Podcast show notes best practices

What should you include in your podcast episode description? How much information do you need to include? How do your show notes compliment your podcast episodes?

In this episode, we'll give you two things to avoid and two things to consider when putting together your show notes.

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Transcript

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Today on five minute Monday. I'll teach you some best practices when it comes to your show notes. Welcome to five minute Monday. We're bringing the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now, whenever you listen to a podcast, you often hear the host tell you something like check the show notes, go to the show notes, or check the episode description for links. Now these show notes is the section of your podcast episode that allows you to engage for your listeners, provide some next steps for those that are ready to take action on what they just listened to and also persuade someone new to listen to the episode. Now there's a lot of moving pieces here. You really have the flexibility to customize it any way that you want, but there are definitely two things I would encourage you to avoid and two things that you should focus on and keep in mind when you're putting your show notes together as a best practice sort of thing. The number one thing that you need to avoid as a podcast is neglecting your show notes. I know how you're feeling after you spend a bunch of time planning, recording, editing, and uploading your episode. The last thing you want to do is write a couple paragraphs in the episode description, right? You're in the home stretch. You Think, oh, I'll just mail this in, but ignoring your show notes or neglecting your show notes is the equivalent of tripping just before you cross the finish line of a race. You want to finish strong. And you also want to show your listeners that you care about delivering a high quality podcast and you're going to show them that by investing the time necessary into making your show notes useful. Now the other thing that you need to avoid, and I see this more often than I would like to , is people that write a full blog post in their episode description, right? So if one extreme is not putting anything in your show notes or hardly anything, the other extreme is putting too much in your show notes, right? People do not want to read a five paragraph essay in your episode description. And I'm using the words episode description, show notes interchangeably because people use them to describe the same thing. Um, but people aren't gonna read a five paragraph essay in your episode description. They don't have time for that. What they want is to find the information they're looking for and then move on with their life. And so if you put an hour into riding this awesome, well thought out, well crafted episode description, if it's too long, people won't read it. It doesn't actually help you or contribute in any meaningful way. So at avoid neglecting your show notes by not putting anything in there. And I would also avoid writing too much, putting too much in there because that's not what it is really for. Which brings me to my two best practices. The number one best practice is to use formatting. All right ? A majority of podcast players like apple podcasts , Google podcasts , uh , overcast, they support html formatting. That means you could put paragraph breaks, bullet points in bed links, all the stuff that you need to do to make your show notes look nice because when your show notes are properly formatted, when it's easy to navigate within your episode description, it makes it easier for your listeners to find what they're looking for. Right. Instead of combing through several paragraphs of information, they can just zip down to the list of links that you mentioned and click on the one that they're looking for. Because remember when someone goes to your show notes, your episode description, they're going for a number of reasons. First reason they heard you mention something in the podcast and they want to find the link. They want to learn more, they want to buy that product that you recommended. They are looking for a particular piece of information and they're going to take action on that. The other reason somebody goes through your show notes or your episode description is they're not sure that they wanted to vote the 30 minutes, 40 minutes hour to listening to the full episode, and so they see the title is interesting. They're curious. They want to learn more and the go to your show notes too , to see some amplifying information to see is this something that I really want to listen to and that brings me to best practice number two, which is to limit the episode summary, the description of your episode to three sentences or fewer. Right? Typically at the beginning of your show notes you want to include details about what the episode is about cause you want to give your listeners an idea of what they can expect. You want to hit the high points, the parts of the episode that are intriguing to create curiosity and persuade someone to click play on the episode. You don't have to write a book. Three sentences is a good target and is enough information to get somebody over the hump. And then below your episode summary will include any links that you mentioned and your standard calls to action. Like subscribe to the podcast. You're on my email list, follow me on social and other things like that. Well that is it for today. If you are new here, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you're watching this on youtube or subscribe to the five minute Mondays podcast and your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. Thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.