The name Scott Aukerman, or any oddly pronounced variation of his name as he tends to introduce himself by, is synonymous with podcasting. Longevity is one key to his standing in the industry: Comedy Bang Bang, his flagship comedy gabfest, is approaching 450 episodes by the time we run this story. Aukerman shared his podcast secrets with Den of Geek and told us to keep them to ourselves. Naturally, we didn’t listen. By Scott Aukerman, as told to Chris Longo and Matthew Sullivan-Pond: An interview show at the end of the day is going to be dependent on guests and people’s interest in that guest. A lot of times a good interviewer will recede into the background and let the interview be about the interviewee and so there’s not a lot of room for growth sometimes. So the first tip would be what makes your show unique, why should people listen to your show, and not the other 8 million podcasts that are around right now?
2. Sustainability
I think to the other extreme of that, sometimes people can think too much about the unique idea and have some crazy whacky idea that’s unsustainable and they get burned out… the genius of podcasting is that there’s no barrier, almost, between the audience.
3. Regularity
The only real way to get growth is for the audience to know that they can depend on you and that if you pick a day when you come out, it’s a Monday for me, that when they wake up on Monday that can be part of their routine and they can download the episode. If you have a spotty record people will tune out and say ‘oh, I’m not dependent on them anymore.’
4. Celebrities help!
One thing that we found at Earwolf is that celebrity guests do help. Some people will only check out a show if there’s someone they’ve heard of on it. So if you have a celebrity episode, it doesn’t have to be them being interviewed or anything. If they can be on it, it’ll really grow your show in a certain way.
5. Reliability
Reliability of product is really the one thing you can control, a lot of times, even though podcasting is ephemeral and it’s meant to be somewhat disposable. Even though I hear people like to return to my episodes over and over. At its core, podcasting is certainly more ephemeral than a television show where you’re doing a finite number of them. What you can control is not feeling like you’re wasting someone’s time. Like if you have an episode that you recorded and you go, ‘oh man, I just don’t think that we were on fire that episode and we weren’t really clicking,’ you can do what I do a lot of the times and go back, listen to dead spots and edit them out or you can not release that episode. No one is forcing you and you can go and record it again so try and have a reputation of being dependable so every time you put out an episode it’s a treat, and you can grow it that way.
1 – Comedy Bang Bang
Scott Aukerman’s absurdist improvisational show that started the Earwolf podcasting empire remains one of the best experiences one can achieve through podcasting.
2 – WTF with Marc Maron
“So I think that’s it. We cool? We good?” WTF with Marc Maron is now more than seven years old and 700 episodes in and it remains possibly the most iconic podcast our culture currently has.
4 – How Did This Get Made?
Making bad movies is fun. Making fun of bad movies with three of the funniest people in podcasting is sublime.
5 – Last Podcast on the Left
Last Podcast on the Last may be the logical conclusion to the cherished Internet creepypasta with episodes covering the spookiest things in the world – real, imagined and some combination of both.
