Dos and Don’ts for Podcast Show Notes – PCI 358

Speaker 0 00:00:00 Expect a technical geeky. Another problem with that is if you make, you know, if you put a transcript or you put a bunch of really long texts in your show notes, that can make your r s s feed bigger, which means slower, which means there can be glitches getting it syndicated out to the different platforms.

Speaker 1 00:00:20 Yeah, I didn't really think about that. That is true.

Speaker 0 00:00:22 Yeah. So it's a, you know, technical limit there too. You know, I, I'd say try to keep it to 300 words or less.

Speaker 3 00:00:30 You're listening to Podcast Insider, hosted by Mike Dell. Todd Cochrane, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team bring you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting. All with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in.

Speaker 1 00:00:51 I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist here at Blueberry.

Speaker 0 00:00:53 And I'm Mike Dell, VP of Customer Relations here at Blueberry. Your

Speaker 1 00:00:57 Podcast recording is just the beginning. After that comes editing, and after that comes show notes. Today we're here to tell you some do's and don'ts of show notes.

Speaker 2 00:01:10 Yeah,

Speaker 0 00:01:10 This one, we've covered this before, but we have a little bit different take today. So, uh, I, I figured redoing some of the subjects from the past is probably not a bad thing.

Speaker 1 00:01:22 It's not, this is, in my opinion, a never ending topic. You can always learn something new or try something different.

Speaker 0 00:01:30 You know, I get a lot of support requests for, you know, how come my show notes don't show this or that, or the other thing. That's not what we're talking about today. So, I'll let you start and we'll go through the topics we came up with here.

Speaker 1 00:01:45 Okay. So we're gonna start from the dos and first and foremost include a brief summary. This is gonna help you so much in your ss e o of including the keywords, the main things that you talked about in the show, and giving people an idea if they actually want to listen to this episode.

Speaker 0 00:02:05 Yeah. The, the other thing about that is in a lot of the apps, okay, here's my techie geeky take on it.

Speaker 1 00:02:14 That didn't take long.

Speaker 0 00:02:15 No. If you look at your phone and you look at a list of podcast episodes, what, what are you gonna see? You're gonna see the first two or three sentences at most, you know, in a list of podcasts. So make sure those first couple of sentences are important. So, and another, another topic, or another thing in the list here is make sure you link to the resources you talk about in your podcast. Now, it may not show up on, say, all of the apps, but it'll show up on your post, which is where you wanna drive people back to anyway, and that's helps you on s e o. But make sure you have, you know, like if you've mentioned a book or article, a website, any sort of product, any sort of research, link to a website, all that good stuff, make sure you put that in your show notes as links.

Speaker 1 00:03:11 Yes, I'm very skeptical. Make sure I can actually follow up on what you guys talked about.

Speaker 0 00:03:17 Yeah, yeah. Like I said, you know, if you're talking about a book, you definitely want a link to that book and maybe even an affiliate link for Amazon or something to make a little money, but that's beside the point of this podcast. But yeah, make sure you have all your resources in the post so that, uh, people can find it. And again, helps you with ss e o.

Speaker 1 00:03:41 And, you know, one of those resources is our next topic. Guest information. If you're having someone be a guest on your show, whether they're just a one-timer or a regular contributor, have their information, especially if they might have the upper hand in terms of reputation or credibility or just followers, audience, anything like that, that is going to help you as well.

Speaker 0 00:04:08 Yeah, for sure. You know, so many times I'll be listening to a show that has an interview and I wanna look up more of, you know, about that person. And sometimes a Google search just doesn't do it. So then I'll go back to that podcast and see if I can find it on their website. Most of the time I do. But make sure you put that in there. Not only helps you, but it helps the, uh, guest as well.

Speaker 1 00:04:34 But then following up to that is your own contact information. We try to encourage podcasters to have their listeners get back to their own website, because that's where your contact info, your blog posts, your other episodes, other types of content that you want to get out there is going to be available. So in your show notes, make everything as simple as possible for them to find and be able to track you down in a good way, .

Speaker 0 00:05:03 Yeah. And especially, you know, if you want feedback, how are they gonna give you that feedback if they don't know how to get ahold of you? Mm-hmm. , you know, and a lot of times here at Blueberry, we get, listeners will contact us and say, Hey, I, I can't get ahold of this podcaster. Can you help me? Unfortunately, we can't.

Speaker 1 00:05:22 That has happened so many times over the years, especially because of our directory. People will email us and say, Hey, I would love to talk to you about the show, or talk about this episode. And it's, they're reaching out to us because that's, that's as good as they could understand of who to contact, even though we really don't have anything to do with this.

Speaker 0 00:05:43 Right. So if you put 'em in your show notes, even on the blueberry directory and other directories and apps, your contact information will be associated with that episode, not your host, whatever directory. And then I'm sure, sure. Apple, you know, can't get ahold of anybody. .

Speaker 1 00:06:00 Yeah, , yeah. You gotta, you gotta look out for yourself here because no one, no other service is really helping you with that.

