sure have evolved since we wrote this chapter). With so much variability, we thought we’d list some features and factors to consider when choosing podcast hosting platforms, so you can make the selection that’s best for you.

One note of caution before we begin: changing hosts is a massive pain in the ass. Brutal, just the absolute pits. So don’t rush through this part, and make sure you’re settled on one before you decide to commit.

Fees: Some services offer free tiers for a small number of downloads per episode, which is a good option when you’re just starting out. Remember, you can always upgrade if you outgrow a free plan. I know of at least one free plan that pulls episodes hosted with its free tier after ninety days. That seems less than great to us. Don’t you want listeners to be able to enjoy the classic episodes that sounded like they were recorded in a trash can and featured more eating noises than a Denny’s at 3:00 A.M.? Some providers will limit the number of episodes you can upload per month; some put statistics behind a paywall as well. These plans all vary wildly, so we’ll just say make sure you know what you’re paying for when you sign up.

Statistics: One of the most important services a host provides is data about how many times your show has been downloaded and who is listening, how they’re listening, and where they’re listening. A good provider will be able to show you geographical data of where your show is popular (which is the number one way we decide where we’ll tour My Brother, My Brother and Me and The Adventure Zone). It’s also interesting to see what services people are using to listen (Spotify? Apple Podcasts? through a cup pressed against their neighbor’s wall?), though this data isn’t really that actionable.

Being able to chart which episodes have been downloaded the most can also help you shape the content of your show, but don’t live and die by those numbers. For example, nearly every podcast we know of does worse in December. We have no idea why, but we try not to kick ourselves when it happens.

Advertising: We’ll talk more about this later, but there are two important ideas we need to cover right this moment, as they relate to choosing a host: dynamic ad insertion and ad networks.

Dynamic ad insertion is basically the ability to stick ads into your show after it’s been published. We’re not here to tell you that dynamic advertising is right or wrong for you. But it’s probably smart to choose a host with the ability to do so, should you ever decide it’s something you want to pursue.

Some hosts also provide you with access to ad networks. As your show grows, many services will automatically insert ads into your show and pay a small amount for each download you receive. They may also go the old-fashioned route and provide you with ad copy to read. This can be really helpful because most sponsors won’t buy space on a small show because it’s not really worth their time. A hosting service can bundle several small shows together and make it worth their while.

Age and Prestige: Podcasting start-ups spring up constantly, and while they may bring glitzy features and a slick user interface, there’s still the concern that they (like so many start-ups) will go belly-up and leave your show homeless. Hosts that have been around for a long time or have a major company backing them up are usually a safer bet.

Another potential indicator of a good provider is if your favorite podcasts use it (you can usually find this information on their website). Marc Maron’s enormously huge WTF podcast uses Libsyn, Adam Carolla uses Nox, Guys We F****d is on Megaphone, and so on. Note that podcasts that are part of big networks will often use a large enterprise provider (like Earwolf does with Omny Studio) that may not make sense for an indie like yourself. Some other biggies host themselves, like WNYC does for 2 Dope Queens and its other shows.

Website: Most every host will automatically generate some sort of web presence for your show. While it’s easy enough to make your own website with a service like Squarespace or—well, there are others, but none that have been putting food in our families’ mouths for ten years—it’s nice if the starter website your host generates isn’t murder on the eyes like some of the legacy providers’.

Embeddable Player: Most hosts will generate a little bit of HTML code that can be dropped onto a website and let visitors play a podcast directly from that page. Some players look really slick, some are extremely bad. Try to see a sample of what an embedded episode looks like on an external site while you’re researching.

Contributions: As of this writing, this is provided only by Anchor, we believe, but we’ll be surprised if others don’t follow suit. On the website that Anchor generates for your show, there is a link to start a monthly contribution to your podcast—a baked-in, low-impact way to turn listeners into donors. That’s cool!

Cross-Promotion: There are some providers that are just receptacles for podcasts and there are some that try to seem a little more like a cohesive network of shows. One of the ways the latter type builds a sense of community is cross-promotion, asking you to plug other shows it hosts and then other shows to do the same in return. This can be valuable for a show just getting started, so it might be a nice feature to look for.

Support: Despite our efforts to make the technical process of creating a podcast seem as easy as it (usually) is, you’re bound to run into hiccups. See what the customer support for your potential provider looks like before you commit. One of the nice things about long-running providers like Libsyn is that Google is full of step-by-step troubleshooting resources and advice for navigating your hosting platform, but you can’t count on that for newer services.

