Woo Your Listener - Writing Effective Show Notes

These words need to count, so don’t waste them. Discover my favourite DON'T and your show notes will be better right from the get go.

These few simple tips will help you avoid the obvious pitfalls and make the most of the critical text in your podcast show notes. These are the hooks which contribute to wooing listeners to your podcast episodes, so making them count is important.

This episode is an audio companion to the blog article "Writing Effective Podcast Show Notes" (https://eastcoaststudio.com.au/how-to-write-podcast-show-notes/).

Episode Transcription

0:24 This episode is the first of a short series we'll be doing, which are audio companion pieces to run alongside some blog articles that I've been writing about the world of podcasting. So in this episode, we'll be looking at the topic of how to write effective shownotes. For your podcast, I've got a few simple tips to help you avoid the obvious pitfalls, and make the most of this critical text in your show notes. This text provides the hook which will contribute to wooing listeners to your podcast episode and then hopefully, subscribing and following you for the journey. First of all, let's have a look at the context in which your text will appear. The browsing environment is absolutely critical to understand the user experience is the canvas and also the constraints that we have to work within. So most likely, this canvas will be an app or a mobile phone screen, maybe the desktop app on Mac. The limited space that's available for your text means only a small part of the description that you write is actually visible at all when people are casually scrolling by.

These words need to count.

1:36 I'm looking at the Apple Podcasts, desktop app here to illustrate some of the points. But in the article, we've got some good screen grabs from the iOS app that probably is the most useful gauge of the environment that your text will appear in.

1:56 But regardless of that, these same principles apply to any other podcast app, because none of them were showing through your description text in its entirety.

Good Example Show Notes

2:06 So first of all, I just started to sort of pick out a few things to use as current illustrations of what I think is really good. And in the article, I've got, like, a little list of importance for each of the items here. So the way I break it down is your title. The title of the episode is really important because that has to communicate to the listener, the what and the why, for that episode, what are they going to get out of it, the first line of your descriptive text will always be there, at least the first, whatever it is, I can't, I'm gonna have to count the number of characters to be able to to tell you accurately. But to me, it's something like first time words is guaranteed, maybe first 20 words, if you're lucky. So that is very important that the following paragraph, I would say is important. But in order to read that subsequent paragraph, your your your reader or your your browser, the person has to actually act, they actually have to sort of click into it in order to be able to access the further information. So really, I think we can sort of discount anything. Beyond that we're looking at good title, really good first line. And that's that's the best shot that we've got.

Ted Tech

So a couple of examples which I didn't produce. Just just browsing here is the TED Talks always seem to sort of smash every kind of media which they put out there. So savvy, their latest episode of the TED Tech Talk is "Six big ethical question