Speaker 0 00:06:11 The last thing on the do's list that we have is make sure you have a call to action of some sort, you know, whether it's subscribing to the show, visiting the website, sign up for a newsletter, all that kind of stuff. Make sure that you have that call to action in there. You know, you know, and feedback, you know, people don't get feedback unless they ask. And put that also, not only in your show notes, but one of the pet peeves I have about podcasting and listening to podcasts is a lot of people won't put it in the show.

Speaker 1 00:06:44 Right. They don't mention it at all and they kind of just hope that it'll happen, .

Speaker 0 00:06:49 Right. You know, you guys know we, we mention it all the time. You know, this is, this is a blueberry show, so you can go to blueberry.com, but better yet, you can go to podcast insider.com and you'll get the full show notes and all that stuff, and make sure you say that at least once, maybe two or three times in each episode. 'cause the goal is you want to get them to come to your website if they want the more information, you know, but remember, this is an audio medium, it's not a text medium, it's not video medium. Well, unless you're doing a video podcast, that's a whole different thing. So put what you want 'em to do also in the show itself. I know that's swerving off to the left a little there.

Speaker 1 00:07:32 No, I mean, it's, it's related because the call to action really means nothing if people aren't looking at your show notes.

Speaker 0 00:07:39 Yeah, yeah. Because a lot of people just, they don't even see the show notes. Mm-hmm. , they say, Hey, there's a new episode, they hit play, they stick their phone back in their pocket and they never see it again. So give them a reason to go look at it.

Speaker 1 00:07:51 The thing with show notes is, whenever I Google to look for a podcast on the topic that I want, that's how I'm gonna be able to find it, probably is show notes, show description, any type of written description of what I am looking for, what's going to match the Google search that I am doing. Because I'm not gonna just, you can't find a podcast based on osmosis.

Speaker 0 00:08:17 Yeah. Ba based on nothing. You know, a lot of people, they'll, they'll write, you know, one sentence or two or three words and that's their show notes. Well, you know, again, this is an audio medium, so that may not be terrible, but it's gonna be bad for ss e o. It's gonna be bad for people being able to find the stuff. You know, that's the, that's the big thing. So let's go on to the don'ts. My favorite one is up first, so I'll, I'll take that one. Don't put your transcript as your show notes.

Speaker 1 00:08:49 It can be a part of your show notes. .

Speaker 0 00:08:51 Yeah. You can have a link to it in the, you know, we have a area at Blueberry and in all the different publishing methods to link a transcript file that's different and you do wanna do that, but don't just put a blob of text in your post and it's usually a really big blob of text. And unless you're editing these machine transcripts, they may not be perfect . So make sure you just focus on the key points, topics, discuss resources, all that stuff, but don't drop your transcript and does not help with ss e o. Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn't like word salad anymore than the rest of us do. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 00:09:34 And speaking of Google, the next one is, don't forget ss e o. A big, big one for discoverability is making sure that you are using the phrases that people are searching for. So this isn't something that you have experience with or, you know, kind of feel like you're unsure of what you're doing. Just do some research, you know, get some basic familiarity with it and just give it a shot. You will get better at it.

Speaker 0 00:10:05 Yeah. Make it useful for humans first. And then Google likes that, you know, and don't stuff it with keywords. That's, you know, sometimes people will, well I wanna be found on these 20 things. So they'll write an article about their show, even if they didn't talk about that in the show and stuff it with all kinds of keywords,

Speaker 1 00:10:27 Nonsense article. That doesn't make sense.

Speaker 0 00:10:29 Yeah. You know, I like to use the term word salad, you know, because lots of words doesn't equal good ss e o

Speaker 1 00:10:36 No, it does not.

Speaker 0 00:10:38 Lots of relevant words do, but, uh, that's a whole nother thing.

Speaker 1 00:10:41 The next one is, don't make them too long. This , this is definitely something that I feel like, uh, people, they make them too short, but the same problem can happen if you are making them too long. And I think a big part of that sometimes is people that are using transcripts as part of their show notes or just use the transcript in general as their show notes and don't do anything else.

Speaker 0 00:11:05 Or if they're doing a scripted one, they just drop the script in there.

Speaker 1 00:11:08 Oh yeah.

Speaker 0 00:11:09 You know, that's just not back to technical geeky. Another problem with that is if you make, you know, if you put a transcript or you put a bunch of really long texts in your show notes, that can make your r s s feed bigger, which means slower, which means there can be glitches getting it syndicated out to the different platforms.

Speaker 1 00:11:31 Yeah. I didn't really think about that. That is true.

Speaker 0 00:11:34 So it's a, you know, a technical limit there too. You know, I, I'd say try to keep it to 300 words or less. I don't know how we do on that, but

Speaker 1 00:11:43 Yeah, that's, that's typically what we aim for. It's considered enough information on the page to essentially be, be reviewed or indexed or something like that from search engines. You know, it's not just a blurb information here and there, because it can't really understand that to the extent that you want it to of what you're providing. It needs a full thing to properly come up in search results.