Take Your Time

Choosing a host is one of the few parts of the podcasting process we won’t try to pretend is a breezy joy. It’s a big choice, and it’s one that you shouldn’t rush into without doing your homework first. Choosing the wrong host, or one that can’t grow alongside your show, won’t make or break you. But taking the time to find the right home for your show can speed things along considerably and save you some pretty massive headaches down the road.

Climbing the Podcast Charts

WITH GRIFFIN MCELROY

So, you’ve got your podcast done, dusted, and uploaded to your chosen podcast host. At this point, folks with the appropriate link to your RSS feed can listen to your new show. If that’s as far as you want to take this enterprise . . . I mean, that’s your prerogative. I’ll admit, that’s got kind of a 1990s underground punk-rock VHS-trading-market vibe that I’m super into.

Generally speaking, though, it’s good practice for people to be able to find your show without your direct intervention. Which is to say: it’s time to add your show to some podcast listening platforms, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or [insert relevant podcast listening platform based on the time period you’re reading this book in, assuming folks are still interested in listening to podcasts in the future and aren’t too busy battling each other for seeds and radiation-free water].

These platforms are often called “podcatchers.” Just a cool bit of lingo for you.

There’s a distinction you should understand between your podcast host and a podcast platform. When you upload an audio file to your hosting service of choice, it stores that file online and generates a link where folks can access it. It also ingests whatever data you’ve fed it, either per episode (the episode’s title, description, album art, etc.) or per show (the show’s title, your name, the content rating, etc.). A podcast platform (such as Apple Podcasts, still the most prevalent platform at the time of this writing) is where that data surfaces. Your host is where you store your finished product; Apple Podcasts and similar platforms are where it goes to market.

The good news is that getting your show on said platforms is typically quick and painless—so long as you’ve been thorough when setting up things on the hosting side. Most platforms simply lift all that juicy metadata from your RSS feed, rather than forcing you to fill in a lengthy application by hand for each podcast you create.

With that in mind: make sure your show’s settings on your hosting platform are on point before you go any further. Is the title correct? Is the description free of glaring grammatical errors? Are you using the final album art? Are the show’s category tags accurate? This information is going to be used by every platform your show ends up on, so give it a quintuple-check, just to ensure you don’t spread your goof-ups far and wide.

One section of your metadata to pay special attention to is your show’s categories. I’ll explain why in a second. Now, let’s get this bad boy up and into the marketplace of ideas.

Submitting Your Show to a Podcast Platform

For the purposes of our tutorial, I’m going to describe the process of getting your show on to Apple Podcasts. Bear in mind, though, that the landscape might have changed by the time you’re reading this, and now Apple exclusively manufactures Faraday cages to secure your precious data cubes from the Ever-Expanding Cyberstorm.

You’d have thought we would have seen that one becoming an issue, what with the name and all . . .

For now, it’s a fitting place to start. Apple Podcasts is still where nearly half of everyone who listens to podcasts . . . listens to podcasts. Other platforms, like Spotify, are cutting into that share, but for now it’s the platform supreme. Not only that, a few competing platforms—like Pocket Casts—will automatically add your show to their lineup once it appears on Apple Podcasts.

TL;DR: there’s a river flowing deep and wide, and Apple Podcasts is its wellspring.

To get anything on to the Apple Podcasts ecosystem, you use a service called Podcast Connect. Go ahead and type that into your web browser and find the login splash page. Just log in using your Apple ID (which, oh right, you’ll also need to have) and you’ll end up on the Podcast Connect dashboard.

You’ll want to bookmark this dashboard, because eventually, it’ll give you a few pieces of wildly accurate analytics with regard to folks listening to your show on Apple devices. Specifically, how many devices each episode ends up on, how many hours said episode has been listened to on said devices, and what percentage of that episode’s running time folks listening on said devices have finished. So, essentially, it knows everything.

For now, click the plus symbol, and you’ll be prompted to input your show’s RSS feed. Head back to your hosting service, where you should be able to easily locate said link. For Libsyn, it’s right there under Destinations, labeled “Libsyn Classic Feed.” The McElroy Brothers Will Be in Trolls World Tour’s link ends in “RSS,” which is a helpful mnemonic device I use to remember which Destination is our RSS feed.

Once you’ve dropped that in, you’ll confirm that Apple Podcasts has received all the data you’ve filled in with your host. It will also prompt you if there’s any important data you need before you can submit your show for approval, such as categories. If you don’t have any selected, Apple won’t let you get past this step. Again, make sure you’ve selected categories that are specific and accurate before you go any further. It’s kind of important.

