What Kind of Show Notes Should You Have?

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There are a lot of different options you have for the show notes for your podcast.

You can go really, really minimal with 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 or partial blog style with one or more paragraphs of content, optionally broken into headings and subheads.

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. All things being equal you want the shortest and easiest-to-produce notes that will help you achieve the goals of your podcast.

Here’s a quick breakdown of a few different podcast goals, and what show notes style helps with them the most. If you want to dig a little deeper, check out our guide to podcast show notes – you’ll learn about a few edge cases for notes, and see some data from the latest State of Business Podcasting Report about how the top 100 business pdocasts are using notes.

Relationship Building / Networking: At a minimum you should have at least one paragraph of description and one with your guest information. Description and Bullet notes work really well for this. They let you pick out some great points your guest made, and give you room to share thier contact inforamtion. This is one of the ways you show your guest you appreciate them and their time, and if they are making an offer to your audience, this is where you can put it.

SEO and Discoverability: Go blog style with titles, headings, images – the whole shebang. If your content isn’t readable it’s not findable. If that sounds like a hideous amount of work for your hour long interview show… yep. Consider adding a new, shorter episode type that will be easer to translate into the written word. Do description and bullet style notes for your guest focused notes for your interviews, and optmized blog style notes for your solo content.

Sales Enablement and Lead Nurturing: I lean towards blog style for this goal as well – when you are creating a podacst designed to help people know like and trust you more it doens’t really matter how they get the content from you – as long as they get it. That said, for time and cost considerations, well-done bullet and description notes can do the trick.

As you can probably guess, I’m not a big fan of minimal show notes. They may be the easiest to produce, but they don’t do much for you. Sometimes, it is the right choice, however, if your time or budget are limited. You can still build relationships and thought leadership with audio and/or video content only – it just takes a little longer.

Always consider what you’re actually hoping to get out of your podcast, and choose your notes style accordingly.