Along with developing, planning, recording, editing, andpublishing, a good episode description is a vital part of the podcast process.
After you start a podcast, you may find yourself faced with the question of how to go about presenting that audio in such a way that people will actually, you know, listen. You may have excellent professionally engineered audio, a good premise, interesting guests, a catchy name, maybe even a well-crafted logo. But how do you actually go about getting people to hit that all-important ‘Play’ button? This is why your episode description is a vital part of the podcast process.
Whether you are creating a podcast for business or a branded podcast or even a healthcare podcast dedicated to spreading important medical information, the published podcast will need an episode description. Your episode description should be short, succinct, and convey the most important details about your show and episode. This is where you will entice a prospective listener to take the plunge on your show.
While the episode description should be kept short, there are a few items that should always be included. They include: the topic of the episode; the name of your guest or guests; the major points covered in the episode; the tone and style; and a call to action.
The call to action can take a few different forms. Do you want to direct your listeners to a secondary resource? Maybe your guest has published material that you can link to, or maybe they have events or offerings they would like to promote? Or maybe you yourself have material you’d like to promote. Even something as simple as cueing your listeners to subscribe to your podcast or visit your website counts as a call to action.
It cannot be stressed enough that episode descriptions should be kept as short as humanly possible. No one, no one, wants to scroll through paragraphs and paragraphs of information before hitting play. The more work you give your listeners, the less likely they are to listen.
The trick is to be clear and concise, while also utilizing keywords that people are likely to use if they are searching for information on the topic that you are covering either in the episode or on the show in general. Since people can’t exactly Google the contents of the audio itself, the episode description is where you can place that information to bait the hook.
Let’s say you run an auto body shop in New England and you have a podcast all about the ins and outs of working with cars and other motor vehicles. And let’s say that you dedicate an episode to best practices for driving safely in the winter. Keywords that you could utilize might include everything from “four-wheel drive”, “driving in snow”, “driving in sleet”, “safe driving in storms”, “New England driving”, etc.
As a final piece of advice, be sure to take the extra minute to review your episode description for typos or grammar mistakes. Those sorts of tiny errors add up to make a podcast seem unprofessional and slapdash, regardless of the quality of the actual show.
With customers and listeners, you never know what tiny thing will tip the balance in one direction or another. You don’t want all your time spent developing, planning, recording, editing, and publishing to be dismissed out of hand because a potential listener spotted a misspelled word in your episode description.
Learn more about starting your own podcast with us at ModPod. Get in touch with us today and we can begin your podcast journey together.
