24: What are Show Notes and Why Do You Need Them?
Now that you've recorded your episode 00, uploaded it to Libsyn (or your preferred hosting service), and know how to submit your podcast to the various platforms, let's tackle another major component of a podcast episode ... the show notes.
In this episode, I explain what podcast show notes are, what they typically consist of, whether or not you should get your episodes transcribed, and why you should absolutely have show notes on your website.
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Transcript
welcome to podcasting for coaches i'm Britany Felix and i'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business i realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show so i created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients if you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more welcome to episode 24 of podcasting for coaches in this episode we're going to talk about show notes so if you're not already familiar show notes are essentially a blog post on your website that accompanies each podcast episode the difference between this and a real blog post is that usually a blog post is only text and it's typically pretty long and it's written more in the style of like an article or a true blog post form show notes however when i say blog post that's mostly just because if you're using a wordpress website or a lot of the other websites actually that's what they're going to call it you're going to create it just like you would a regular blog post and instead we're going to have this be something on your website to go with each episode to kind of lure people back to your site from the episode itself so podcast shownotes serve essentially two main purposes one it allows people who are not familiar with podcast to still listen to your show if they're intimidated by technology and have no idea how to get a podcast app or use it or listen to an episode or anything like that they can just listen to write on your website and then it also gets the people who are listening back to your site with a promise of resources and more information because of course as a coach or consultant you are starting this podcast as a part of your business is a way to draw in new leads so obviously we want to get those people from just listening while they're on their daily job to on your website where they can learn more about you schedule discovery calls submit questions to you connect with you further those kinds of things so there's a main components to any basic show notes page and those components are that you have an episode image so that when you share it on social media it displays nicely you have a brief description of the episode and this can be a long form blog post if you want you absolutely can do that most people choose not to just because they just don't have time and they're devoting all of their time to speaking this content as opposed to writing it which i will talk about here in a second so generally people just do a 123 paragraphs explaining what the episode is about giving a quick bio on their guests if they do interviews those kinds of things then we also have an actual player for the episode so that those people who do not want to get a podcast app can still listen now if you host with lipson which is who i prefer to use as i've talked about on the show several times already they actually have a player that you can embed right onto your site and you can customize the color of the button so that it matches the rest of the branding on your website and you can choose to have your main podcast artwork displayed with it or not depending on how you like the look of it and then it also offers some playback features like downloading the episode to their device and fast forwarding and pausing and all of those kinds of things now i typically recommend also including subscribe links right underneath the player for the various podcasting platforms that you're going to be on apple podcast google podcast spotify they all have badges that they want you to use if you're going to use an image so they don't really want you to create your own as a matter of fact for these platforms that violates their terms of service if you create your own and don't use the ones they specifically say that you can use now those links of course are for their branding so it's their colors their design their logo which means that it probably won't look the best on your site it might make a look a little bit cluttered especially if you have a bunch of them so i recommend saving the badges more for like a sidebar on your website or you know a homepage where you're talking about all the different places they can subscribe to your show but here in the shownotes i recommend just doing a simple little list of links so right underneath the player i just say subscribe colon apple podcast with the link to the show there and then i do a little bracket google podcast with a link to the show there another bracket spotify and then i think i have one for just general android devices for people who don't use google podcasts and then one for i heart radio and one for my basic rss feed so i find that this just looks a little bit more clean a little bit more polished the links can match the color of the rest of your website and allows you to have a lot more options in the same amount of space or sometimes even less space so if you want to see an example of this of course head back to my show notes which you can find by going to podcasting for coaches.com click on the podcast tab in the main menu and select any one of the podcast episodes in the list of course the most recent one will always be at the very top also in the show notes for this episode i'm going to include some links to a few different styles of a podcast show notes so i'm actually going to link to different podcasts and i have either worked on or not some of them are previous clients some of them are current clients and some of them have never been a client but it'll allow you to see a few different ways that people have chosen to format and really make their show notes shine on their website so next to sometimes people will have a list of the main talking points for the show so you can either write that out in paragraph form in the description and just say in this episode we discussed blah blah blah blah blah or you can say mentioned in this episode and then it's like a bullet point list of the main talking points however you choose to handle that is perfectly fine next i recommend putting the meat of the show notes the most important component of the show notes which is a list of the resources so as you are recording your episodes whether they're solo or live we want to make sure that you're dropping in these resources these extra little bits of value so if it's for the guests you're going to have their website links their social media links links to whatever freebie they want to provide if it's you you're going to talk about your programs your social media different resources for people articles that you have found or written on other websites those kinds of things and you're going to link all of those everything that you mentioned in your episodes that can be linked to should be in those resources that way you can always tell people an example of this or the link to this will be in my show notes and you hear me say this all the time and literally just did it with the subscribe links so you always want to refer people back to your show notes because here's the thing about 10% of the people who listen to your podcast episodes and again this is a very rough general broad number can be very different for you specifically will ever go back to your show notes pages so don't expect it to be like this crazy amount of you know spikes in the visits your website however if they're coming to your website to get those resources that means they're curious they're engaged they want to learn more so that's where we want to really provide that content so that they can trust that you're going to provide the information you say you provide and they're going to look