Every time I have submitted a podcast to iTunes, I have, without fail, gotten the logo size wrong on the first try. It needs to be a minimum size of 1,400 x 1,400 pixels and a maximum size of 3,000 x 3,000 pixels.

Once everything looks good to go, click “Validate.” Look out, world! Your podcast is about to hit the scene!

In one to three business days.

Damn, y’all, we should have had you do this step on page one. You’re probably all horny to start your new career in podcast production, and now we’ve gone and slammed on the brakes. Good things come to those who wait! Assuming those who wait aren’t making a podcast that includes infringing or illegal content, because Apple isn’t going to let that slide.

The review process could take anywhere between a few hours to a few days, so plan your launch party accordingly. You’ll receive an email confirmation once it’s complete, and hopefully it will now show your podcast as “Active” on Apple Podcasts. Congratulations!

If you failed the review, it will tell you why—usually because of an error in the metadata of your RSS feed—and what steps you should take before resubmitting. Try not to take this resounding failure too hard. Pobody’s nerfect!

That’s just the walk-through for Apple Podcasts, but you’ll find that other platforms follow similar vetting processes that you’ll need to clear. For example, Spotify requires you to log in to a “Spotify for Podcasters” dashboard, where you’ll plug in your RSS feed, double-check your show’s metadata, then submit it for approval.

If you’re trying to get in front of as many folks as possible from the jump, you may as well sow your oats by looking up the most popular platforms at the moment (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.) and getting your show on them.

Climbing the Charts

There are a few different vectors through which your podcast can achieve success, and, to be perfectly frank, podcast platform discoverability isn’t the most effective among them. We’ll have more on how to promote your show a bit later on, and that’s going to be the process through which you’ll get most of your new listeners—not because your show landed at #26 on the earth sciences charts.

Still, can’t hurt, right?

Way down the line, being able to say, “The show hit number blah on the such-and-such charts,” can be useful if you are trying to court advertisers or pitch your show to be hosted on a podcast network.

Continuing to use Apple Podcasts as the template, there are a few things to keep in mind if you want listeners to organically find your show on-platform. The most important factor to keep in mind is—thanks for waiting for this explanation, by the way—the categories you’ve selected for your show.

At the time of writing, Apple Podcasts lists podcasts under nineteen top-level categories, most of which further break down into more granular, more specific subcategories. You want your show to appear in its relevant category, mostly because it inherently makes it more visible on the platform, but also because each subcategory has its own chart. The more specific the category, the less competition you’ve got, and the more likely it is that your show will chart.

It’s worth noting that the “chart” I’m describing isn’t strictly a measurement of who’s got the most listeners. The exact math that goes into Apple Podcasts rankings is shrouded in mystery, but anecdotally speaking, these charts value newness and growth as much as they value total audience size. (This is good news for you, the creator of a new podcast.)

Garnering even a modest number of listeners during your first couple of weeks will dramatically increase your chances of hitting one of the Apple Podcasts charts. In fact, you might hit multiple: if your show falls under a subcategory, it’s considered for the charts of that subcategory, the top-level category, and the default “All Podcasts” ranking.

Once the shine’s come off the Apple (lol), you’ll have to work way harder to keep or boost your spot in the rankings. You stand a chance if you maintain a steady increase of listeners as you continue, but in general, it takes an act of God to change up the top ten shows in a major category. (My Brother, My Brother and Me is #19 on the comedy charts at the moment, where it usually lingers, well behind Joe fucking Rogan and his apparently impregnable podcast battleship.)

And if you don’t make it? Seriously, don’t sweat it. Not that many folks are going to stumble upon their new favorite show while browsing the rankings of an Apple Podcasts subcategory. If anything, folks are going to stumble upon their new favorite show—ideally your show—by searching for it on-platform. That search scans the title and description of not just your show but every episode you’ve ever published.

To summarize, rather than trying to game the system, it’s way more important for you to include thorough descriptions and SEO-friendly titles when publishing new episodes. It makes it way more likely that folks will find your show when searching for a certain topic, which is always going to be a more effective lure than “Hey, give my podcast a spin, it’s only thirty-seven podcasts less popular than Joe fucking Rogan’s.”

Communicating with Listeners

WITH JUSTIN MCELROY

I’m sorry that it has taken this long to tell you, truly, but there is no surefire way to succeed in podcasting. Or anything really. But definitely podcasting. That being said, there is one thing that we feel fairly sure that, without it, you stand no chance of building a sustainable audience.

