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A Podcast Show Notes Generator That Increases User Engagement

18.07.2023

Is your audience still not growing? A podcast show notes generator is a critical component of your podcast marketing strategy, and I’ll explain why. Other podcasters have been in exactly the same boat. It is tough to build a community around your podcast. Once you have one, they will spread the word and others will be attracted to the great content you have. Getting there is tricky. This is called the “Cold Start Problem”, and it refers to the fact that you need some sort of community to take off, otherwise it is very difficult to gain traction.

Leveraging SEO and UEO for podcast growth

While you should try to build personal connections at the very beginning of your podcast journey, it is also important to use technical means to get your engine running. In my last article I wrote about the benefits of having a title with a high SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) value. You can find that here: Podcast-Title-Grader ✍️

To overcome the “Cold Start Problem”, you should start with an SEO-friendly title. Now you need to build on that.

The role of podcast show notes

A full podcast transcript, while great, is more likely to help on your website as it is too long for a description of your episode on any hosting platform. The next step would be a summary, which is a good start, but you can do more. Show notes are the next step.

What makes good show notes?

While a podcast summary gives users an idea of whether the podcast is of interest to them, and helps hosting platforms better rank your content, it’s not very engaging. And as I wrote last time: UEO (User Engagement Optimisation) is just as important as SEO because listeners build a relationship with you as a podcaster. It’s not quite the same as advertising a product, where the creators of a product can remain anonymous. The content has to be good, but the listeners are building a relationship with you, so you want to connect with them. Personally, I have to like a podcast host or I’ll probably stop listening to the podcast. Show notes can be a great tool for this, but what should show notes contain? Here’s a list I compiled from the top five search results:

That’s already a lot. You’ll find lots of articles on the internet telling you that these different points are beneficial, but it’s also a lot of work. You can do a smaller version of this. Just do the summary, a few key insights and a guest bio. The bare minimum. But is that how you want to end your well-crafted episode?

Using AI for show notes creation

You have probably heard of ChatGPT and the hype around it. You can use AI for just such a use case. Navigate to ChatGPT or any other language model of your choice and ask it the following: “Here’s the transcript, please generate the key takeaways for me” and it will work. You can do that for each point I have listed, then stack the results together and be done with it. Here and there you’ll have to modify your prompt to ChatGPT to improve the results, but it’s doable!

Taking it a step further

I don’t want to give you what every other AI tool can give you. So I thought about what points in a show note would increase the UEO of your readers. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone reads your show note, is intrigued by the notes and is eager to listen to the whole thing?

That’s where I can give you some extra value — for free. Here are topics that the Streamlit app will create for you:

These are strong topics that will help you connect with your audience and entertain them, which is why they’re there in the first place. People who listen to podcasts want to be entertained. Once you have the show notes, you can not only add them to your episode, but also reuse them to build your social media audience. Giving them a sneak peek at the episode you are about to upload is now a snap. Don’t forget: People want to build a relationship with you as a host!

TLDR: Show notes are a blast! Titles were the beginning, but show notes are the next step in your SEO and UEO efforts. Please do it. ✅

The Show Notes Generator: A free app to create show notes

Best of all, I have developed a free tool on Streamlit that generates all of the above points. Only the points for which no information can be extracted are omitted.

You can just go to Show-Notes-Generator 🎭 and provide your transcript. Don’t worry if you don’t have one yet. You can create one there.

Note: What started as a free tool has been integrated into LemonSpeak, providing a seamless flow for you. You can find it here: LemonSpeak

Thoughts and feedback

I’d love to hear what you think. You can send me your feedback by clicking on the caption of the image below.

You can find my feedback form here

Read more about show notes in our blog postCrafting Compelling Podcast Show Notes: A Complete Guide.

Exploring more

I write about building free applications that help podcasters make the most of their content. If you don’t want to miss an issue or read about other topics that will help your podcasting journey, follow me on my newsletter 👉: Exploring AI for Podcasts