Speaker 0 00:12:14 Oh yeah, for sure. So this next one, you and Kathy are kind of the, uh, the arbitrary

Speaker 1 00:12:22 Yeah. There's a, there is a reason that I work on the show notes for the blueberry team and that Kathy helps out with that. This one is, don't forget to proofread.

Speaker 0 00:12:33 Yep, for sure. The thing I find is I can write pages and pages of stuff. Okay. And I can go through and proofread it myself and I won't catch things and then I send it to you or Kathy and boom, you know, you, oh, what about this, what about that? You know, and little grammar things and, and all that. You know, you're never gonna be able to proofread yourself. So try to get another person to take a look at it,

Speaker 1 00:13:00 A person, ai, however you wanna do it. Just be honest with yourself, .

Speaker 0 00:13:07 Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:13:08 I think that's the biggest thing. I'm

Speaker 0 00:13:10 Good at grammar .

Speaker 1 00:13:11 Yeah. So you, you don't have to be good at this. People aren't good at everything. So this shows off how you want to be perceived.

Speaker 0 00:13:22 Yeah. And uh, the last one on the don't list is don't ignore feedback. Feedback is gold in podcasting.

Speaker 1 00:13:29 Yes. But people are scared of it, Mike.

Speaker 0 00:13:32 Yeah. But you know, even negative feedback can improve your show, improve your show notes in this case. But, you know, just make sure that you are paying attention to any feedback you get. You know, friends and family will say, oh, that looks great, and all that. And you know, somebody else will say, ah, what the hell are you talking about? You know, you wanna make sure you take all of it. You know, even negative feedback is gold in podcasting. 'cause it'll tell you they perceive you're doing wrong and whether you agree with 'em or not, that's up to you. It's your show. But don't ignore the feedback,

Speaker 1 00:14:07 Don't ignore it and don't sit on it , you know, don't dwell on this feedback.

Speaker 0 00:14:15 Yeah. Don't let it ruin your day.

Speaker 1 00:14:16 Exactly. Don't let it ruin your day or let it ruin one day and then move on or do something about it. You know, move forward anytime that you put yourself out there on the internet specifically, you are going to get negative feedback. It happens to every single one of us. And you just, you keep going. Don't ignore it because a lot of it is critical.

Speaker 0 00:14:42 It's a good thing, you know, because you, you, you don't see your own mistakes. A lot of people, you know, like I, I do, I'm sort of a, a amateur graphic artist, . So when I make something, I look at it, I think, yeah, it looks good, but there's something not right about it. So I always ask for fe feedback and, you know, so, oh yeah, that color's goofy or make that text bigger or smaller or whatever. You know, I take the negative comments because I've asked for them. That goes for writing as well. So, you know, make sure that, you know, you ask for feedback. If you're concerned about your show notes, write in the show. Say, Hey, you know, go read my show notes over on my website and, and tell me what a, you know, what do you think I should add or subtract from from that?

Speaker 1 00:15:27 This kind of goes for your entire show, I think of don't ignore feedback. Um, when we were starting fresh with this show with a different format earlier this year, we reached out to our production team for brainstorming and ideas, and one of them was our show notes of how do we change this? And it was, you know, here's what we've been doing poorly. Here's what we could try instead. Here's something that we could just change just because it's been a really long time. And I think that's, that's helpful in the, in the long run.

Speaker 0 00:16:01 Yeah. And if you need to get outside help to look it over, you know, that's

Speaker 1 00:16:05 A big do in show notes. Get outside help if you feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed.

Speaker 0 00:16:13 Yeah. Even now Theis are getting so good that, you know, you can write something all goofy and then pop it into the AI and say, Hey, rewrite this in a professional manner, or rewrite this in whatever manner. And you know, you still gotta go in there and tweak it a bit. Oh,

Speaker 1 00:16:30 I beg of you to go in and tweak the AI response .

Speaker 0 00:16:33 Right. You do get, you know, you know, like we get ideas for our show notes from AI right now. You know, I've been doing that the last few times and, and like it because it makes me think about stuff that I wouldn't have normally thought about when doing show prep. Not really show notes related, but, you know, but we definitely tweak them. We don't just blop here, here's chat GBTs show notes. We don't do that. Anyway, just remember, your show notes can show, enhance the listening experience, increase audience engagement. I'm reading and and drive traffic to your website or products. It's worth investing time and effort into creating them. Well, God, that sounded like a read. Don't, don't read on your podcast. Bonus tip. So anyway, Mackenzie's got a link here to some more stuff about show notes and that'll be in our show notes over@podcastinsider.com. Any, uh, last words?

Speaker 1 00:17:34 Nope. Just head over to podcast insider.com to read the show notes for this episode, previous episodes talking about show notes or articles, and tell us things that you do and don't do for your own show notes.

Speaker 3 00:17:49 Thanks for joining us. Come back next week and in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. Check out the latest suite of services and learn how blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease because they can't afford the ease.