If we have a secret sauce, a magic trick, that has helped us become a success despite our mediocrity in many areas you would think important for professional talkers (bad recording equipment, bad voices, etc.), then it would be this: we actually, no bullshit, appreciate our listeners.

We don’t want to pat ourselves on the backs too much for this—it’s a pretty low bar to clear as a human being. Again, if someone is nice enough to give you their most precious resource (their life minutes), then we believe you owe it to them to not make them feel like they’ve wasted their time. You do that in lots of ways that we’ve talked about already or will soon. You care about the quality of your sound, you edit out the boring stuff, and you create a recording plan so you make the best end product you can.

In this section, we’ll be talking about something a little more direct: communicating with listeners to make sure they understand that if they’re listening to you, you’re also listening to them.

I can actually track the development of this radical policy of giving a crap about people to the Dale Carnegie audiobooks I listened to on cassette when I was an unpopular teenager desperate to win friends and/or influence people. He tells the story of meeting magician Howard Thurston (he was a big deal back in the day) and asking him the secret of his success. I’ve copied his answer here verbatim.

HE TOLD ME that many magicians would look at the audience and say to themselves, “Well, there is a bunch of suckers out there, a bunch of hicks: I’ll fool them all right.” But Thurston’s method was totally different. He told me that every time he went on stage he said to himself: “I am grateful because these people come to see me. They make it possible for me to make my living in a very agreeable way. I’m going to give them the very best I possibly can.”

He declared he never stepped in front of the footlights without first saying to himself over and over: “I love my audience. I love my audience.” Ridiculous? Absurd? You are privileged to think anything you like. I am merely passing it on to you without comment as a recipe used by one of the most famous magicians of all time.

If you want our secret to success, here it is: we love our audience. This section is about how you can let them know.

The Old-Fashioned Email

Communication is vital to your growing podcast, but you can’t expect your early listeners to open those lines of communication up. That’s your job, unfortunately.

The first, most obvious, and most direct way to encourage listeners to reach out is by creating a simple email address that you include in every episode. Gmail is fine, but if you can’t find a succinct email address, it may be worth spending $12 so you can register a domain and get a really short one. It also just sounds a bit more professional.

Social media is great, and we’ll discuss that soon, but you can’t beat email for more in-depth (and private) communication. If you’re just getting started, it’s worth responding to as much email as you comfortably can.

Let’s say you start with a single listener. That one person represents the only chance you have at building an audience. They are your only hope, the bearer of the tiny flicker of popularity your show has, and you want them to go into the world and spread the word. You can’t pay this single candle bearer to go out there and set the world ablaze for you—all you can do is let them know how meaningful their time is to you and how much you appreciate them passing the show along to others.

It may seem like we’re being dramatic, but it’s tough to overstate how fragile your audience is at this point and how much impact you can have by treating each listener like a valuable human being who holds your future in their hands (which they are).

Thank You for Not Sharing

Besides being a great way to stay in touch, emails can also provide content for your show. My Brother, My Brother and Me is an advice show and obviously lives and dies by questions that our listeners send our way, to say nothing of the weird internet ephemera they dig up and pass along.

Emails can make for great discussion starters; even just introducing a new voice via email can provide a shot in the arm. It’s like bringing on a guest you can kick off whenever you like and give a hard time without them being able to contradict all your great jokes.

Reading email is also a great way to encourage getting more email, as everyone loves the idea that they’ll be featured in a show that they enjoy.

Wait, did that paragraph say “everyone loves the idea”? I’m so sorry, I don’t know why it says that. That paragraph has been slacking off a lot lately—troubles at home maybe? Who knows. Anyway, not everyone loves the idea of having their email read aloud.

If you want to read an email on the show, you need to be absolutely confident that the sender intended it for mass consumption. If someone sends a request for advice into My Brother, My Brother and Me, we feel pretty confident including it, even without their explicit permission. But if there’s a stitch of doubt in our mind, we confirm that it’s okay to read.

If your show doesn’t typically make listener emails a part of it, you need to make doubly sure that the sender of an email wants it blasted out to the wider world. There’s no taking that back.

How to Love a Troll

We’ve talked about the importance of communication, but not necessarily the content of those communications and how to handle them. Put simply: If the email is positive, be effusive in your gratitude. If it’s constructively critical, be even more appreciative. If it’s mean and shitty . . . well, then it gets less simple.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with deciding you don’t have it in you to fuck around with someone who’s acting like a total creepazoid. And if they’re clearly trolling you, that’s probably the right call. But if you can find it in your heart to tell that person you’re sorry that you wasted their time, that you hope they find another podcast they enjoy more, and that you appreciate them giving you a shot? You’ll be shocked, shocked, at how often you can create a lifelong fan.