to you as their source for more information they're going to want to connect with you further so in your resources again always put links to everything you mentioned in the episode but then i also recommend in every single show notes page having a main call to action and you can have this in your resources section or it can be a whole separate section at the very bottom of your show notes i actually do it this way on my website just because the platform that i host on they allow you to do this very easily and that needs to be whatever call to action you want them to take next so inside your podcast episodes your call to action is to basically go to the show notes or connect with you in some other way but then here inside the show notes you've already got them so what's that next step that they need to take maybe it's downloading your freebie to get on your email list maybe it's joining your facebook community maybe it's scheduling a discovery call with you whatever that next step is that you want that active and engaged person to take put that at the bottom of your show notes page so those are the basic components of most podcast show notes pages now some people choose to have a transcript of the episode in their shownotes there's a lot of debate on this some experts say it's fantastic you absolutely need to do it and some other experts say it's a complete waste of time and money i tend to kind of fall somewhere in the middle i actually do not offer this service to my podcast editing clients because it's just not worth it for me to provide this service to them it's just not enough roi on what i would you know put into it so there are some services out there where you can actually just send them the audio and then it'll either be a live human being or a computer that will transcribe it for you if you're going to transcribe your episodes which some people like to do this for a couple of reasons and that's because one you may have somebody who's hearing impaired who still wants to consume your content and if you're doing a podcast instead of a blog there's not really a way for them to do that so you can provide the transcript for them however really the main reason that most people do transcriptions is because they feel that it helps with the seo for their website now again it depends on which expert you ask as to whether or not it helps or it doesn't you can read a bunch of different articles on both sides of this argument so you can always try it for you for a few months see if it works see if it is boosting any of your posts if you're getting higher rankings in google but what you're going to find is that especially with a service like rev it costs $1 per minute so if your episodes are 60 minutes long you're going to be paying 60 minutes just for that transcription for every single episode so you really have to weigh the cost and the benefits and the benefits we're not entirely sure that there are some i'm not entirely convinced to help with seo because google doesn't really like that type of content from what i can tell in my research Again, I'm no SEO expert by any means. So you can do your own research on this. But I personally don't feel that it is worth the time and money that would go into transcribing it. However, that is an option. And I will of course, have a link to rev. in the show notes. If you decide you'd like to check it out. There are cheaper services, Trent is one that I know of tr IMT. And it's some a computer, but I can tell you from my own experience, it is riddled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes and things like that. And it only costs I think, about 10 cents a minute. So you really can have from one end of the spectrum to the other. And you can just decide what you want to do and how you want to proceed. But if you are going to include transcriptions, I recommend putting those at the very, very bottom, even past your call to action. That way people don't have to scroll through these long, long, long transcriptions of your show is just to get to the contents they actually want to see. So when you're creating the show notes, I want you to think about the URLs. So this is something that a lot of people don't really consider. And they have their URLs be the full title of their episode. And it's super long and not anything you would ever want to share. If you're on WordPress, I highly recommend using a plugin called pretty links. And what pretty links does is it allows you to customize the slug for your URL. Unfortunately, I no longer host with WordPress and the platform that I use, I absolutely love it for everything except for the fact that it does not let me customize URLs, which is why you should do as I say here and not as I do, because I cannot actually do what I'm going to tell you because pretty links is no longer available to me. With pretty links, you can have your website, for example, we'll just use mine be podcasting for coaches comm forward slash 24, which would be the number of this episode, it's super easy to say people can remember it. And it's very easy to find your show notes if they're not clicking a link. So again, I recommend using pretty links to create a customized URL for every episode of your show, to make it very, very easy for people to remember and know how to find those. Lastly, I want to talk about creating a podcast page. So you're going to have these individual show notes posts, which are like blog posts. But I want you to have also a main page that is linked to in your main menu. Now this main page is going to be when I tell you to go to every time when I say go to podcasting for coaches comm and click the podcast tab in my main menu, there's then a list of all my episodes. That's what I want you to have as well. And depending on your theme, that's going to look a bunch of different ways. But it's basically just going to be a list of every episode of your show. And it's going to make it very easy for people to look through previous episodes and discover more content and learn more from you, if they haven't already. So if they're just discovering you, from this one episode, they go to the podcast page on your website, and there's 30 more that they can check out, it's gonna be really easy for them to sort through and pick the ones they want to listen to. If you're not sure how to get this page set up, or how to get your shownotes post into the actual main page, I recommend speaking with whoever developed your website, if that was not you, and they should be able to get this all set up for you. If you are the one having to do this, if you're bootstrapping it yourself, you can do this by setting up a category inside your blog section. So where you check what category this blog post fits under, you can create a podcast one and then you should be able to set up your main podcast page, so that it pulls just the post where the podcast category is checked. So that's going to wrap up this episode, I hope that you understand the importance of having the show notes and using it as a part of your lead generation for your clients to get them back onto your website. Whenever you are sharing your episodes on social media, I do not recommend sharing the various platforms, Apple gets enough traffic as it is if you want to have a super high ranking yes or share it. But that's not what's important for you. What's important for you is getting people to connect with you further. So always, always, always share your show notes page for your episodes when you're sharing on social media. Thank you so much for joining me this week. And I will see you back here next week, where we're going to talk about what exactly a podcast editor is, and whether or not you should have one. Thank you so much and I'll see you next week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you're wondering if now is the right time to start a podcast for your coaching or consulting business, head on over to podcasting for coaches.com where you can either take a free quiz or schedule a one on one consultation with yours truly, thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you back here for the next episode.