There are 3 main types of show notes  - Minimal, Bullet and Blog Style, with plenty of variations each. There is also one format that - as of this recording - works the best with the different podcast player apps. We’ll tell you what it is in a few minutes, because first, we’re going to talk about the TYPES of show notes, starting with the minimalist.

Minimal show notes will usually have a short description of the content of the show, links to any resources mentioned, and info about the guest being interviewed - if there was one. There might also be a link to a transcript and one or two key moments.

These are the quickest to put together, and you’ll often see them where a show is being produced by a solopreneur doing their production in house, or in shows where the main business goal of the podcast is networking and relationship building. In the first case, a host needs to prioritize relationship building and promotion with their podcast dedicated hours. In the second, if a business is podcasting so they can expand their professional network (which is it AMAZING for by the way), then investing a lot of resources in creating detailed show notes doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Second, the bullet show notes are probably the most common. They have more written content than minimal show notes, but they aren’t as complete as blog style notes. They’ll take key points, ideas, questions and insights from the podcast, and write them as bullet points, with or without formatting or timestamps. The goal of each bullet is to give a compelling reason to listen and encourage people to engage with the content.

Bullet style show notes are also great from a repurposing standpoint because many of the bullets will be very well suited to social media platforms. They take longer to put together, but they result in more listens, and more engagement, and do a little more for your SEO -- IF you’re putting them on your blog.

Finally, we have blog style show notes. This is when you’ll have either a near transcription of the episode, or paragraphs of content about the show, and what it contains. Some people take it a step further and write a totally unique blog post expanding on one or more ideas from the episode - but that will usually be in addition to another style of show notes. Blog style show notes are far and away the best for enhancing your SEO - you can optimize for keywords, link to other content, and drive traffic to your opt-ins.

But, they also take the longest to put together. It’s not about time-saving as much as it is batching your work. Instead of needing a blog post and a podcast with show notes that you create at different times throughout the week, you get your notes, post, and maybe socials and an email all done together.

Now, that format that works best with the different podcast players - it’s blog style!

Many players will strip out the formatting of your notes, so bullets don’t appear as you want them to. However, there is a functional limit of about 4000 characters - some players won’t display more than that, so if you have longer show notes, you’ll want to create different versions of your notes for submission to the players and your own site.

Your action step for the day is to check out the episode pages of some of your favorite podcasts and see what style they’re using. See if you can guess why they made the choice they did and decide whether or not it gives YOU the kind of experience you want from their show.

As for us, we write a script, then refine it for our site’s blog post, and naturally, the blog post has an embed from our podcast player. Check out how we do it at AuthorityBuildingContent.com/4.