It always amazes me how often people who send mean messages, when responded to, will say, “Oh! I didn’t think you’d ever see this!” Not everyone grew up with instant messengers and chat rooms. A lot of folks see the internet as a void to be screamed into and don’t always imagine someone listening. This is not to excuse shitty behavior in the least. Just a reminder that not everything is a personal attack! I am reminded of a time when someone was tweeting about how much they hated being at one of our live shows. I contacted them and they turned out to be a very nice person who was just going through a really rough time. That said, I also know that my day-to-day load of emotional labor is pretty light. It’s not your job to turn every negative reviewer into a fan—we’re just saying that it can be done!

The internet breeds apathy. You have no way of knowing how many times the person on the other line has been ignored and treated like nothing. By treating someone with basic decency, you may do something much more important than create a fan; you could remind that hard-hearted person that there are still people out there who give a shit.

Or maybe just delete it, that’s fine too. Life is short. It’s your call.

Email Is for Old People

One other note about email is that nobody writes emails anymore. Well, maybe old people do, but not young folks like all of us in our physical and sexual prime. What use do we have for emails? We’ve got social media.

We’re not going to talk about marketing your show via social media here (that’s a whole other chapter to look forward to). In fact, we’d like to stick with Twitter for the moment, as we’ve found Facebook to be a less-effective place for one-on-one communication with listeners.

The most important thing to remember when interacting with listeners on Twitter is that everyone is watching. Well, they’re not, but they could be, and that should make you think super extra hard about how you present yourself when communicating with a listener. It’s not like you’re a secret creep in one-on-one emails (those emails can still be screenshotted, and besides, you’re already a nice person, right?). But on Twitter, the public nature creates additional risks:

1. Every comment can be taken out of context and retweeted to a giant audience.
2. Followers often take tweets as an opportunity to comment or spin off their own discussions.

This makes Twitter a bad environment for meaningful discussion. No, scratch that, it’s a 100 percent terrible environment for meaningful discussion forever and ever, always.

The watchwords then are “brevity,” “positivity,” and “gratitude.” The key thing to do is acknowledge that you’ve seen the tweet and then thank them for it in the most positive way you can muster. You do not, must not, get into an argument on Twitter. No one will win. Please, you don’t have to do it. Don’t do it. It will end badly.

We mentioned in the last segment about winning over detractors over email, but this is riskier on social media. What can feel meaningful to a critic in private can seem performative in public. If you see a baseless or cruel tweet about your show, you’re almost always best served by muting the person and moving on.

Gather in Our Name

We’ve tried some nontraditional methods of connecting with our listeners over the years, some of which haven’t been a good fit and others that gave us a great boost in the early days.

We know some shows use them to great effect, but opening up a voicemail line was a time sink for us and attracted a lot of . . . odd contributions. More frustratingly, it’s not like we were going to call anyone back, so it felt like a very one-dimensional tool for building relationships. Still, we know some shows swear by them (Uhh Yeah Dude has kept its open for more than a decade, so what do we know?).

Our little gimmick (to which we’ve often attributed a lot of our early growth) was listening parties. The idea was this: whenever a listener could get four or more people together to listen to an episode of My Brother, My Brother and Me, we would record a personal greeting to play before their party. They would send us the names of attendees beforehand, and all they had to do in exchange was send us photo proof of the party.

This worked beautifully, especially for a podcast just finding its legs. Recording the messages was easy, and we met a lot of lovely listeners we’re still in contact with today this way. Eventually we had to ease off the listening parties, as the show grew to a point where we would have been spending all our days recording greetings. Still, if you’re just starting out, it’s a fun idea.

A Face for Radio

If you’re at this long enough, you’re eventually going to meet listeners in person. Depending on your temperament, this is either extremely exciting to look forward to or genuinely terrifying. We can work with either impulse.

(Personal interaction is, admittedly, a little ways down the road if you’re just starting out. Maybe come back when you’re ready, or just keep reading. What do we care, it’s your book!)

If the idea of face-to-face hangs isn’t too much for you, you could always orchestrate one yourself by organizing a meetup. It’s easy enough to announce you’ll be at a bar or at Dave & Buster’s and just hope people show up. If you’re comfortable with it, it’s hard to beat that level of intimacy for building an audience.

For my money, you can’t go wrong with a bar with board games. Something for folks to do and socialize, while also giving you room to move around and schmooze!

