For a shocking number of business podcasts, show notes are just an afterthought, and that can be leaving a lot of value on the table.
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So there are a lot of different options you have for the show notes for your podcast.
You can go really, really minimal, bare bones, just a sentence or two describing what the episode is about.
You can do one of the more common ways, which is to have some descriptive paragraphs about the content and bullets of the key points and then resources and information about the guests.
Or you can go full blog style and write an entire post for each episode that you have.
Some people also like to do transcripts or edited transcripts of each episode and use those as their show notes.
There isn’t a wrong answer exactly. There’s just better or worse notes to choose for the different goals that you have.
One thing to keep in mind as you’re making this decision is that the more text you have, the more discoverability options you have. Audio itself is, at the time of this recording, still not great for discoverability.
And when people are searching for new shows, especially using AI, using Google using the different podcast players, the way those results are going to be turned up is going to be on the text associated with the podcast – the description, the tags, the categories, rather than the audio itself.
So, it’s important to make sure that if you are going to have a strategy of wanting to be found and have more people discovering your work or doing an SEO play – more (human edited ideally) – is going to really help you achieve that goal.
Of course, you’re going to have to balance the value of extra search or more SEO content for your blog or pre-written social media captions, for example – with the time and expense that it takes to create them.
And that’s a decision that’s going to have to be between you, your team and maybe your producer. What’s going to get you the maximum amount of value with a workflow and budget that actually works for you.
Now, I always like to lean on the side of having written content that could theoretically stand alone at least a little bit, because if I’ve got really important information to share or something that I want people to know, it doesn’t really matter to me if someone watches, listens to, or reads it.
By making all three available, not only is my show more accessible, But it’s going to be more consumable for the different people who might be interested.