If you’re going through all the trouble of creating a podcast, you want to make sure you’re getting the most mileage out of everything that goes with it as well – that generally means your show notes.

Overall, this year show notes are still pretty short! We saw a slight overall increase in length this year, with more shows having 1-3 paragraphs, often with bullets, and a significant number with only a single sentence of description. Together these groups make up about 38% of the podcasts. 37% of the shows used a single summary paragraph. About the same number of shows did a full blog post style (15% this year compared to 18% last year). The remainder used an edited transcript, a PDF or nothing at all for their notes.

Show notes are often backburnered, and that can be an appropriate strategic choice! If your goals for podcasting are more about the listening audience – it’s fine (and in line with the most popular shows!) to include pretty minimal notes. The goal of many show notes is to get people to listen to the episode, whether that’s on your website or in podcatchers.

There are benefits to more extensive notes, however! They can serve as blog posts (68% of the podcasts we looked at have notes and episodes on unique website pages) and can be optimized for SEO. If you have the resources to really optimize your show notes, the benefits can be large! It’s also the case that there are people (perhaps people in your audience) who just aren’t into audio! Show notes, in this case, can be a way to serve them as well.

Written content is also easier to repurpose than audio content, so if you’re thinking about long term repurposing projects, then creating transcripts (like 46% of the top 100 shows did this year – almost no change) is a good way to make sure you have a library of easy-to-access content. Whether you make them available or not, having episodes transcribed is a smart choice.

It was interesting to note that this year about 10% fewer shows put their notes and episodes onto unique pages. This might be because of a greater reliance on livestreams and social media promotion of shows – a decent number of the top 100 really minimized the written and website-based elements of their shows compared to last year. This could indicate changing demographics of listeners – websites aren’t always the easiest to browse from phones! – and a greater priority being placed on platforms like YouTube.

Interestingly, there were a few more shows this year that had 100% unique standalone sites for their podcasts - a website with podcast content and not much else. This might mean there are more shows in the top 100 that are running their podcasts AS a business rather than to support one. As a rule, creating a unique website for your podcast isn’t a great investment of your time, since most B2B shows ultimately WANT more people on their websites, signing up and getting more information.

So, what are people including with their show notes? Lots and lots of social links for people to use to get in touch with the hosts and the show proper! Many are also using show notes space to link to sponsors, opt-ins and resources mentioned. A strong segment also included related episodes, to make it easier for people to binge-listen. Surprisingly few people linked to guest resources beyond how to connect with them on social media! I wouldn’t recommend that – backlinks are a good courtesy to provide when a guest joins you for a show.

Another new item we looked at this year was the perennial question: should I include episode numbers in my podcast titles? Based on the data – probably not.

34% of shows used episode numbers in the players. Likewise, many people include the guest’s name for SEO purposes, but fewer than half of podcasts that had guests did so. This might be because devoting SEO juice to guests isn’t as useful as keeping it focused on your topic keywords (and it’s not likely you’ll make it higher on the list than the guest’s own website!), or it might be because title space is precious, and should be used on the meat of the episode rather than the guest.

That’s all for today! Next, we’ll be talking about on-site promotion choices for podcasts.
Cf. One Stone Creative

Mick Smith, Consultant M: (619) 227.3118

E: mick.smith@wsiworld.com

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