Keep in mind, though, that even if you have a decent audience, they’re probably spread out across the country (and world), so you may not be able to draw a crowd in your hometown. That’s okay! Don’t get frustrated. Just try to have a good rapport with the few that do show, or, you know, enjoy a relaxing drink on your own.

You can work around this by planning meetups while visiting big conventions!

Even if you don’t seek it out, meeting listeners may one day be foisted upon you, be it after a live recording or by the random hand of fate. Here’s our very quick guide to handling these interactions well:

1. Warmly greet the person, say it’s a pleasure to meet them (it is, remember), make sure to get their name.
2. If they seem really nervous, you’ll probably have to control the interaction. Don’t wait for them to lead the conversation; this is bound to be a little weird for them.
3. If you don’t feel silly about it, you can offer to take a picture, or maybe they’ve already asked. Either way, great! But . . .
4. Before you throw your arm around someone for a photo, make sure they’re cool with it. It’s awkward to ask, “Is it okay if I touch you?” but not as awkward as touching someone who’d really rather you not.
5. If the listener is especially uncomfortable, they may not know how to end the conversation. That’s fine, you just need to take control again and end the interaction just the way you began it, with warmth and gratitude.

I Love My Audience

We’ve thrown out a lot of dictates and guidelines here, but they can all be summarized in a single concept that we introduced at the beginning of the section: respect. We’ve never thought of our audience as a series of earholes. We’ve tried to think of them as people, because that’s how they think of themselves, and, frankly, it’s the only moral thing to do.

Show respect for the time the listener has spent on your show, respect for their support, and gratitude for the energy they’ve infused into your creation with their mere attention, and you’re going to create an audience that can feel good about listening to what you make and sharing it with friends.

Our one-on-one marketing strategy isn’t any more complicated than this: treat people like people.

The Obligatory Social Media Chapter

WITH TRAVIS MCELROY

Well, my friends, the time has come. You see, you’re attempting to get a product in front of a consumer, and it’s after 2004. That means it’s time for the obligatory social media chapter!

Wait! Don’t go! I promise this isn’t going to be about “going viral” and memes and stuff. (But give memes a chance, a lot of them are kinda funny.)

My brother sounds like he’s a sixty-five-year-old cop trying to sneak his way into the Cool Teen Internet Zone. Please do not stop reading this book because of this.

We’re going to teach you about practical, real-world ways to use social media to grow your show and, hopefully, your audience.

So, in the before time/the long, long ago, social interaction on the internet mostly took place in chat rooms. For anyone reading this who was born after the year 2000, imagine the early internet as a long hallway lined with doors all labeled with very specific interests. You’d find a room where people were discussing what you wanted to talk about and you’d go in. The problem with this structure, at least as far as we are concerned, was that you could only reach the people already in that room and the rooms were quite small. If you found yourself in a room with more than one hundred people, it was a rare experience.

Then came Facebook (after Myspace and Friendster, R.I.P.) and that changed. This new site allowed you to post things and discuss them publicly. It opened up conversations—for better or worse—to a much wider audience. However, that audience was still limited to people you were connected to.

It is no coincidence that the boom of podcasting and the advent of the Twitter age go hand in hand. With Twitter, there was the chance that anyone might find your show or website or blog or whatever! Complete strangers might stumble across a link and become fans.

Now listen, far smarter folks than us will spend the next twenty years or more debating whether the existence of social media is a societal net positive.

It’s not.

But we are not interested in that at the moment. We are looking at it purely as a means to an end.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that “social media” is a blanket term for a huge collection of things. Oftentimes, people tend to think only of Facebook or Twitter, but there’s also [big breath in] Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, Discord, Mastodon, Twitch, and many more. Not only that, there seem to be new ones being developed all the time!

Do you need to be active on all these platforms to be successful? Nope! In fact, if you tried that, you’d spend more time on social media than you would on your podcast. We just want to make sure that you are aware of all your options so you can figure out which one works best for your show.

Which brings us to the second important thing to learn about social media. You need to separate your social media presence from the show’s. Believe it or not, most of your audience is going to want show updates without also being subjected to your hot takes on movies and politics. So, as soon as your show has a name, you’re gonna start registering for social media accounts (and an email address, remember?). The bad news is every single combination of words is already taken, so you’ll need to get creative. Keep in mind that people will be hearing you say it instead of reading it, so make sure it is easy to spell and is spelled like it sounds. If possible, try to keep the username consistent across as many social media platforms as you can so it is easier to find.

We didn’t do a great job of this when we launched The Adventure Zone. For reasons that have been lost to time immemorial, we went with @TheZoneCast on Twitter, which isn’t the name of our show, isn’t an abbreviation we’ve ever used, and also sounds like a podcast about the Zone Diet, which we aren’t even familiar with enough to make a joke here about. Don’t be like us!

You’ve got all your various accounts registered; now it’s time to get yourself some art! Let’s assume by this point that you have a logo for your show, and that’s great! What’s that? We haven’t told you to get some art? Uhhhh . . .

Welcome to a Section within a Section!

Get Some Art!

First and foremost, have someone who knows what they are doing make your art. That might be you or it might be someone you hire, but this is going to be the image associated with your show, so it needs to look good. Notice I said “hire” there. That is because if you get someone else to design your logo, you are going to pay them. This is for two very important reasons. First, you should pay people for their work, plain and simple. Second, you want to make sure you own this art because you will be using it professionally. If you are on a budget (and who isn’t, amirite?!), be sure to tell the person what you are able to pay them before you commission them to do the work. It is quite possible that the amount you can afford won’t cover their quote, and it’s best to find that out up front. In the past, I have paid anywhere from $100 to $500 for album art, depending on how complicated the project is.

When it comes to finding someone to do your design, assuming you don’t already have someone in mind, start by looking at fan art for something you like. Search through Tumblr and Twitter and whatever until you find an artist whose style you like and reach out to them. Another option is to reach out to friends who have commissioned designs or reach out to other podcasts whose logos you like and ask who did theirs.

We’re no lawyers, but we’d recommend getting something on paper or in an email agreement about who owns the art and how it will be used. We’ve never done formal signed contracts or anything, but if you wanna be extra careful, go nuts.

When it comes to the logo itself, that’s where it starts to get subjective. We can’t tell you exactly what the logo should look like because it needs to match you and your show. Some things we can say are:

• It needs to be square. Podcatchers use square logos. Even if your design isn’t a square itself, it needs to look good in a square frame.
• If the title is the featured element in the design, it should be prominent and easy to read.
• The logo needs to be distinct. It doesn’t have to be entirely unique and break every mold, but it shouldn’t be easily confused for another show’s logo.
• A lot of the time, the logo is only going to be seen as a tiny thumbnail. Make sure it still works if it is shrunk down.
• Pay attention to size requirements of podcatchers. For example, Apple Podcasts requires that the image be between 1,400 x 1,400 and 3,000 x 3,000 pixels.

One other good idea is to look at other podcasts in your genre and see what kind of art they use and let that be your jumping-off point. In some genres (especially celebrity-centric shows) photography is really common. Not saying you have to ape those who have come before—maybe standing out is a smart strategy—but it doesn’t hurt seeing what other successful shows are doing.

Past that, it’s up to you! One subjective piece of advice that I (Travis) will give you: I think that someone should be able to look at your logo and get a general sense of what your podcast is. Even if the actual subject matter isn’t represented, people should be able to get a feel for it as lighthearted or educational or narrative or what have you.

Wow, that sure is some beautiful podcast art you have there! Unfortunately, it’s probably not going to work for your social media needs. For an example of what I mean, you needn’t look any further than the difference between a Twitter profile picture and Twitter banner art. The size specifications are wildly different, and this is the same platform we’re talkin’ about! Once you get into the specifications across all platforms, it can start to feel overwhelming. Worry not, we have two solutions and you should use both. First, have in mind which platforms you are aiming for when you have the logo designed. Make sure the designer has the specifications for each platform you are planning to use and have that included as part of the design. It should go without saying, but be sure to compensate them for this extra work. Second, have your designer create individual pieces of the design that you can mix and match later to meet any requirements you need. For example, have them give you a chunk of the background layer with nothing on it, the text of the logo with no background, and maybe a recognizable piece of the image to use as flair.

Okay, got your art needs all sorted? Great! Now, back to . . .

Social Media (cont.)

Now you need to decide what you are going to post on your show’s social media page. The obvious answer is that you’re going to post every time an episode goes up, and you should! That said, you’re going to need to do more than that. You need to give your audience some fun stuff, too. Do polls about issues you discussed on the show, share fan art, link articles related to the show’s subject matter, share behind-the-scenes pictures, and/or anything else engaging you can think of. Make your show’s online presence something that your audience is excited to be a part of and to share.

One of the things that makes podcasts so special is the high level of interactivity they offer the audience. I like to think of this as a tradition passed down from radio. Much like how people used to call in with requests and long-distance dedications, folks can now tweet questions and email topic suggestions. Make sure that you plan for this!

Now, when an episode does come out or you have an important announcement, you should tweet about it, and you should tweet more than you probably feel like you should! The halflife of a tweet is twenty-four minutes, according to Hootsuite. That means that 50 percent of a tweet’s engagement happens in the twenty-four minutes after you hit Tweet. So, you can’t just say Episode is up! at 9:00 A.M. and expect people to still be seeing it in the afternoon. Now listen, I know you are going to feel like you are annoying everyone when you tweet about your show three to five times in one day, but you are looking at it all wrong. You are not standing in front of your followers yelling at them with a megaphone. You are pinning your flyer to a big bulletin board that is constantly filling up. You have to keep posting new flyers or your message will get buried!

Now that you’re generating content on your various social media platforms, you’re going to need to convince people to look at it. Welcome to the unending cycle of using your podcast to tell people to follow you on social media so you can then use your social media to make sure people listen to your podcast. I know that on the surface this seems unnecessary, but, in reality, it is of the utmost importance. You have to remember that we live in a world full of distractions looking to engage your audience. You’re competing not only with other podcasts but with all media. Social media posts function as routine little reminders that your show exists. That’s not the only reason to keep up with your social media! There’s also the hope that people will share posts of yours or discuss you in posts of their own, thus getting more people interested.

Now when I listed a bunch of social media sites, did I say YouTube? Indeed I did, reader! You may not think of YouTube as a social media platform, but I promise you that YouTube is a thriving community all its own. We spent many years undervaluing having a strong presence on YouTube and we regretted it! If you want to really use the platform to its fullest, shareable clips is the way to go. Creating short clips (five minutes or less) that showcase your show, or even unique video content specifically for YouTube, gives your audience even more ways to share your content and convert new listeners/viewers!

A section on social media would not be complete if we didn’t talk about Facebook. Keep in mind that we are all old, but there was a time when you weren’t a thing if you didn’t have a Facebook fan page/group. See, there used to be these things that were kind of like chat rooms called “forums.”

Elderly Cop Travis is back, and he’s trying to sell you some bootleg vape pens. Don’t fall for it! That’s entrapment!

People would go to these forums to start/contribute to discussions regarding things they cared about. You’re probably thinking, “Hey, that sounds like Reddit!” and you would be right, but Reddit has not always been as mainstream as it is now. When the old forums died away, people turned to Facebook groups to have these discussions. That included us.

Let me tell you what I wish I had known then: you do not need to start/run your own Facebook group. In fact, I’ll extend that beyond Facebook to say that you should not create/run any kind of discussion group about your show whatsoever.

First, it’s a ton of work. You’ll need to manage member requests, approve posts, settle disputes, and much more. It can end up being a job in and of itself. Think of it this way: Do you think Ted Danson has time to run a forum for The Good Place?

Even if Ted Danson did have time to run that forum, he still shouldn’t because of power dynamics! Say someone puts up a post about The Good Place in which they express their distaste for Ted’s performance in a certain episode. If Ted were to respond to this, calling this person out, can you imagine how poorly that would go?! You might be thinking, “But I’m not Ted Danson. I’m just someone with a handful of listeners!” Yes, but to that handful of listeners, you are the creator of a show they love! You have way more power in this situation than they do, and it isn’t fair to anyone to have you running the forum.

The final (and most important) reason not to start your own discussion group is: you don’t need to. We’re talking about the internet here, folks. If people want to discuss something, they will. They don’t need you to create a space for them to do it.

Now, if you still want a presence on Facebook, you can always create a fan page. A fan page can act as a pseudo-website for you to post updates and pertinent information about the show without the need for full-time moderation. That said, if it becomes worth the time, effort, and hosting costs, an actual website would serve almost the exact same purpose and give you way more customizability.

Finally, I want to share some important lessons I have learned about how to process social media feedback. First, learn to tell the difference between constructive criticism and personal preference. I try to read between the lines to see if the comment boils down to either “it would be better if” or “I would like it better if.”

Second—and this was a hard-learned lesson for yours truly—don’t seek out negativity. If you are like me, when you see a bunch of people respond positively, there is something in your brain that feels the need to dig deeper and find someone who hates your pod. Try to kick that habit as soon as you can!

Third, if someone is upset about or hurt by something you said or did, don’t dismiss it. It’s easy to get defensive, but everyone’s experience and perspective are different. Not only will you expand your own understanding of the world by learning from others, but also you may find that the quality of your show improves as well!